Magazines
By MURORI KIUNGA
In Summary
- Not a single person produced incredible work without putting in a decade of practice first.
Last weekend, I did something I had never done
before. For the first time in my career I played the role of a marriage
counsellor.
A business friend called and told me that he had a serious domestic issue which threatened to tear apart his marriage.
It involved money and business. At first I was
relieved that it had nothing to do with infidelity and physical abuse.
But then I remembered reading somewhere that statistics show that about
80 per cent of all divorces are caused by issues related to money.
This implies that all problems that pastors and
counsellors say could spell doom to marriages such as infidelity,
alcohol abuse and so on are responsible for only 20 per cent of
break-ups.
This means that spouses are more at home handling
the ‘for better, for worse, in sickness and in health’ part of the vow
than handling for ‘richer, for poor’ part of it.
In brief, my friend has been in business for the
last six years, but according to his wife, the business does not seem to
be heading anywhere near paradise as she was promised when they began
it. The wife who has a good and stable job feels that she has
sacrificed enough for the family and business, and she was not ready to
put a cent more, or be part of it.
She was bitter for supporting the business and
shouldering almost all family responsibilities with her salary. She went
short of blaming her husband for being a non-performer. She felt they
could be better of economically without the business.
The man on the other side maintained that the
business is on course and requires a little bit of time and funding to
cross the valley and reach Canaan, something that annoyed the wife more.
I drew my lessons from the Outliers: The Story of
Success by Malcolm Gladwell. In this book Gladwell examines the factors
that contribute to high levels of success in all areas of life. Using
numerous examples of highly successful people like Bill Gates, he comes
with what he calls a 10,000-hour rule.
The 10,000-hour rule simply states that one needs
at least 10,000 hours to gain mastery in any field. This resonates very
well with another study conducted by John Hayes, a cognitive psychology
professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Professor Hayes investigated the role of effort,
practice, and knowledge in top performers. He based his study on
thousands of musical pieces produced between the years of 1685 to 1900,
with core objective of establishing how long after one becomes
interested in music it takes to become world class.
He concentrated on 500 pieces popular conceded to
be the masterpieces, frequently played to the world and studied 76
composers who created them.
Quite remarkably, he established that almost all
the masterpieces were written after 10 years of the composer’s career.
Out of 500 there were only three exceptions, which were written in years
eight and nine.
The discovery that not a single person produced
incredible work without putting in a decade of practice first, not even
genius like Mozart, is quite remarkable breakthrough in the study of
personal development.
Prof Hayes called this period, 10 years of silence.
It is a tough period which is manifested by hard work, hardly any gain
and little recognition.
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