Malcolm Gladwell might cook, possibly he is a stinky cheese lovin’ gourmand but that isn’t why he is the referenced in this post. It is because he writes readable, knowledgeable and succinct books. In The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers, Gladwell publishes books like you might find in the New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. Chapters of 5,000 – 8,000 words - both self-contained and part of a larger thesis - A synthesis of ideas, explanations and opinions offered to answer a single question all laid out in a rapid fire narrative. In Outliers, Gladwell takes a look at why successful people have become successful. This is a popular work that so hyper-readable the message doesn’t need to be distilled further, but the short(er) answer of success is opportunity, advantage and drive.
One part of being an outlier, a success in your vocational field, is what Gladwell descries as the 10,000 Hour Rule - people who practice a task for 10,000 hours will possess a mastery of that discipline. In High School, Bill Gates had the opportunity to program a computer at the dawn of the digital age, the advantage or having parents to afford access to an elite high school with a computer and the drive young Mr. Gates showed in putting the time in working on programming.
After reading that chapter of the 10,000 hour rule, I had to ask myself, what are the things that I have put the time into and would consider that I have mastered: Being funny – possibly, depending on who you asked and what your definition of funny is. Time in the retail/restaurant/service industry? That is a double-triple mastery. Hosting/preparing for events/parties both in catering professionally and inviting people over for dinner? Pretty close but I am not sure I could be certified on that – but I have put the time in for both cooking and baking.
10,000 hours is about 5 years of full time work. About half-way through my apprenticeship in the kitchen, I moved from large scale catering to a tiny café. By running a 180 sq ft. kitchen, I came to a deeper knowledge of what food was about and how to use ingredients. But it wasn’t just the hours that I logged in the kitchen; I lived and breathed food: read about it, talked about food with friends, co-workers and vendors. I made food at home, I experimented with techniques and ingredients. Opposed to catering days, a café that offered soup, sandwiches, salads and desserts gave me a chance to cook something more than chicken breasts and green beans. I went home at night and worried about how to use two cases of Roma tomatoes that were getting a little too ripe. I thought about how to make lentil soup, vegetarian (for the clientele and for profitability), taste good. I doubt too many people my age worried about what to do with orzo once a week, which olive oil could hold up best in a Caesar dressing or where to get the good mustard. The constant drive to be creative with very austere and quotidian ingredients led to a mastery of cooking in a way that I would have never been afforded working in a more traditional and financially stable restaurant.
I don’t think I have 10,000 hours at restaurant workstations. If I put checked pants on and started today, I’d make a bad line cook. It would take some time to get in the rhythm of cooking to order, finishing my part of the entrée within seconds of someone 25 feet away finishing theirs, working on 8 separate orders from 3 different tables simultaneously, those skills I have not mastered. Fortunately, my aspiration isn’t to be a line cook. What about something more ascertainable like being a good boyfriend – that is going to take some work too. Or more likely, something I can do by myself, something I have ambitions of doing successfully? Something like writing. Including the time I have spent in class, workshop, working on a manuscript to a discarded (and rightfully so) cookbook, the nominal amount of professional work I have done and the time I have spent on Saucyman? I am about half way to mastering my new craft. This realization is made all the more difficult by the fact most of this time hasn’t been spent writing well, just writing. I have a long way to go for my 10,000 hours of producing grammatically correct, concise and coherent work.
Even if I don’t produce readable, knowledgeable and succinct passages every time I write a draft or hit the publish button, I have some comfort when I think about how far I am from a Gladwell-certified defined level of mastery…More than clocking 10,000 hours while learning how to cook, I mastered my craft in a hyper focused 30 month period. By the end I knew how to use ingredients, develop complex flavors, observe how ingredients react and even with preferences being personal, know, really know what people enjoy to eat. I just need to practice explaining it better.
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