10,000 Hours

Malcolm Gladwell is a downright sexy man. He may not look it but it’s down there lurking, it’s hanging out somewhere deep and undetectable. He’s sexy because he keeps putting books out that draw me in like a lush to a straight shot of whiskey. I can’t get enough of him.

If you’re unfamiliar with Malcolm maybe you remember the runaway best seller “The Tipping Point”, and then the next New York Times success known as “Blink”. I’m currently working on “Outliers”. You can usually find these books on the center displays in airport shops or anywhere that sells books or coffee. He’s that good.

He’s not a mystery writer and he doesn’t put out cheap romance novels that double as porn for women. He likes to write about the real world. His primary interest is in facts, things we rarely pay attention to or take into account but should be aware of nevertheless. He’s the thinking man’s author. Or woman’s. Or pornstar’s. (I gave pornstars their own category because some men and women think they’re better than us).

So here’s what Malcolm taught me today: it takes ten thousand hours to be an expert at anything. Ten thousand hours to be at the top of your game. This applied to Mozart. It applied to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and The Beatles and Michael Jordan. It applies to concert pianists.

Here’s what worries me: I’m not racking up my 10,000 hours in anything that will pay off by the time I’ve paid my dues. Yeah, it’s nice to be able to suck dick very well, but as a contract girl I’m not putting in hours with any type of efficiency. I do on average one movie per month, 2 scenes per movie, and only 1.5 of those scenes involve dick. Scenes take an hour. So I’m doing an hour and a half of professional dick sucking per month. 18 hours per year. I’m maybe 36 hours in. I have 9, 964 hours to go. By the time I’m an expert I’ll be dead.

And here’s another problem: I’m only getting better at making it look good on camera. Nothing about a scene is helping me make it feel better. It’s not like I’m stopping the scene every five minutes for feedback. A street hooker is going to be the best blowjob hands down. She goes for quantity. The faster she can make someone cum the more money she makes. But the more I think about it the more I think a dirty Vegas stripper would be the best blowjob. Here’s why: A street hooker is theoretically dealing with a client base who doesn’t cum all that often (because aren’t street hookers the last resort on a list of available options?) correct me if I’m wrong)). If they don’t come all that often they’re probably easier to get off. Plus, a street hooker doesn’t necessarily work constantly. She works only as often as she meets someone willing to pay her. Most likely not a straight 8 hour shift.

But a dirty vegas stripper… she’s doing an 8 hour shift if she’s good.  And she has to be very good because she has to get it done under the radar (but only go to an older one because the younger ones haven’t logged their hours yet). Plus she has a larger pool of potential clientele at her fingertips… and they aren’t going to her because she’s a last resort. They’re partying. Who knows what kind of game they have outside of the strip club.

So now that I’ve endorsed tricks in Vegas strip clubs from old dirty strippers based on simple logic let’s get back to how slowly I’m moving towards their level of expertise. I need something else to be an expert at. The only other thing I do regularly is try to look pretty for the camera but once again, by the time I’ve logged 10,000 hours I may be an expert at making the best of how I look but I won’t have the same raw material to work with. And the only other thing I do regularly (according to Mike not regularly enough) is blog. I don’t know how many hours I’ve logged blogging but if you do it a lot the book says it’s about 1,000 hours a year on average. I have 9.3 years to go.

The other thing I do really well is read. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I’m already an expert reader because I’ve definitely logged my 10,000 hours. You need to understand the extent of it–my first detention was for reading during math class. I used to read at recess. I also read during reading class but got in trouble for that too because I wouldn’t be reading the same book the rest of the class was reading because I’d already read it. I’ll read the back of a cereal box if it’s the only printed thing in the English language available.

So right now I can read and in 9.3 year’s time I can blog equally well. I must formulate a future career out of this.