Expertise in just 10,000 hours
Anyone that’s read Malcolm Gladwell’s delightfully liberal Outliers will remember that it takes 10,000 hours to master a complex activity. He cites Bill Gates in computing and the Beatles in music as examples.
I was talking about this with Lisa recently, and we did a little math regarding her residency. Since she started, she’s been working 80 hours / week for 48 weeks a year. At that pace, she’d become an expert pediatrician in 2.6 years.
It’s no surprise, then, that her residency lasts 3 years, and that she’s two months away from wrapping up her general training, and prepping for her board certification exam.
I thought that I might be an expert in watching the Red Sox. It turns out, I’m close, but not quite there. If you assume each game lasts 3.5 hours, you need to watch every game for 17 seasons to rack up the requisite time. I’d say I watch nearly every pitch of closer to 50 games a year, so it’ll take me ~55 years to have mastered rooting for my home team :-)
