Ten Thousand Hours

There's been a lot of talk lately about how mastering, well, anything, takes ten thousand hours. It comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success. I'm wondering how true that may be in our case?

I got my pilot's license in less than fifty hours. I had demonstrated by that point the proper skills and to a sufficient level to be deemed safe enough to fly unwitting people off to faraway adventures, with a high probability of getting us all back home, again. Fifty hours. But I can tell you that I was a much, much better pilot at 200hrs.

I was easily better than four times the flier, with four times the hours. I am sure that if I was able to continue racking up time, by the time I got to ten thousand hours, I'd be pretty damned good. It's not linear—I wouldn't be fifty times better, but I would bet that I would notice the difference, if nobody else did.

I've mentioned before that when I play guitar, I can hear the seventeen year old me laughing at the fifty year old me. But I figured out the seventeen year old me practiced and played about five hours per day, nearly every day, for a period of about two years, and about two hours per day nearly every day for about a year before that. So that's about twenty-five hundred hours of guitar playing, or a quarter of the way there. No wonder I was good. Had I stuck with it through the 1980s and 1990s, you might have heard of me by now.

But I wonder if this is transferable to the Web? How can anyone become an expert at building Web pages, if you need ten thousand hours? Is there really anything to learn from the umpty-millionth <p> tag you put on a page?

There are only a limited number of tags we use every day. There are only a few tags that we use maybe once a month or three or four times per year (I don't think I have ever used the <dd> tag, for instance, and I've been doing this since 1993). Once you have mastered HTML to some degree, you probably move on to Cascading Style Sheets.

There, you have several dozen property-value pairs to learn for several dozen selectors (basically the most-often used HTML tags). That is all quite a hill to climb. But here's where it falls apart, for me.

Ten thousand hours of eight-hour days is twelve hundred and fifty days. Given a typical working year of 2000hrs (8x5x50), that's five years of heads-down markup and design, with no sick days, no all-day meetings and no staring absently at the tree outside the window—and especially with no accounting for shopping on eBay, searching Facebook for old sweeties or looking up things in Wikipedia.

And here's my problem. In any random five years there are huge changes in the Web, the way we work, the tools we use and so on. How much of that transfers over? How much of the work I did in HTML v3.2 counted, when HTML 4.01 became the choice? How much of what I did in HomeSite was I really able to carry over into Dreamweaver? And how much of what I learned of Dreamweaver MX 2000 am I still using, today?

At some point, I stopped laying out pages in tables. At some point, I quit using <font> tags. Somewhere along the line, I learned to include title attributes on links, and alt text in images.

Realistically, the way I work today, this week or this month is how I have worked for only a couple of hundred hours. Some parts of it stretch back to the 1990s, sure, but not many, and fewer with every passing year. HTML becomes XHTML and probably soon will become HTML5. CSS is moving into CSS3, now. Browsers are still rolling out about a once a year, but there are only three or four that matter so it's a new one only every so many months. JavaScript improves and so do the libraries that techniques like JQuery depend upon.

It's all still in a great deal of flux.

So, according to Outliers, will any of us ever be any good?