Practice, Practice, Practice

The other day I got a great idea for a blog from our Network Systems teacher, Mr. Larry Regedanz. Mr. Regedanz constantly tells his students that "Your aren't going to be a master at Network Systems or any other program when you leave Vantage, but you will have a great head start. And you get out of it what you put into it over the course of your career, so start NOW and make every minute count." What great advice to our young students and not only is it great advice, but Larry passed on an article that backs up those claims.

The article was titled "10,000 Hours of Practice", written by Raymond T. Hightower. It is based on the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. He came about this conclusion by studying the lives of extremely successful people to find out how they achieved success. One of the studies that I found very interesting was in the early 1990's, a team of psychologists in Berlin, Germany studied violin students. They studied their practice habits from childhood all the way into adulthood. By age twenty, the elite performers averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only 4000 hours of practice. This study also debunked the idea of "natural talent" because no naturally gifted performers emerged. He gives example after example including Bill Gates and the number of hours he put into code writing before starting Microsoft, and he talks about the Beatles and how they played over 1200 concerts together before 1964, the year they finally broke onto the scene. You can check out his article here.

Did you know that if you are working in your target profession, forty hours per week over five years would give you the ten thousand hours. Or maybe you have hobbies that you really enjoy and people always admire your work, for example, woodworking. You might have several thousand hours into that hobby already and just need to continue practicing to get to the 10,000 hours. The idea is that the practice should be fun. We should fall in love with what we do so that it doesn't even feel like practice. Then eventually we fall into a career that we absolutely enjoy and it doesn't seem like work at all, and we are pretty good at it too.

For all of our students here at Vantage, you chose a career that you found interesting and worked hard at it. Do you realize that after 2 years, you have almost 1000 hours of practice. You have accumulated that by only going to lab 2.5 hours per day. Can you imagine when you start working in your career that you will have 1000 more hours of practice then students who chose not to come to Vantage. I hope all of you will find that passion in your life and land that job that you absolutely love going to everyday. I hope that you continue to get better and better and love what you are doing. However, please realize that being great at something doesn't come easy and it isn't just given to you. You need to practice, practice, practice.