I was really excited when I read about this rule of how world – class experts are distinguished from the rest and when you read and apply it, it can change your perspective of how you approach your own personal development and how you choose to contribute to the world.

The 10,000 hour rule was put forward by Malcolm Gladwell in his book ‘Outliers’, and states that one of the key factors that distinguishes those people whose achievements fall outside of normal experience from everyone else is this rule, which helps answer a question that has been raging for generations.

The question is: what distinguishes the highest achievers in the world, from the rest? For many people, this question guided the development of NLP through the process of modeling. In the pre-NLP days, the answer to this question was simple: they are just born that way; they are naturally talented. A few skeptics, often confused for blind optimists, would argue that there had to be other tangible external factors that shape individuals – you may know this as the old ‘Nurture vs Nature’ debate.

The theory put forward by Gladwell, for which he uses examples of Bill Joy (the guy that re-wrote the code for UNIX and some of the original code for accessing the internet), the Beatles, American Ice-hockey players, Mozart, and Bill Gates, and I might thrown in Michael Jackson (R.I.P). His theory is that to be truly successful, you do need opportunity and background – the opportunity and background that you create, or that is created in your life to enable you to spend… drum roll… 10,000 hours dedicated to your craft.

That’s about the amount of time that each of these people spent working alone at their craft before they ever achieved anything great. The Beatles performed for that number of hours live before they became famous, Mozart’s first masterpiece was created after that long composing, and the software geeks turned billionaires spent that much time writing code, to be able to become authors of modern life as we know it.  Let’s be clear, this is a theory, but it seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb.

Now, let’s apply this to our lives.  My first question is, what area of life would you like to dedicate 10,000 hours to in order to contribute to the world in a way that no-one else has?  For me, it is undoubtedly doing one-to-one and group Coaching sessions. It’s my mission to continue to do this until I’ve logged over 10,000 Coaching hours, and then I’ll do it more, and bigger, and better, with my own techniques that have developed out of my experience. What is it for you? Brian Tracy calls this defining your ‘major definite purpose’ – the one goal that is most important to you right now. There cannot be two.

My next theory is, if it takes 10,000 hours to become a world-class expert, then it takes 1000 hours to become truly competent at anything. Think about it. It takes roughly 1ooo hours to become a black-belt martial artist, it takes about 1000 hours of intensive language learning before you become roughly ‘fluent’, it takes about 1000 hours to understand and memorize every verse of the Qur’an – as I recently discovered with one of my Muslim clients ;o)

So, my question is, what are your personal development goals, that you are willing to dedicate 1000 hours towards? AND, how would you like to schedule those hours over the next 5,10 or 20 years? Remember: there are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic time-frames for achieving them in a balanced way given your other life goals.

This is one way of quantifying some otherwise difficult to quantify personal development goals. Obviously, I would advise you to have other criteria for your goals too, and you will probably fulfill your ‘evidence procedure’ (the evidence that let’s you know you have your goal) well before that time, but you will not achieve any of your long-range goals, if you are not willing to dedicate roughly that much time to it.

While you work on your one major definite 10,000 hour purpose in life, it is essential for you to dedicate the other hours in the day, week, month, year or decade to the other areas of your life in order to live a balanced life. Most of us over-estimate what we can achieve in 1 year, and under-estimate what we can achieve in 10.

If now’s the time for you to focus on your major definite purpose, or personal development goals, why not do a free Coaching Strategy Session turn those dreams into results. If you have one goal that you have not yet been able to achieve in your life, you will be empowered to make more progress towards it in the next 3 months than you have in the last 3 years.

Call us on 0208.133.4520 to take action now!