How to best spend 10,000 hours

The 10,000 hour rule states that spending this amount of time practicing a skill is necessary to achieve world-class expertise. Alas, neither complaining nor drinking counts as a skill.

For a long time, this kind of deep specialism was considered a superpower. The mythos around Tiger Woods and numerous chess grandmasters made vocation an ambition. In the business (and agency) world, being highly specialised added value. 

There’s still plenty of examples of how specialism can drive outsized success. A recent long read on viral video sensation, Mr Beast (aka Jimmy Donaldson) quotes a 36-page onboarding document (eurgh) which states “I spent five years of my life locked in a room studying virality on YouTube”. It’s clearly paid off - Donaldson is now worth about $750m.

But as ever, AI may be changing that. Take a few recent examples.

Meta recently announced they would be releasing tools that allowed customers to use AI to fully create and target advertising campaigns. The job market for grads has “deteriorated noticeably” in the US, and graduate job postings fell 24% in Australia last year.

Stephan Pretorius, who apparently describes himself as “WPP’s AI guy” in the same way the Four Horsemen might describe themselves as “The Apocalypse's equestrian guys”, said recently “AI replaces tasks, it eliminates tasks, it doesn’t eliminate jobs.”

But for many, a job is a series of tasks. Eliminate those tasks and there’s precious little to do.

What AI does struggle with, however, is complexity. A much discussed research paper from Apple found that AI systems experienced a “complete accuracy collapse” when presented with highly complex problems.

And this is where generalism becomes a superpower. Knowing how to do one thing very well is great until a machine can do it better. Knowing how to bring it all together still appears to be an innately human skill. Millennials and zoomers recognise this and are now prioritising soft skills.

This isn’t to say there’s no value in specialist knowledge. But diversity is increasingly what separates us from machines. Like combining complaining and drinking, for example.