I just finished reading the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a well-written and thought-provoking book on the topic of success. Among many interesting ideas in the book, there is one I’d like discuss here and that is the 10,000-Hour Rule. The rule says that you need approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become a world-class expert in a field. Outliers shows that the rule applies even to geniuses like Mozart and Bill Gates. There is no other way: if you want to be a world-class expert in your field, you must do your 10,000 hours of practice. When I was thinking about it, a question came into my mind: Where should I invest my 10,000 hours of practice?
Note: This is a guest post by Jeff Grundy of 30 Wasted Years There are some people who are completely happy with themselves, their lives, and their prospects for the future. While they can be considered to be more fortunate than most, most who do not fall into that category are not as bad off as they tend to believe. Instead, they are simply lacking something, or making mistakes, which are standing in the way of their lives being as fulfilling as they would prefer. Some even go as far as to not realize the immense potential they possess. What is the main difference between those lucky individuals whose lives seem to be wonderfully on-track and those who, often despite every step of trying on their part, appear to have all of the odds stacked against them? While in some cases it is a matter of some people having better luck than others, those whose lives are content in the moment and proceeding in the direction of their choice, do not live in the past.
To grow in your career, there is no other way but to increase your value. The more value you have, the more value you can provide to others and the more reward you will get in return (both financially and in other forms). That’s why it’s essential to invest your time and money to increase your value. There are several ways to increase your value, but here I’d like to focus on six roles that can help you do that. Three of the roles come from The Tipping Point and two come from The World Is Flat. I may miss some roles (feel free to share your thoughts in the comments) but I believe these six roles can give you competitive advantage in your career. Here they are:
Improving my mind has always been one of my interests. That’s because I believe that the quality of the mind has significant influence on success. But of course, improving the mind can’t be separated from knowing how the brain works. You need to know how the brain works in order to use your mind effectively. That’s why the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina is interesting to me. It aims to introduce you to the latest discoveries in brain science while giving you practical ways to apply them. In the author’s words: Most of us have no idea how our brain works… Unless you have the Journal of Neuroscience sitting on your coffee table, you’re out of the loop. This book is meant to get you into the loop. Let’s look inside the book.
Note: This is a guest post by Michael of Effortless Abundance We are all looking for happiness, and feeling good is the key to a successful and meaningful life. But how many of us make it a priority? How often do we commit to making ourselves feel good? I believe that happiness is so important, it should not be left to chance. Realize that you are pulling the strings In ‘Man’s Search for Meaning,’ Viktor Frankl writes ‘between stimulus and response there is a gap, and in this gap lies all our freedom.’ Frankl came to this insight after spending several years in Nazi concentration camps, during which time he discovered that those who believed they had some control over their lives were more likely to survive.
Nurturing your multiple passions is important to improve yourself. By nurturing your passions, you will be able to cross-pollinate different fields and come up with fresh ideas that put you ahead of the pack. The question is: what should we do to nurture our passions? There are many ways to do that, but here I’d like to discuss one of them: creating multiple blogs for your passions, one blog for each passion. There are several reasons why blogging is a good way to nurture your passions: It pushes you to keep learning You can only write something meaningful on your blogs if you keep learning. The responsibility to update your blogs will give you the pressure to learn.