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I've been reading the book, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and in one chapter he talks about The Beatles, and a star computer programmer turned billionaire Bill Gates. Those people mastered one skill and got rich and famous for it, seemingly overnight.
Photo Credit: Amazon.comOnly, it wasn't overnight. They had been quietly putting in 10,000 hours of practice at their skill, and according to Gladwell, that is exactly what it takes to become a world class master of a skill.
Ten thousand hours.
That is an enormous amount of time that translates into 3 hours a day for ten years or 10 hours a day for three years. This got me thinking about myself learning my new skill of hearing, and that I had only just started. If I count all my waking hours since my CI activation day on June 1, I'm only about a thousand hours in or maybe even less.
Hearing people already have their 10,000 hours in for mastering the skill of hearing (and speech comprehension). They got it done by 4 years old, easy. Since I was born deaf, and the use of hearing aids did not add much if anything to the skill of hearing in the sense of understanding speech, my first hour was the hour I got my CI activated. For late deafened adults, they usually have some several thousand hours already put in for hearing, so they adjust faster to the CI and then they max their learning curve within a few months to a year. Me? I started at 0 hours.
What about reading lips? Now THAT is a skill that I had already put 10,000 hours into, not by choice, but by necessity. I was so good at lipreading that in college, some guy offered to PAY me to lipread a conversation between two girls at another table forty feet away because he had a crush on one of the girls and wanted to know what they were talking about. He handed me $20, and I tried to lipread the girls' conversation. I could only get half of what they said without getting the gist of their conversation, so I gave the $20 back.
I've also heard that the National Football League has hired lip-readers to figure out what plays the opposing team were planning to run, but the coaches wised up and started covering their lips while calling the plays. Lip-reading, however, is a very very HARD skill, even a master doesn't pick up everything because only 30% of English is physiologically lip-readable and the rest is context. And then there are the accents and ventriloquists...
Back to the new skill of hearing. If the 10,000 hour rule holds true, then it would take me at least three years to master it and understand almost everything people say in any setting, even in groups. I think in a year's time, my skill would be passable in many situations, but my learning curve would continue to go up.
I hope it'll take me less time, though :-)
