nickshanagher

“I have an idea for a new product but I don’t know how to build it,” Josh Kaufman writes on the first page of his book: TheFirst 20 Hours: How to learn anything fast . So do I and so probably do you. So why are we not doing it? “How much free time do you have each day after all your work and family obligations are complete?” asks Kaufman. “Do you feel like you’d need 36 or 48 hours in a day to finally sit down and learn something new?” In 2008 another US author Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers in which he argued that you needed 10,000 hours of skills training to become better than other people at something. You may notice that the England football team has just used the 10,000 hours idea as the basis of its skills work with young England footballers. So now you have a new barrier to not learning something new. “Not only do you have to make time for practice…but now you have to put in 10,000 hours.” Kaufman’s book, which will help any business owner looking to grow and develo...

My children hate Malcolm Gladwell and they don’t even know him. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposed that you had to spend 10,000 hours practising something to become an expert. I won’t let them read The Click Moment , a book from Frans Johansson that proposes that luck has just as big a role to play in success – unless you want to be a chess grandmaster, a tennis star or a classical musician. But The Click Moment will make me more sympathetic when they complain about the long work. Maybe they will get lucky early, I think. But I doubt it. Take the story of Ray Preston who found the perfect spot for his independent bookstore in New York. A month after he opened, a major civic project started that diverted foot traffic away from his shop. Ray tried lots of different things to save his shop. He sold his apartment and moved into the stock room to invest in it. But he reached the point when he thought he would go bust in three weeks’ time. I might as well have some fun, h...