Here We Go!

This morning I read a post on Ravelry by IdaW about a project in which she'd decided to participate. Seems that a gentleman named Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Outliers as follows:

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimal level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers 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, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…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…This is true even of people we think of as prodigies.

Just think about that for a moment....10,000 hours. If you break that down into 8-hour days, that's 1,250 days. Nearly three and a half YEARS. Whoa.

So does that mean if I start right now ice skating 8 hours a day, I'll be an expert in 3-1/2 years? Probably not, since I'd break my hip the first day. But what if I want to develop expert skills in something I'm already doing and that I ENJOY doing? Okay....sock knitting!

As I've told many, many people who are unitiated in the joys of knitting socks, "Yes, I DO know that it's cheaper to go to Wal-Mart and buy a whole sack of socks." But where's the fun in that? Not to mention the fact that nothing in the world feels as good on your feet as a pair of hand-knit custom-fit yummy wool socks.

I'm currently working on a pair of "Summer Lovin" socks, and so I'll begin keeping my time starting today. (It's my sister's birthday, so that will make it easy for me to remember.)

And so, here we go! I'm starting on the journey of 10,000 hours of sock knitting, and looking forward to the trip!