Fifty: On Learning To Create Poorly
Even Hemingway didn’t know what he was doing when he first picked up a pen.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson, the well-known French photographer considered the father of, and first master in, candid street photography, once famously said that “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” While I sometimes want to cynically dismiss this sort of sentiment from a creator that has already achieved success, recognition, and even financial compensation, the reality is, no one achieves mastery in anything overnight. Even Ernest Hemingway didn’t know what he was doing when he first picked up a pen.
With the completion of this blog, I will have written 46 different pieces this past year, plus an additional 4 short teaching videos that I stumbled through conceiving, creating, writing, editing, and uploading, not an easy process to master well in and of itself. Taking an unscientifically random sampling of 5 different blogs I have written throughout the year, an average blog length is about 564 words, for a rough estimate of just under 26,000 words written since the first week of September 2014 for EKerk. According to Words To Pages, that translates to over 65 pages, or roughly 1/3 of the length of a typical non-fiction book (Most non-fiction books are between 75,000 – 100,000 words in length, or roughly 180 – 250 pages in length).
What am I trying to say, other than to bore you with math calculations that semi-boast about my mild writing prowess this past year? I’ll let Malcolm Gladwell explain much more coherently than I ever could:
“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researches have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. ‘The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything,’ writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. ‘In study after study, of composers, of basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
(Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, pp. 39-40).
Earlier in the same chapter (“The 10,000-Hour Rule”), Gladwell speaks of a study by K. Anders Ericsson in the early 1990’s that compared the practice techniques and work ethic of amateur and professional musicians over the course of their childhood, teenage years, and into early adulthood. The striking takeaway wasn’t the innate talent of some musicians versus others, or the exposure to top-level instructors. Although other factors surely contributed, what they found consistent among professional musicians was that they all “steadily increased their practice time every year” (Gladwell, Outliers, p. 39).
Could the story of success – in almost any arena – be as much, if not more, about the nature of slow, hard, consistent work over a long period of time? Is excellence achieved through “steadily increased practice” in other words? Recently, I showed a clip to my Leadership and Empowerment class at Cornerstone Institute where Bill Gates, a subject of Gladwell’s 10,000-Hours Rule chapter in Outliers, was asked to comment on whether he thought his success had anything to do with Gladwell’s theory. Gates replies that he doesn’t think that doing something for 10,00-hours is the sole ingredient for achieving mastery, as most people try something for 50 hours, and then give up that activity to move onto something else. And then he says this:
“You have to be fanatical enough to keep going. The person who makes it to 10,000 hours…is somebody who has chosen, and been chosen, in many different times.”
Perhaps, by the grace of God, I have some measure of ability in the written word. Perhaps, by the grace of God, you stumbled across something I have written in the past year, and it touched your heart. Does this make me an author who has mastered the written word? Far from it! In reality, I’m only a third of the way into my first poorly written story as a person trying to develop my writing more seriously into a skill that could become a profession of sorts over time. As this first year of writing comes to a close, I find myself returning to the starting line once again, more determined than before to steadily increase my practice of the written word. I’m not exactly sure where this journey will lead me. I have some ideas, and possibly even some developing dreams.
To see them become reality? I have to be fanatical enough to keep going, one sentence at a time.
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“From what you have, take an offering for the Lord. Everyone who is willing is to bring to the Lord an offering…all who are skilled among you are to come and make everything the Lord has commanded” (Moses to the entire Israelite community upon building the Tabernacle; found in
Exodus 35:5, 10, NIV).