The Consultant's Code Blog - 10,000 Hours of Intense Training

10,000 Hours of Intense Training

Many people have heard or read the idea that to become an expert at something, you need to put in 10,000 hours of practice. Many people have read this in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. That number, 10,000 hours, comes from psychology researcher K. Anders Ericsson. However, Ericsson means specifically 10,000 hours of intense practice, and not 10,000 hours of just any level of practice.

This is where effort comes in. Effort is putting work into what you do and not just doing it haphazardly. It takes effort to pay attention, to be engaged, and to strive for improvement. No one is born with a gene that lets them to do something like an expert. Expertise comes from effort and putting in quality time to build your craft. All talented people build their talent through effort.

When I started consulting, I was told by many people that I wouldn’t know much until I’d been in the job for two years. On my two-year anniversary, I remember thinking, “Man, I still don’t know anything.” It wasn’t until the five-year mark that I really felt like I’d built the foundational skills to execute my craft properly. Since the average person works about 2,000 hours per year, it was five years in that I hit 10,000 hours. This was when I felt I was becoming a consultant who could deliver quality work.

As a consultant, you develop your skills through focused effort. Your client is also expecting you to put effort into identifying their issues and understanding their needs. Passive listening and a passive approach will drop you down the ranks to being a mediocre consultant. Consultants who put in an effort stand out and reap the rewards.

Deliberate practice is not always fun, but to be a professional, you must accept that this is a requirement. Baseball player Buddy Reed once said, “I know baseball is a game of repetition and it gets repetitive after a while, but that’s why you play the game, because you love it.” Deliberate practice is about repetition. So be prepared for it to be repetitive.

In his article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” where the 10,000 hours idea comes from, Ericsson writes, “Engagement in deliberate practice is not inherently motivating.” This shows the importance of effort. It’s as the saying goes: “If it were easy, then everyone would do it.” The effort comes from being focused and deliberate in what you do.

For consultants, the term “practice” means the skills we build every day. Your value is in your technical skills, such as the specific skills your client requires of you, and your soft skills, like problem solving, client interaction, situational awareness, and so on. Each day, you practice these skills in a live environment. Of course, it is ideal to build your skills in a safe practice environment; however, the live interaction at a client site puts your skills to the test. You must be deliberate in how you execute your skills, as this separates the expert consultants from the average.


About The Consultant's Code Blog


The Consultant's Code Blog is a blog that contains excerpts from the #1 International Best Selling book The Consultants Code: Four Pillars To Success In Your Career And Life.  The Consultant's Code focuses on skills that will help separate you from all of the other consultants by showing you how to properly develop and use the four pillars of success. The four pillars are intelligence, effort, likability and intent. Each pillar is discussed in detail and shows how common misconceptions that have been taught or believed has been holding consultants back. These misconceptions and inaccurate beliefs not only affect the consultants they negatively affect clients.


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