This week I saw Time for Three in concert. These guys are wonderful. Tf3 is three guys who met while students at the Curtiss Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Two violinists and a double bass player, they began over a decade ago as friends who played and improvised together, mostly for fun. A few years later they formed Time For Three and they’ve played been together ever since. If they ever come to a venue near you, GO SEE THEM!
As I listened and watched – because half the fun, at least, is watching them perform – I was in awe of their talent and just how well they played. Three experts made better by being with each other. And that got me to thinking about expertise and how it relates to the Renaissance Life.
What is Expertise and How Do We Get It?
Clearly, Tf3′s musical expertise come from a combination of talent and work. They all come from musical families and they all began playing at an early age, showed promise and subsequently received training from the best in their fields. And they practiced! Google “expertise + 10,000 hours” for a bunch of nifty references to this concept, including Malcom Gladwell’s work in Outliers, his book about exceptional people. Basically, the research indicates that it takes 10,000 hours of immersion in a subject to become an expert. That’s roughly 10 years of practicing 4 hours per day.
Without discounting the natural talent required to want to, or to be “invited” to, practice 4 hours per day for 10 years, the key element is time spent at the task. Incidentally, think of what might happen in business if all young people were taught to consider the 8 hours they spend each day on the job as “practicing for expertise” rather than “doing the job”. Granted, a ton of what we do is routine stuff in any business, but playing scales (and Horowitz was still grinding out an hour of scales every day well into his 70′s) is also pretty routine. I think we can practice for expertise in anything we do.
Can Renaissance People Hope to Become Experts?
Perhaps you smell the same problem I do when thinking about gaining expertise. The guys from Tf3 are all about music. I have no idea what other interests they have, but clearly music is central. But those of us who crave the Renaissance Life are drawn to too many interests to begin spending the required time to attain their kind of expertise. Indeed, I envy those souls who, early in life, discover something that they are passionate about, so much that it becomes their focus and life’s work.
But we Renaissance Souls seem cursed by many and sometimes fleeting interests. Typically, we find it pretty easy to learn something new, and we are excited by the exploration and the newness. But often, after we have messed about with it for awhile, our interest wanes and we’re off to something new. Perhaps we never fully abandon the former interest, but we don’t have – actually, we don’t allow – the time to practice required for expertise. I’m trying to figure out what to do about this. Here are a couple of ideas that I will try.
Pick a Few Things; Practice More Than a Little…
If we can’t, after all, “do it all” (or at least we can’t do it well), then it makes sense to grab our top three or four interests and become as good as we can at them. I’m trying this approach:
- pick four areas that I want to “master”. I’ll be sharing these a bit later (and I’ll let you know if 4 is the magic number).
- play around with my schedule to carve out “practice time” in each. (I think it’s fair to include how we make our living as one of our chosen “passions”, by the way.)
- try both an intense and a more relaxed approach to “practice”; that is, I will spend more time on some things, less time on others;
- get lessons, take courses, constantly try to improve;
- take it public; there is something energizing about taking your passion out of the closet and letting others see it.
I’ll revisit the idea of expertise often, because if we do a whole lot of things, but do a poor job of them, we’re not really being true to the Renaissance Life.
Stay tuned, more to come.
Yet another outstanding post and insight to life. I’ve also noticed our tendency to think that life is supposed to be blissful all the time. And that any discomfort in doing a task is to be avoided. While I believe that life is meant to be fun — that doesn’t mean that we don’t go through at least some discomfort as we go through the journey of becoming an expert.
In fact, one might say that it’s how we use those moments of discomfort that determines the ultimate success of our endeavors.