10,000 Hours

I have yet to read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success, but I was fascinated by a recent interview where the author discussed something called the 10,000 Hour Rule, to which he devotes a chapter. He maintains this rule of thumb--to become expert at anything, from arts, to professions to athletics, it requires about 10,000 hours of practice. That would be around 20 hours a week for ten years.

This is bad news for generalists and dilettantes. There aren't that many 10,000 hour chunks available in life. After one has become expert in the disparate skills of sleeping, eating, watching television and driving automobiles from place to place, the windows are few. It has probably taken me all of my 55 years to rack up 10,000 hours of writing--I may still be a little short. But by the rule, you can expect a dramatic improvement in these postings anytime now.

On the other hand, I am close to having my 10,000 hours in on video games that haven't been available for 20 years. They told me then that I was wasting my time. Ya think? And I am close to having 10,000 hours in on playing the guitar, but I'm still kind of lame at it. So one must always account for underlying talent. I definitely have 10,000 hours in on reading science fiction novels, but I search the classifieds in vain for openings that require an expertise in fictional xenosociology. I'll keep practicing; but before turning my hand to something entirely new, I'll keep the rule in mind--tick, tick, tick.

And checking it twice

I'm not an avid mass forwarder of email. I receive and send too much in my day job to enjoy doing more than the necessary off duty. But as a public library trustee I was interested to read a forwarded list of titles that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was supposed to have recommended for removal from the town library. The list purported to originate from the minutes of the library board. I was on the verge of forwarding it to my library director and fellow trustees, when I thought to check into its veracity. Good thing--it was bogus.

There are claims in the press that Palin had a conversation about policy regarding library books she considered inappropriate with the library director, and a claim that she subsequently tried to have the director removed, but no list has ever been unearthed, nor evidence that any particular titles were ever proposed. It is now unlikely that there ever will be a credible list, or that the other claims will ever be substantiated or disproven.

Because the entire conversation has now been overtaken by the question of who floated the bogus list and why. And why so many people were ready to accept it at face value, and whether it could be additional evidence for this or that conspiracy theory. Bad info not only drives out good, it poisons the well of further discussion and investigation. It reduces all claims to equal veracity and converts what could have been a dialog into twin streams of disconnected invective.

This is one of the great dangers of the new media landscape. We get too much of our news from sources of untraceable provenance, from "redmeat14@yahoo.com." If there is a bright side to this tawdry episode, it is that it highlights the continuing value of professional and accountable media sources--despite what you might be reading about them in mass emails.

Nosing around

The North Country is pretty easy on the eyes these days: lilacs, apple blossoms, trillium, new leaves, tender grass, lots of sun. We take the world in first through the eyes, so much so that the interrogative "See?" is synonymous with "Do you understand?" Nature may have shorted humans in other ways, but a big chunk of our big brain is dedicated to sight. If we were dogs, we'd be gaze hounds. But the brain is an onion--peel away the primate and find the mammal, peel away that and find the reptile, deep within the secret core of us. That part of the brain is only interested in the eyes if they show a fast-moving object, prompting us to hotfoot across the intersection, or shriek at the 3D horror movie dagger. The lambent pastels of spring are wasted on it.

The ancient brain "sees" instead through the nose, which wraps mysteriously around the limbic chemical pumps of our emotions, triggering cascades of long lost memory and association. Compare the impact of watching someone outside the window mow the lawn with the experience of walking out into the sharp-scented grassy air. It recalls to mind every warm day since you were a child. Last weekend, I had the happy occasion to be in the rare book room of the Strand Bookstore in New York City with my daughter Elena. She turned to me and said "It smells like your Dad." I took a deep breath to "see" what she meant and there it was: all the generations the old books in the stacks had steeped in pipe smoke in the libraries of bookish men, still seeping back out decades later into the environmentally-regulated air. His dimming face comes sharp in the mind's eye once more. I see him turning the pages even now. The smell of aftershave.

Harry escape

The longer I am exposed to the brutal bleeding edge of popular culture, the greater comfort I take in more antiquated and sedate pursuits. Like many parents with children of a certain age, I rediscovered the pleasures of reading aloud through the adventures of Harry Potter, wizard-in-training at Hogwart's School. The series has outlasted our daughter's residence at home, but the habit of picking up each new book and reading it aloud has stuck. In fact, we re-read the fifth book in preparation for seeing the movie released last week, and the sixth, to bring us back up to speed for the final book, due out with screaming hoopla on Saturday. We read aloud in the car, spelling each other at the wheel, and read aloud in the kitchen, trading the cutting board back and forth. We read aloud in the living room, when taking a break from the hundred channels of mind-numbing cable, and read aloud in bed--which can lead to odd dreams and the need to go back over some pages.

One of the beauties of the process is that it seems tailor-made for the long-married. After thirty-odd years, one tends to use up all possible conversational gambits. You can always talk about the day's news, but after a while, yelling at the radio and muttering obscenities to the inbox--though gratifying when shared with a loved one--is incompatible with sound cardiac health. A mutual reading session, on the other hand, shares all the features of companionable conversation, with none of the stress of figuring out what to talk about--a real blessing after a long day in the frazzle of cyberspace. When we have worked our way through to the stunning conclusion--some time next week, probably--it will be soon enough to engage one another on the pressing issues of a serious relationship. Such as what to read next.