Debunking the "1,000 hours of practice" myth

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 14, 2011 at 03:30 PM

Alexander, thanks for referencing my post on benefits of getting an early start. Indeed, I believe many, if not most of us, may have times of days which are better suited to some tasks more than to others.

More recently I wrote another blog post which may also have relevance to this discussion - it looks at the notion of conscious awareness being beneficial, especially when we face the experience of overwhelm. I suggest that mindfulness practice enables the kind of conscious awareness which enables us to experience and react in a useful manner to those thoughts which interfere with our ability to be focused, and to work in an optimal manner.

This blog post may be found here: http://www.exuberanteclectic.com/2011/10/conscious-awareness-key-to-getting.html

The operative words in the article Dr Andus introduced may be in its title: If You?re Busy, You?re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers - and those words are “surprisingly relaxed.”

We think of relaxation as something we do when we are not working, as the antithesis of work - but my experience, distorted as it often has been with issues related to ADHD and executive dysfunction, is that my best intellectual activity, or my best work as a chaplain or therapist, has occurred in the so-called flow state, which to me is very similar to being relaxed.

I think as research accumulates with regard to mindfulness practice, it may be said our best chance of achieving that kind of state may be through regular practice. It may not make us gifted in what we do, but it will perhaps shift our relationship to the stuff of our life in a way which enables a more relaxed approach. And with that go notions such as being focused, have greater awareness, being able to learn and understand without “friction,” and so on. Having said that, I need to emphasize one does not practice mindfulness for any “goal” or “purpose” other than the practice. So while it is true certain contexts of our life - stress, overwhelm, chronic pain, grief - may lead to our taking up the practice, we do not do so with a specific goal.

Daly

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Some thoughts after reading through this fascinating discussion:
> >- Sometime ago
>Daly wrote a post on getting up early
>http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2817 I believe in circadian
>body/mind rhythms and know that, regardless of the tools, I will be best at doing
>different things at different times of the day: 5:00-8:00 for texts, 8:00-11:00 for
>organisation, 11:00-14:00 for focused discussions, 14:00- 16:00 for physical
>exercise, 16:00-18:00 for social communication, 18:00-... for delving on
>technical problems (whose solutions will probably be manifest after a good night’s
>sleep) etc. These are indicative times but for me they work. Many of my productivity
>problems have to do with doing the wrong thing at the wrong time…
> >- Re focus /
>concentration: it may indeed be a matter of discipline, but the surrounding
>conditions can facilitate it or make it more difficult. Is it surprising that many of
>us look back to DOS days, JB swears by Emacs Org-mode and full text editors like
>ZenWriter, Q10, WriteMonkey etc. abound? I only switched from WordPerfect 5.1’s
>‘darkroom’ environment to Windows editors when I could no longer run it… When
>working on texts early in the morning I will disable PopPeeper’s auto-checking of
>mails, because I find even its tiny static flag notification distracting.
> >- I
>believe that software can indeed help as Dr Andus suggested, even without AI; much of
>the software we discussed here offers specific views to our data. IMHO, the ideal tool
>would provide (a) different representations of structured relationships, i.e.
>concept mapping, tabular, outline etc. and (b) zoomable views to those
>representations. The latter is very important and surprisingly missing from most
>offerings. Even more, when zoomable views are provided e.g. in TreeSheets, they
>treat all info at a certain level as of equal value. Yet just as on a geographical map
>there are landmarks and we will often visualise France with an out-of-proportion
>Eiffel Tower at its centre, so we may need to have such ‘landmarks’ in our data too.
>