Just imagine… you want to increase your income. You understand that a brain surgeon gets paid very well. You buy 7 tablets for the course brainsurgeon101. You drink it every night for 7 days and on the eight day you are a fully qualified brain surgeon!

This new miracle drug has been manufactured after carefully downloading the experience and knowledge of 10 top brainsurgeons in the world. In a revolutionary new method in Never Ever land. Dr Quick Brain has developed this method. It has now been carefully transferred through nanotechnology into a tablet that could be released over a seven day period and assimilated by anyone who is able to afford the technology. The CEO of Nanolearning, Mr Clever announced that the price tag of $1 000 000 is not too high as the neurosurgeon would be able to recover his investment in three to five years depending on where he is working and the income related to the position. “It is much faster than studying through the normal “old” method. It is also much more profitable as you get into the workplace in a few weeks instead of quite a number of years,” Mr Clever said in an interview in  “Unbelievable”, the capital of Never Ever land.

Of course you will not believe this. I no doubt beleive that there are ways to accelerate learning, but this may be a bit too far fetched. Yet I am amased that people think that some things are easy and that you could achieve mastery very quickly. They join a company that distributes nutrition products. They taste the products on day one and they belief that they are endowed with a special power of assimilation (like drinking a tablet) to give them instant knowledge and experience. As they have eaten food in the past, they can be food experts without getting training about nutrition. They forget that mastery comes from knowledge and experience. It may be a good 10 000 hours¹ to get mastery. That is four hours every day of your life for seven years!

Wow, 10 000 hours is way to long if you want to learn something that could still make an impact quickly. Here you could apply the 10 hour rule as explained by Bradley Hartman². The 10-Hour Rule can be broken down over six weeks. If you focus on Construction Spanish for 6 weeks, 5 days each week, for about 20 minutes a day… that’s 10 hours. That’s enough.  You won’t be an expert, but you can make a huge impact on the job by bridging the language gap.

So to apply this to nutrition – you could learn quite a bit about nutrition if you spend 10 hours on that – not enough, but enough to make a big difference in your life and the life of others. For complete mastery it is different, you need to put in the time!

If you focus on this, you will find time every day to devote to mastering something new. Choose carefully and prayerfully and put in the work and you could become a master in a new field. We have not discovered the wonderful pill of knowledge so the pearl of wisdom is still there: put in the hours and you will succeed!

 

1. Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers 

2. http://redanglespanish.me/2013/08/23/malcolm-gladwell-vs-bradley-hartmann-is-expertise-overrated/