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THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK - The 10,000-hour rule!
In his book, “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell introduces the concept of the 10,000-hour rule. He wrote that, “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” Stated another way, mastering a field requires 10,000 hours of practice.
For a 40-hour-per-week job, assuming you’re practicing all 40 hours, that comes to almost five years. But we know that we’re not engaged in work every hour, we also take time off from work, and not all our work would make the cut as being correct practice. Also, not everyone learns at the same pace. Realistically, it’s closer to seven or more years.
Of course, this is debatable and soon after the book was published, the debunkers went to work.
The point Gladwell was trying to make is that mastering complex skill sets takes practice, lots of it, and it must be done correctly, typically under the tutelage of someone who has already mastered the skills.
B2B marketing and sales requires mastering a complex set of skills. While your marketing and sales team gets plenty of practice each day, how confident are you that it is correct? Are they supervised in a way that is developing them, are they becoming better, and are they being introduced to new skills they will require to be masters? I rarely speak with B2B marketers and sales people who feel like they’re part of an organization that practices the right way.
I encourage you to do a self-assessment of how your organization does at creating professionals who will one day be masters at the scale described by Gladwell and the 10,000-hour rule.
I hope you have a great week!
--Perry
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Perry Rearick
Chief Editor | Follow Your Buyer
prearick@followyourbuyer.com
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