2024-09-15
I remember reading about 10,000 hours years ago. Without spending any time on a search engine right now, I believe it was an indicator (roughly) of the amount of time one had to dedicate to a discipline in order to be an expert or master in it. Then I think years later I may have read a sort of debunking that it mattered less the exact number of hours but how you spent that time.
In any case, it came to mind and I was riffing on it recently when another professor called me a senior faculty member and it hit me that now I am. It doesn't mean that I'm the best, or that I can't still learn a ton and improve. They said it in the context of explaining that they were thankful for me mentoring them, and I realized how time flies, that others had been mentoring me what seemed so recently but was years and years ago. Especially as I'm now tenured and have received larger grants, I must be doing something right. Right?
But I do still feel like an amateur at times and that I have much to learn. In high school, my friend's grandfather who played for a famous orchestra came to visit our band and orchestra. He was a cellist, and in his 70s or 80s, and he said he was still constantly learning new things. I also think of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, where Jiro, the cantankerous master was still to this day learning new techniques to refine his sushi. Think of the moment where says he realized that hand churning the rice for an extra 30 minutes made the flavor better, so he needed to start doing that every day. And that was decades into his time as a sushi master. In some ways, that is admirable, but also, that's a lot of work!
I played a concert today and there was a packed (small) venue. I noticed little things I could have done better, but felt generally pretty good about it. It was a powerful performance and I had lots of people come talk to me after the show, asking questions and talking about different moments. It was one of the first times I felt like I was getting anywhere close to the territory of my favorites, like synth wizard Caterina Barbieri, or ambient piano virtuoso Nils Frahm or aggro fuzzmaster Allessandro Cortini. This was the territory I wanted to be in, and I felt great. I have at least 10,000 hours in music. I've been playing instruments since fourth grade, and electronic instruments and composition since studying music in college 25 years ago, and have now been playing my modular synth for 7 years I think. So yeah, thousands of hours helps!
I also have been biking my whole life. Though it feels natural and intuitive, I am a go-to information source (and cycling companion) to many friends. This week my housemates received their ebike Paddywagon, that can carry lots of weight, 2 kids, many panniers on the back. And even though I've never owned an e-bike or had disc brakes (or a de-flopilator for that matter - only those with this particular bike will know what I mean), I built their bike up for them using the knowledge I've gained from working on my own bikes all these years. And it's very satisfying to do so, and I felt great afterwards when we took it on our inaugural test ride, with two kids on the back, a rack on the front, and a working battery and brakes.
It's important to be an amateur too. Recently I began dying and screenprinting shirts with friends. My style is an allover exploded aesthetic, and I like it, but I'd like to try doing more of this, and maybe even sew some of my own shirts.
In areas where I've invested so much time, I love particularly hobbies, crafts or disciplines where I can always learn new things and apply them. I think this is what attracts me to programming as well. It's why I'm diving into little experiments all the time, and picking areas I don't know a lot about and then investing a ton of time in them: frameworks (Love2d), projects (compiling packages for Void Linux), or languages (Forth, Lua) to delve into occasionally. There's joy in the learning.
There's fun to be had in amateurism and in "expertise," and sometimes you can be doing both at once.
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