Retain Submitting the Very Good Function

I thought it'd be funny to use lines from spam comments as titles of posts. Thus the nonsensical gibberish you see above. Moving on...

I recently started reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," a book about how/why people become successful. It's been hugely enlightening to me so far and I've really enjoyed it. There are several patterns researchers have stumbled upon as to why people are successful in different areas, and one of them involved analyzing the so-called "naturally talented." People like Mozart or Michael Jordan. Those we look at and are amazed at their skills. I always thought a lot of that was due to inborn talent. Apparently that's not really the case. Turns out practice really does make perfect. 10,000 hours of practice, that is.

That's right. 10,000 hours. Researchers analyzed many amazingly talented people and determined that it takes on average about 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. So of course I had to figure out how many hours I'd spent doing various things to see how much farther I had to go. I thought I'd spent quite a bit of time practicing the piano... on average about an hour a week for the last 25 years. That amounts to 1,300 hours. Huh. A little surprising. No wonder I haven't progressed very much. Moving onto something else, I figured out how many hours I had spent on cooking. This one is a little harder to determine, but I figure if I went with 5 hours a week for the last 5 years, that would be pretty close to a lifetime total. Oddly enough that also came to 1,300 hours. Geez. Ok so no career as a professional chef in the near future for me!

I wondered how long it would take to get to rack up all those hours if I were to really dedicate myself to something. Well, if I were to spend 8 hours a day, 7 days a week practicing, it would take 3 1/2 years to become an expert. Or if I wanted to slack off and just do 4 hours a day, it would take 7 years. After looking at those numbers, it's not too surprising that there aren't very many Michael Jordans out there.

I've decided that there isn't anything out there I care about enough to spend that much time on. It seems like it would be easy to get burned out on something after spending so much time on it. To me, having a wide variety of interests is more exciting than being really good at just one thing. Plus, I'm really, really good at being average. I've got over 270,000 hours of practice under my belt after all!

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”  
-Malcolm Gladwell

Things to Do Before You Die

My new favorite t.v. show is 'An Idiot Abroad' on the Science channel. If you've been over to our house recently, there's a good chance you were forced to watch it. The basic premise is they (Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant) make the 'idiot,' Karl Pilkington, choose activities to do based on a list of the top 100 things people say they want to do before they die. These aren't things Karl wants to do before he dies. He's more of a homebody type. So to see him put into all these crazy situations is pretty dang funny.

This got me thinking of what would be on my list. My "Bucket List." I've actually done a lot of things that'd be on your typical list, so I think I'd have to get a little creative and/or specific. I don't have any desire to do things involving large amounts of adrenaline. At least the type that comes with risking life and limb. No bungee jumping or sky diving for me, thanks. I think most of my to-do's would involve outdoor activities, traveling, and food. So... let's see what we have...

1. Fly fish for Browns in New Zealand
2. Eat an authentic French & Italian meal (ideally in each of those countries...)
3. Visit New England in the fall
4. See the Northern Lights & an iceberg
5. Have an article or book published
6. Go backpacking in the backcountry for at least a week

It's actually really tough for me to think of things I'd want to do before I die because usually if I want to do something I just do it! Most of the things I haven't done are simply because it takes a little extra cash to accomplish them.

So what do you think? What do you want to do before you die?

Asking Too Much

Remember a few weeks ago when I made my 101 goals in 1001 days list? Yeah, so do I. Sort of. I wrote up a separate post that only I can see so I can keep making updates and such. So, I've realized something already in this endeavor. No, I'm not quitting. Far from it. I think there were some great goals there. However, I have noticed I may have made a few too many goals that are dependent on me completing them on a regular basis.

 

Here are all the goals I made that I was supposed to do regularly:

1. Workout 3x per week  
2. Drink at least 40 oz. of water a day 
3. Call at least one family member at least once a week
4.  Have dinner with Mom once a month
5.  Play the piano at least once a week
6.  Play my clarinet at least once a month
7. Do at least one post per week on my personal blog
8. Bake bread 1x per month
9. Bring a treat for co-workers at least once a month
10.  Bring my lunch to work 3x per week
11. Vacuum & Dust once a week
12. Clean the bathrooms once a week
13. Clean out my work e-mail inbox weekly

So mainly the problem is, I can't remember all this stuff! I thought I was doing ok until I started going through trying to list the dates of all the times I did each of these things and realized I've pretty much already failed at all of them. Even the ones I thought I'd remembered to do.

Like I said, I think these are good goals. However, I think feeling like I HAVE to complete each one takes the fun out of it. When playing the piano or calling family becomes a burden, you know something's wrong.

So, I know when you're making goals it's best to narrow them down and be specific, but I think I'm going to do the opposite of that on these. I'm going to replace the "weekly" or "monthly" addendum with "more often." So instead of "play my clarinet once a month" it'll be "play my clarinet more often." And I think just having these items on my goal list at all will help me to think about them more. Doing stuff is hard.