Reflections on Mastery
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In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that mastery of a subject comes from doing it for 10,000 hours. That sounds about right.
In reflecting on my own mastery of editing and publishing, I can't even begin to determine how many hours have been spent on different tasks, but a rough estimation is as follows: I held office-based editorial positions for twelve years, 9-to-5, minus vacation days, adding up to 23,040 hours (but really more, if you include time spent reading and editing manuscripts in the evenings and on weekends). Then, I spent two years as an actor, and did fewer hours of editing, but some, so let's call that another 2,000 hours of editing/writing. Since 1998, I figure I have put in roughly 44,000 hours as editor, writer, consultant, and coach.
My productivity has been high: I've edited hundreds of manuscripts and co-written/ghosted over 25 published books (gee, I've lost count). Actually, my editing is more like co-writing in most instances, since I develop ideas and overwrite manuscripts that read poorly. So I'm definitely in the mastery category, even give or take a few thousand hours, if we can agree on Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule.
Around 70,000 hours in total. That's nothing to sneeze at.
This came up as a reflection this week when a client asked me if I was following a certain rule she'd heard of for how to formulate a sentence. My reply was that I listen to the sound of the sentence in my head and use that as the basis for my editing. It got me thinking about grammar. Grammar is pretty dynamic. Our language is always evolving. In years past, it was frowned upon to end a sentence with a conjunction; but recently a major publishing company instructed me that they don't mind it anymore and think it sounds more natural in some instances to end that way. I don't mind. My sensibility isn't offended. It is the way people speak, after all. One publishing company likes numbers to be spelled out until 101. Another prefers to switch to digits at 11. From my perspective, either is fine. Just tell me your preference and I'll follow it, I say. What gets my goat is when people aren't consistent. Inconsistency drives me nuts.
I've noticed something about masterful people. They don't usually make too much of it in the way less masterful people do. They're validated by experience, not as much by praise. They focus more on getting the job done to their satisfaction than on approval from outer sources. Why? I suppose it's because they already know they're good at what they do. My friend Tim Phillips, for example, is a masterful acting coach. He was born to teach. And he's been teaching acting for as long as I've been editing and writing books. When he stopped being an actor (and bartender) and became an acting teacher and coach, it was endlessly fascinating to him. I also believe that anyone who spends 10,000 hours at a specific job is probably drawn to that job in a way that other people may never understand in full. Aptitude is a factor in developing mastery.
Praise is lovely, but the innate reward of doing what you love well is lovelier. If you are a writer, write. Write until you find your voice. Write until you are competent. Then keep writing until you are good. You'll know you are good when you know it because you know it, because you look up from a sentence or paragraph you just wrote and you say to yourself (because no one else is there), "Damn, that's good!" or "Wow, I really like the way I wrote that," or "That got the job done," or something along those lines. Find encouragement wherever you can. If you need praise to motivate you, go get some. Get it from someone trustworthy whose opinions are honestly expressed or give it to yourself for the little things you do.
Confidence increases with the length of the trail of your past experience behind you. Mastery means you know what works and why it works, and what the menu of choices looks like. Masters probably don't eat the same meal twice.
The final factor in mastery I want to mention here is the component of self-awareness. Masters are more than mechanics (though I am sure some mechanics are masters!) who have memorized a rule book. They probably have more than their fair share of idiosyncrasies. But that's often part of their charm. (As soon as I wrote the previous sentence I immediately thought of an exception, so I went back and stuck in the word "often.") The thing is, they know how to get the results they need from themselves. They understand their processes, for better and for worse. They develop their own ways of doing what they do that streamline aspects of their work and can be hard to explain to others because these are instinctual after so much time doing this thing they do.
Now that I've appointed myself to this exalted status, I'm sort of embarrassed, but only because I think self-aggrandizement is sort of ridiculous. I really couldn't give a shit! Should I care more? Perhaps. For now, I'll let you be the judge of that and I'll just stick to my own path through life.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that mastery of a subject comes from doing it for 10,000 hours. That sounds about right.
In reflecting on my own mastery of editing and publishing, I can't even begin to determine how many hours have been spent on different tasks, but a rough estimation is as follows: I held office-based editorial positions for twelve years, 9-to-5, minus vacation days, adding up to 23,040 hours (but really more, if you include time spent reading and editing manuscripts in the evenings and on weekends). Then, I spent two years as an actor, and did fewer hours of editing, but some, so let's call that another 2,000 hours of editing/writing. Since 1998, I figure I have put in roughly 44,000 hours as editor, writer, consultant, and coach.
My productivity has been high: I've edited hundreds of manuscripts and co-written/ghosted over 25 published books (gee, I've lost count). Actually, my editing is more like co-writing in most instances, since I develop ideas and overwrite manuscripts that read poorly. So I'm definitely in the mastery category, even give or take a few thousand hours, if we can agree on Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule.
Around 70,000 hours in total. That's nothing to sneeze at.
This came up as a reflection this week when a client asked me if I was following a certain rule she'd heard of for how to formulate a sentence. My reply was that I listen to the sound of the sentence in my head and use that as the basis for my editing. It got me thinking about grammar. Grammar is pretty dynamic. Our language is always evolving. In years past, it was frowned upon to end a sentence with a conjunction; but recently a major publishing company instructed me that they don't mind it anymore and think it sounds more natural in some instances to end that way. I don't mind. My sensibility isn't offended. It is the way people speak, after all. One publishing company likes numbers to be spelled out until 101. Another prefers to switch to digits at 11. From my perspective, either is fine. Just tell me your preference and I'll follow it, I say. What gets my goat is when people aren't consistent. Inconsistency drives me nuts.
I've noticed something about masterful people. They don't usually make too much of it in the way less masterful people do. They're validated by experience, not as much by praise. They focus more on getting the job done to their satisfaction than on approval from outer sources. Why? I suppose it's because they already know they're good at what they do. My friend Tim Phillips, for example, is a masterful acting coach. He was born to teach. And he's been teaching acting for as long as I've been editing and writing books. When he stopped being an actor (and bartender) and became an acting teacher and coach, it was endlessly fascinating to him. I also believe that anyone who spends 10,000 hours at a specific job is probably drawn to that job in a way that other people may never understand in full. Aptitude is a factor in developing mastery.
Praise is lovely, but the innate reward of doing what you love well is lovelier. If you are a writer, write. Write until you find your voice. Write until you are competent. Then keep writing until you are good. You'll know you are good when you know it because you know it, because you look up from a sentence or paragraph you just wrote and you say to yourself (because no one else is there), "Damn, that's good!" or "Wow, I really like the way I wrote that," or "That got the job done," or something along those lines. Find encouragement wherever you can. If you need praise to motivate you, go get some. Get it from someone trustworthy whose opinions are honestly expressed or give it to yourself for the little things you do.
Confidence increases with the length of the trail of your past experience behind you. Mastery means you know what works and why it works, and what the menu of choices looks like. Masters probably don't eat the same meal twice.
The final factor in mastery I want to mention here is the component of self-awareness. Masters are more than mechanics (though I am sure some mechanics are masters!) who have memorized a rule book. They probably have more than their fair share of idiosyncrasies. But that's often part of their charm. (As soon as I wrote the previous sentence I immediately thought of an exception, so I went back and stuck in the word "often.") The thing is, they know how to get the results they need from themselves. They understand their processes, for better and for worse. They develop their own ways of doing what they do that streamline aspects of their work and can be hard to explain to others because these are instinctual after so much time doing this thing they do.
Now that I've appointed myself to this exalted status, I'm sort of embarrassed, but only because I think self-aggrandizement is sort of ridiculous. I really couldn't give a shit!
posted by Unknown at 5:33 PM
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