10,000 hours

How close are you to becoming an expert?

A friend recently reminded me of the ‘10,000 hours’ concept. The idea is that to become expert in any subject you need to actively do it for at least 10,000 hours.

In other words, it takes a long time to be really good at something. This is why we can’t be experts at everything — our lives are simply too short to hit that threshold repeatedly. We need to specialise.

Now, big caveat: not everyone agrees with the 10,000 hours thing. I take it as more of an indicator than a scientific assessment. The BBC has a nice article comparing viewpoints here. There are obvious holes in it as a blanket statement: some kids are expert at some things long before they’re able to have completed 10,000 hours. There are subjects and activities which I will never be expert in, even if I stopped everything else and dedicated my entire life to them. There are limits, and everyone has their own particular talents. It doesn’t matter how much effort I put in; I’m never going to be any good at composing classical music, or playing American football, or spelunking.

Anyway, let’s set all of that sensible debate aside, because it’s boring. Today, we are fully embracing the 10,000 hour idea. We’re going all-in. In fact, we’re going so deep that I’ve made a spreadsheet you can download. I’ll get to that later.

The reason I was intrigued at being reminded of the concept is that I’ve done a lot of writing over the last decade. Since 2014 I’ve written and published fiction every single week. Since 2021 I’ve added a weekly non-fiction newsletter to that mix. That has to add up to a big number of hours dedicated to this thing that I love, right?

Number crunching time!

Let’s take this newsletter first. My fiction chapters tend to come in around 1,500 words. It takes me perhaps two hours of solid writing to create a chapter, but we all know that ‘writing’ isn’t just about putting words on a page. The planning, the ruminating, the rewriting, the quiet moments in-between other things: those are all part of the practice. So let’s say I spend four hours per week on my fiction. I also do the non-fiction newsletter (like this one), which can vary wildly in length and creation time, so let’s take a very rough average of three hours per week.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for two and a half years, so let’s say 130 weeks total. These are not precise numbers, but I don’t care. Embrace the fuzziness. That’s 910 hours of writing time.

I’ve actually been serialising fiction since 2014, so let’s add that in. I’m going to take it as seven years, up to when I shifted to the newsletter. 364 weeks, then, and at 4 hours per week on that fiction we’re talking 1,456 hours.

Together, that’s 2,366 hours since I started taking my writing seriously, and formed a regular habit. It’s felt like an awful lot of writing, so I’m slightly disappointed that I’m so far off that 10k.

However! It’s not like I didn’t do any writing prior to embracing serial fiction. I’d been writing on and off for most of my life. And there’s all the fiction and learning of English and writing that I did at school. How to work that out?

I was very sporadic with my writing prior to leaning into serials. I’m going to go on the low end here and say half an hour per week for most of my life. There were intensive periods where all I did was write, and there were lengthy fallow times where no words came out. If I start from when I was 6 years old, up until I was 34 (when I started serial writing), that’s 28 years = 1,456 weeks. At half an hour per week, that’s 728 hours.

OK, that puts it into perspective, doesn’t it? For the first 28 years of being able to write, I clocked up about 728 hours of intensive work. While in the last decade, 2014-2024, I’ve done 2,366 hours. Needless to say, it shows the power of nurturing a reliable writing habit.

I’m up to 3,094 hours. Not bad, not bad.

Now to figure out all the education. This is every fuzzier, as I can’t remember how much time was spent studying writing at different schooling levels. This will also vary massively per person, depending on how long someone stays in school and their chosen subjects, as well as per country.

Some vague Googling suggests that primary schools average out at 5 hours per week of English, though I’ll only count it from year 3 onwards. For secondary, let’s say 4 hours per week. For sixth form/college, I’ll assume 5 hours. When I was at university in the early-2000s, arts degrees were notoriously slack, so let’s say 3 hours per week (I was studying a combined English and Film degree). A complicating factor here is that we’re not talking all year round, as schooling doesn’t continue for 52 weeks straight. It’s more like 39 weeks for schools, and 30 weeks for universities.

• Primary: 780 hours

• Secondary: 780 hours (huh)

• Sixth form: 390 hours

• University: 270 hours

That’s 2,220 hours accumulated over my formal education. That brings me up to 5,314 hours — getting there!

What about work? The day jobs. Not all will be relevant, but as a copywriter, tutor and marketer I’ve worked on a lot of story-based campaigns over the years which have informed my fiction writing. It’s almost impossible to put a specific time on this, though, as it’s over a very long period of time and is not a regular, repeating schedule. My employment over the years has involved all sorts of non-writing duties as well. I think going on the low end, with a single hour per week during my working life, probably makes sense.

I’ve been working full time for 22 years, so that equates to 1,144 hours. This is evidently the loosest of all these made-up, finger in the air numbers.

The grand total, then? 6,458 hours.¹

Another four years of writing this newsletter at this pace and I’ll hit the magic 10k, and then I can get my certificate and be officially clever.

Another four years? Man, that feels like a long time to have to wait before I’m an expert.

Of course, this is all nonsense

It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve spent writing (or doing anything else that you’re passionate about). The main thing is that you’re doing it at all: that’s what this newsletter is all about.

Some people are incredible straight out of the gate. They write a book when they’re 19 and it’s a stunning achievement. Others spend decades improving their craft, building up those skills over time. It’s entirely possible to come to writing later in life and dive straight in.

It’s also completely fine to be OK at something. We don’t all have to be experts, or the leading voices in our fields. We all want to be improving, sure, but it’s healthiest and most useful to compare ourselves to our previous selves, not to other people.

There will always be better writers than me. There will always be worse writers than me. That has and and always will be the case. It’s a good thing.

We’re sharing the hours

One other thing. We’re not on our own, and we’re not figuring all of this out by ourselves. People have told stories for thousands of years. Writers were publishing serial fiction over a century ago. Books have been written, in various forms, for millennia.

We’re all part of a long history of human storytellers. Which means we’re not operating solely based on our own hours. Those 6,458 hours I somewhat spuriously conjured up? How about adding the hours contributed from all the authors I’ve ever read. The people who they read. The countless humans who helped invent the written word. All of the oral storytellers who spun tales long before they could be recorded anywhere other than to memory.

All of us are building on the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of cumulative hours of creativity generated by human history. We’re each making our own contribution to what comes next.

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For some reason I made a silly spreadsheet so you can work this out yourself!

In less daft news, I’ve been busy with a couple of collaborative projects which should surface over the next couple of weeks. I’ll shout about them when they’re available — should be of interest to readers of this newsletter.

MEANWHILE

• I’ve just started playing Unpacking, a game about unpacking boxes after moving house. Doesn’t sound thrilling, but is actually full of very clever storytelling. I might have to write more about it when I’ve finished.

• My favourite game of the last year-or-so is Sea of Stars, and I stumbled upon a documentary that was made just prior to its release. If you’re into that sort of thing, here you go:

• My parent used to drive me past Greenham Common in the 80s on the way to visit family, so I’m intrigued by

  Eleanor Anstruther
  ’s new serial, which has just got started. I’ll be diving in ASAP

Introduction

• Tales from the Triverse has entered its scifi phase after it’s big time skip. If you haven’t yet jumped on board, now’s as good a time as ever:

• I got a new personal best in the 5k parkrun on Saturday. As always, this has nothing to do with writing,² but I was very pleased.

Right, have good weeks. July, thus far, has proven quite dramatic in all sorts of way, and we’re only a week into it.

Thanks for reading.

Photo by Stanislav on Unsplash

1. I will almost certainly have got some of the maths wrong here. Life goes on.

2. OR DOES IT?! I was thinking about this yesterday, and the correlation between doing a run surrounded by 600 people of varying skill levels, and writing on Substack where you’re surrounded by writers of varying skill (and success) levels. How it can be both intimidating and inspiring and motivating all at the same time. There’s something there. I will probably squeeze and article out of it at some point.