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Personal Development

The Thousander Club in 2007

Scott Hsu-Storaker founded The Thousander Club about a year ago, and he recently posted a summary of his year in the article Thousander Club Take 2.

For those of you who have no idea what the club is, the idea is to become an expert at something. How do you become an expert at something? Practice. A lot of it.

Let’s recall what was said about how much time is required to become an expert. 10,000 hours over the course of 10 years might make you a master, and that seems like a lot of time to put in. It is, and you’ll note that the experts at chess or dance or baseball or writing invest that time anyway. Of course, if you break it down, it can seem more manageable:

  • 1,000 hours is doable within a year if you work full time, and you can be an experienced expert.
  • 100 hours can be done on the side, and you can still be somewhat of an expert.
  • 10 hours could be a dedicated weekend or spread over a few of them, and you’ll definitely learn enough to be dangerous.
  • Even dedicating an hour to a task will give you practice with the basics.

Can you do 1,000 hours in the coming year? That translates into almost 3 hours per day if you include weekends, or about 20 hours per week. You can easily accomplish it if your full-time job involves becoming an expert at a certain skill, but even a dedicated, part-time effort can get you there.

You don’t even necessarily need to dedicate hours. Scott had a goal of creating 1,000 3D models. I had a goal last year to create 1,000 game ideas. Maybe you’ll try to create 1,000 doodles, or 1,000 songs, or 1,000 pages for a novel.

The main idea is that by practicing a lot, you can’t help but become an expert. So will you join the Thousander Club and gain expertise in your chosen skill?

Like Scott, I didn’t hit my Thousander Club goals for the year, but I am going to continue towards my goal of 1,000 game development hours. I will keep track of my hours for this year separately from last year’s hours, but I will total them to count towards my goal. After all, the main point is to do many hours. Doing them sooner rather than later is ideal, but doing them at all is better than not.

10 replies on “The Thousander Club in 2007”

thank you!
i’ll try to do the same and keep track of the hours spent in developement and in game design.
it sounds good.

Welcome to the club, miche! If you would like, follow the link to Scott’s blog and officially sign up so that every week we can see each other’s progress. It’s good motivation and fun.

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