The 10,000 Hour Rule

The final speaker in this year's professionalism class alluded to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, a study of the factors that contribute to high levels of success. He specifically mentioned the 10,000 hour rule, the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice or experience at a certain discipline to gain effortless mastery of it.

I obviously haven't practiced music for even close to 10,000 hours. In fact, I likely have well short of even 1000 hours under my belt. I am a very long way from being a musical master. But there is something else, an area of expertise wherein I am much closer: I am, slowly but surely, becoming a Pokemon Master.

I set out to tally up my total estimated hours of playing Pokemon since the release of the original Red and Blue versions for Game Boy in 1996. I've played through most of the games released since, beating at least two of the handheld games in each generation, as well as several of the console games. The estimates are very conservative; the real totals could easily be over 50% greater, but the hours still add up quite formidably. Here are the results:

Red - 200

Blue - 200

Yellow - 100

Stadium - 50

Silver - 200

Gold - 100

Crystal - 200

Stadium 2 - 25

Ruby - 200

Leafgreen - 200

Coliseum - 25

Diamond - 200+

Soulsilver - 65+

_____________

Current Total = 1765

My dad often used to bug me about my burgeoning Pokemon Mastery. He would tell me that if I devoted all the space in my brain invested in Pokemon knowledge, I could learn at least one new language. He probably wasn't exaggerating by as much as he thought. All this knowledge of stats, moves, evolution, items, strategy, and other specifics seems to stretch deeper the more I think about it.

Its too bad a true Pokemon Master has to know such things. Otherwise, he'd probably be a much better musician.

P.S. The book in the image is ridiculously novice. Don't even bother.

Gui-tarded

This long weekend I picked up a guitar and learned to play it. This is a big deal for me.

People have always assumed I played guitar, and were somewhat shocked to hear that I didn't. It makes sense, I'm a musical guy and my favorite music is heavily guitar based. I play piano, drums, and sing pretty well. Why wouldn't I be a guitar guy too?

Unlike piano, for which I took lessons from the time I was old enough to sit still right up to highschool graduation, I've had no training on guitar. Unlike singing, which I'd been doing in church for just as long, I didn't have constant exposure to guitar. Unlike drums, which came easily enough that I taught myself, guitar felt unnatural and hard. I'd tried before, gotten nowhere, gave up, and decided it just wasn't my thing.

For whatever reason, I decided that by the time the weekend was over, I was going to be able to play pop progressions in G. Somehow, at the end of the long weekend, I was able to play pop progressions in G. They are very slow and have no intentional proper technique to speak of. But now I can whip out "Wonderwall" or "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt whenever I want.

Oh yeah, and power chords. Especially in drop D. I can totally rip on power chords.