10,000 hours and One Red Hen
21 Oct 2010 Leave a Comment
in expert Tags: 10000 hours, becoming an expert, college drinking game, one red hen
The Soul Salon Blog will be moving to its permanent home at MySoulSalon.com as of October 22,2010. If you’d like to continue to read new posts, please change your feed to MySoulSalon.com or visit this link and email subscribe on the sidebar. Also, if you are the webmaster for one of the sites where this blog is syndicated, please make the adjustments needed now as tomorrow is the final day of double posting, after that I will cue the crickets here. Thank you so much for moving with me. Last time, I pinky-swear. ENTER THE SOUL SALON to re-subscribe at this link.
And Now… 10,000 Hours and One Red Hen…
My son let me know today that he learned that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. That sounds pretty monumental in terms of time and it made me think. What can I say I am an expert at? Well, if the 10,000 hour rule is true… I am an expert at being a mom, at driving (except for that Porsche I backed into a year ago, but I was in my SUV and well, I didn’t see him back there)… I am an expert at being a wife and daughter… oh, and a sister. I know I am grabbing for the obvious here, but perhaps that is because I don’t quite feel like and expert at anything. I still feel like there is much to learn about everything.
If I knew it would take 10,000 hours to become proficient at something would I ever take anything on to meet that goal?
When I was in college, we used to play this umm, “game”. We would have to recite these lines in order without messing up any words… or we’d have to take a…. well… we’d have to begin again… I can still remember the lines. We’d go around in a circle and one at a time, we would have to say. “One red hen.” After that everyone would have a turn to repeat, “one red hen” and add, “Two cute ducks.” They would get harder to memorize in order and recite without misspeaking or getting tongue tied…. Eventually you would build up (or be sent to the beginning if you made mistakes)and have to recite all ten… You were not done until you could do all ten, with no errors.
One red hen
Two cute ducks
Three brown bears
Four running hairs
Five fat females sitting sipping scotch smoking cigarettes
Six sloppy slop-shooters slopping up slop on the sloppy seventy-seventh floor
Seven sexy sailors sailing the seven seas.
Eight elongated elephants elevated on elevator shoes.
Nine nifty Nigerians sailing to Nigeria on a nifty Nigerian boat
Ten… I am not the fig-picker nor the fig-picker’s son, but I’ll pick the figs ’till the fig-picker comes.
I am an expert at that game… okay– I did not have 10,000 hours of training, but I can do this 25 years after I learned it, with or without beer. Kudos to me.
So I am going to noodle this through some more and give myself some more time to come up with my expert arena…. maybe 10,000 hours of thinking…. yeah, that’s the ticket! I am practically Socrates….
If you want a really thoughtful well done post about what it takes to be an expert (clearly you’ve come to the wrong place) :+) but I ‘d like to point you to Hunternuttal.com to get some really insightful thoughts on the subject.
All the best!
Rena M. Reese
Founder, Soul Salon International
DISCLAIMER: I do not encourage underage drinking or making drinking a game…. this is just a reflection of my foolish youth–and I am keeping it real.
