I’ve easily blown past the ten thousand hour rule for self-improvement. Many times. If I have developed any particular skill it’s got to be in the messy business of starting something new. I’ve gone through the start-up phase of so many careers, projects, commitments, and adventures you’d think I’d be good at it.
It’s not that I don’t see things through. I don’t abandon many things for lack of determination. No, I seem to invariably pause at some scenic view along the trail and ask myself the Peggy Lee question, “Is that all there is?”
I had a teacher in high school who kept a portable record player (look it up) on his desk. He’d play jazz between classes and was always lecturing us on how the Dave Brubeck Quartet was infinitely better than the Dave Clark Five. He wasn’t wrong but “better” required some discussion. Whenever we had exams he would play Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” when the clock was winding down and our answers needed to be turned in.
When I was an actor I would occasionally have someone (non-showbiz) ask if I would talk with their daughter/nephew/neighbor kid about how to break into the business. I was a working actor, actually getting cast in shows and making money as an actor, and I had no explanation for how I had gotten there. I came to realize that, were it not for an inordinate amount of naiveté, I would never have undertaken acting as a career path. Maybe stupidity would be a better word. In my case, a sense that somehow everything would work out allowed me to enter a career with one of the highest crash-and-burn rates a human can sign up for. In reality, if I had known how soul-crushingly unlikely it was for me to ever earn a living as an actor, I would’ve done it anyway. The impossible just takes a little longer, right?
When I finally fell out of love with show business for the absolutely last time I looked up, saw the sun shining in the beautiful blue sky, heard the birds chirping, smelled the roses, and realized I couldn’t do anything that any reputable business would pay me to do. Wait, not true. I could type.
For some reason I can no longer recall, I thought I could write computer software. Even more deliriously, I thought I should write software for the entertainment business. Several rations of ten thousand hours later, I was writing software for the entertainment business.
Then I got the goofy idea I should start a business. Get clients, have employees (or at least partners), design and build anything that came our way. A few tens of thousands of hours later and “Is that all there is?”
Why not take these skills somewhere and find someone willing to pay me a regular, dependable salary to do the same stuff? Not too many thousands of hours later, and I was a corporate IT guy. A project manager. A manager. An operations manager. Just keep on the ten-thousand-hour plan and see where the treadmill will take me!
Before too long I was thinking that what my big, impressive corporate employer needed was someone who understood both systems development and process improvement, a student of stuff like Lean principles, Theory of Constraints, that stuff. Ten thousand hours here, ten thousand hours there, and I had become a self-improving madman, flying around giving workshops, writing PowerPoint decks, coaching reluctant business people, until, eventually, Peggy Lee began humming in my ear.
Somewhere in the last ten years I thought I should get serious about writing. What’s another ten thousand hours of self-improvement here or there? And so, once again, too naive stupid to see how hard it is, I decided to start something new again. It’s a novel, Kind of Plaid, and I’m kind of excited about it.
What Then? 