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The Beatles and Bill Gates would have never made it doing a ‘4 hour’ work week,
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……. How do you reconcile two great books which seem to say two totally opposite things? In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell proves his explanation that the Beatles and Bill Gates’ fame and fortune was a result of at least 10,000 hours practice. And at the same time Tim Ferris promotes success in life with his book entitled the ‘4 hour work’ week? |
 Could I get my 10.000 hours in this way? I wish. |
So if 10,000 hours breaks down into 5 years at 40 hours work per week then a 4 hour work week would equate to 50 years AND . . .
Bill Gates and The Beatles would never have made it until they reached their sixties.
How does that compute?
In the beginning it didn’t.
It scares me when I read what Malcolm Gladwell has to say about success in Outliers.
It’s well worth reading his entire explanation however in short, here’s what he says;
Don’t be fooled. The Beatles and Bill Gates’ success didn’t happen overnight.
For years and years the Beatles travelled to Hamburg to play 8 hour stints, 7 days on the trot. These long, consecutive days performing just about clocked up a 10,000-hour long apprenticeship.
In the end they became such a well rounded and extremely well practiced band that they had the ability to cope with the huge demands from their audiences and they indeed held their attention for many many years.
They earned their long term success because of their sheer hard work, commitment and extensive practice.
The same applied to Bill Gates.
For years and years Bill Gates used state of the art computer technology at night to accumulate his 10,000 hours practice. For him it was these long, laborious hours of practice at night, missing out on sleep, that kept him ahead of the game and drove his success.
Now take Tim Ferris’ cut on success.
If I take him literally I should strive to produce great blog posts (that add value to the people who read them) in only 4 hours a week.
Now that doesn’t make me feel good at all; at the moment the headline alone nearly takes me more than that and I can’t see that I can improve anytime soon.
Clearly I fail; working a 4-hour week is just not an option for me, in the near future anyway.
In the past I would have left it at that; just accepted it. I would have given up on making sense of it all and continued on my merry way, writing my blog, happy with achieving haphazard advancement.
But since I am so keen on explanations and appreciate their value to advance my life, I think both writers deserve more attention. I want to get to the bottom of what they’re really saying.
Tim Ferris is of course NOT really talking about a 4-hour work week. He uses the title to focus my thinking on how much time I waste on trivial work and how I can free up time to do the things that I really choose to do.
That is totally different.
Ferris is passionate about effectiveness and liberation. He points out that my compulsive, self imposed and very ineffective busyness is costing me hugely in time, time that is valuable and shouldn’t be squandered.
I am sure that if I ask him, he would not recommend 4 hours working on my blog at all; instead he would ask me to examine the following;
- My time management. Do I waste alot of my time, for example on unproductive, fearsome thoughts or on trivial pursuits
- Where do I want my blog to take me and am I afraid to do what is required to get there. Of course fear holds me back. I have been weak at the knees by the sheer thought of leaving comments on other people’s blog or showing up in cyberspace as someone who has something to say.
- And do I use sustainable, time leveraged ways to generate income? In other words am I a slave to money and do things against my will? Humm, in the past I’ve been a lot more fearful than I am now, I am pleased to say. Read this post if you want to see how I have changed.
- Does the amount of freedom I have created allow the ‘ME, my heart’ to do what it desires, wherever and whenever it wants . Tim Ferris is clear that liberation is about advancing your life by following your passion and it is NOT about idling your life away in early retirement.
I am pleased to say I am scoring well on this one too, with my writing here in this Garden of Eden and eating my fresh home grown veggies.
Now let’s tackle the points that Malcolm Gladwell really makes.
I hate to admit it but Outliers is dispelling this big myth of instant, sustainable success.
Apparently there are no shortcuts. Darn.
Mastery requires practice and lots of it.
So let’s take a look to see if all of this is as bad as I first thought it was.
- Forget instant success and enjoy doing my practice and putting the hours in. So if I like what I am doing, I’ll enjoy the practice most of the time, won’t I?
Humm, this is one obstacle I can overcome. Stop practicing the things I don’t like and only do what I really enjoy. Work turns into fun and my 40-hour work week will change from slavery to liberation as I relish in an adventure packed life that I absolutely adore. - Looking back on my life I find that I have already been practicing related skills a lot more than I think. I have spent years of my working life observing and reporting my observations in writing and I loved doing it. I, of course never related that report writing to this blog writing. That means that I am closer to my 10,000 hours than I first thought.
- Being open to new explanations has been my saving grace. It has made me trust that I am in the right place at the right time and having things work out, more than I ever imagined. I have been practicing blogging for over 2 years now and for example, according to Seth Godin my blogging is building long tail searches that have people find my blog.
Giving Tim Ferris and Malcolm Gladwell a bit more time of my day has worked well.
Their explanations start to make a lot more sense.
I can now reconcile ‘ME, the heart’ and it’s desires with what it takes to reach real sustainable success.
One doesn’t have to exclude the other.
That is big folks, very BIG.
I so agree with Malcolm Gladwell when he mentions that this is very promising for anybody who wants to create their own, more advanced future without losing their authenticity, their heart, their me in the process.
12 Comments to “The Beatles and Bill Gates would have never made it doing a ‘4 hour’ work week,”
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Wilma how fascinating that we aread the same tomes!!
Do you know Ben Zanders?
Go to u tube and find Davos 2009
i am in love!
Unfortuntaly for me he is married …but never mind…
i applied and married some of his practices to mine in my last stress course run at the uni….one participant said ” thankyou for being the Mother Theresa of joy!”….
I get that i have done my 10,000 hours…I get now that my integrous self needs to just tighten up “the way we do things round here..” and my life will fly….yep..that old get out of the road pat!
Much joy to you and your readers….
Pat
and that photo at the top of you and john on the beach in jumpers brings tears to my eyes….raw beauty!!
make somebodys eyes shine this week!!
love your points here Wilma
awesome post, so now I’m back to work….!
@Pat. I love Ben Zanders too and how he encouraged his music students to assess themselves. He and his wife are indeed doing great new paradigm things and indeed again, so are you.
Joy is the most precious emotion to go for in life, joy is an expression of love and as life is love in action, joy is crucial and thus what you are doing is too.
Yes, the photos were fun to make and the photographer, Michael Matthew a cracker.
Hi Wilma!
Maybe it’s that once you’ve done your 10,000 hours, *then* you’ve laid the groundwork for a 4 hour workweek? Tim Ferris has gone on record saying that a 4 hour workweek is not really realistic in the startup phase, but once you have things ticking along, then it’s time to outsource all the tedium and focus on the parts you’re passionate about.
Hopefully I haven’t missed the point of your post tho…?
@ Michael. Well, first thing is to see whatever useful you get out of this line of thought and not if your thinking is right or wrong. I personally don’t hold the 10.000 hours as gospel, for me it refers to when you love what you are doing you will clock up the hours regardless and in a very painless way.
Both Tim Ferris and Malcolm Gladwell point out that mastery takes time and practice to get to mastery level is no hardship when you do what you love doing.
The 4 hr workweek eludes to watching where you are wasting your precious time.
Hi Wilma, While I think the “4 Hour” concept is cute, and good marketing, could we not say that if your work is joy, you are essentially playing, and thus not working at all? What does he do with the rest of his time? Play golf? Of course not – and that’s the point. You nailed it with that remark about life being ongoing challenge and fulfillment, not lying around drinking gin and watching Oprah. (Not that I have a problem with that.)
OH Kath, I do agree that having fun is all part of the equation and that includes work but NOT work as we know it, but as you and I and Tim Ferris know it. Yeah for us.
i love this post Wilma. I will definitely share this.
People often misunderstand the 4hww title. The book just didn’t say it directly that you really have to put in time first before you reach a status where you can finally go on cruise control.
Tim was relentless when he promoting that book, and from his stories, he was also relentless when starting his businesses.
I know a lot of people that got motivated by that book and then came crashing back to earth because they couldn’t make it happen instantly.
Oh and i completely agree with kathleen too.
looking forward to more posts
Thanks Ceena, we are so gullible when it comes to messages about work.It is amazing the filters we can equip ourselves with to pick up that what suits us and how they then filter the rest out.
BTW, thanks for your comment.
I wrote about the 10,000 hrs idea back in July 2007 when Malcolm Gladwell was still working on the book. He gave a video presentation to the New Yorker (magazine) conference called 2012: Stories from the near Future. Still worth viewing all this time later.
I’m not sure that all of this material made it into the book but it was fascinating then and still gets hundreds of readers every month on my site as I cross referenced it with a few of my own idea and others at the time. It picks up a couple of case studies on the Maths side of things.
Gladwell is above all else a storyteller of excellence. Bill Gates even did a presentation at the TED conference partly because of the Outliers book. Bill acknolwedges the element of luck in having access to some of the early computers and some top people in the ealy days as well.
But it is also clear he focussed his efforts in a very directed way in those early years to produce dramtic results a bit later down the track.
One other part of the book that I picked up on when Malcolm was interviewed by Kim Hill wasa the importance of what children do in the holidays between terms accounts for a huge degree of differnce whn they get back into class after the break.
As I understand it in the US they have one very long summer break and not as many short holidays during the school year. That idea alone is worth thinking about.
I was reminded of all this again this week when I read a post by Mark Drapeau on success (using Twitter) but it applies to most everything.
He said “The Bottom Line”
“There aren’t any secrets. You get out what you put in. Work hard, add value, and don’t rest on your laurels. Note what’s happening in the news, and in life. Always evolve; adapt to your environment. Embrace trial-and-error and a spirit of lethal generosity. Take risks. Be surprising. Be awesome.”
The very old idea of more haste less speed is still also true.