10,000 Hours in Washington
We love expertise. It entertains us. It gives us hope. We trust it. We love expertise so much, we even quantified it: 10,000 hours of practice. That’s what it takes to become an expert. Strangely enough, there’s an important part of life where we don’t trust the experts to make decisions for us. But that might be changing in the State of Washington…
Practice Becomes Popular
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis are a rapper-and-DJ hip-hop duo from Seattle, Washington. In 2012, they released their first ever studio album, The Heist.
The first track of the album, titled “Ten Thousand Hours,” tells the story of how Macklemore has put in thousands of hours of practice to hone his craft and become a great MC. It’s easy to take Macklemore at his word: the album earned the duo four Grammy Awards, including one for Best Rap Album.
If you listen to “Ten Thousand Hours,” you’ll notice that the song briefly mentions the Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell. This might seem strange. But when the album came out, people quickly made the connection to Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success.
Published just four years before the rap album, Gladwell’s book explores what makes people successful. Based on an academic study, Gladwell argues that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill, whether that’s playing the violin or becoming a software engineer.
The book quickly popularized the idea that there was no mystery to mastery: consistent practice was the key. There was, of course, nothing new about the idea of practice itself. But putting a specific number on it? That was a game-changer. The book was an immediate bestseller, and Macklemore’s song was proof that Gladwell’s work had a far-reaching cultural impact.
“Ten thousand hours felt like ten thousand hands.
Ten thousand hands, they carry me.”
Fun, Hope, Trust
There are many reasons why the 10,000-hour rule resonates with us so deeply, whether or not it takes exactly 10,000 hours to become an expert.
If you like rap, then you know that listening to someone who’s mastered the art of rhyme is truly entertaining. And this is true of anything from listening to rap through watching football to being dazzled by card tricks. Expertise is mesmerizing. It’s inspiring. It’s fun.
Another reason why we love the 10,000-hour rule is that it gives us hope.
Every culture has its myth, and the most enduring myth in the United States is that hard work gets you ahead. It’s the myth of the self-made man. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Pursue happiness. Achieve the American Dream.
The idea that hard work gets you ahead feels especially powerful when you consider the big picture: luxury for the few, struggle for the rest. The 10,000-hour rule promises to level the playing field.
This is why sports fans, to this day, are obsessed with Kobe Bryant’s famously self-punishing work ethic. The message is clear: you could be the next Black Mamba. Just work your tail off. And the fact that very few people ever reach Kobe’s level of expertise doesn’t take away from the power of the story.
But there’s one more reason why honing your craft is such a popular idea. We trust experience.
You’d probably prefer to see a doctor who has thousands of hours of practice under their belt. And you’d prefer to fly on an airplane that’s piloted by someone who’s safely flown thousands of hours before. Right?
When someone has a lot of experience, we’re happy to trust them to make decisions for us. ‘Leave it to the pros.’
But as much as we trust experienced professionals, there’s an important area in life where we don’t always lean on the experts – even though we should. And it happens to be an area where decisions are made for all of us: government.
10,000 Hours of Inequity
If you practice the piano 8 hours a week, you’ll reach 10,000 hours of experience in about 24 years. If you play the piano 8 hours a day, you’ll get there in just three and a half years!
More is obviously faster.
But what if you experience living in poverty? Or if you experience homelessness? What if you’re born a BIPOC person? You don’t get to press pause on your experiences. It’s 24/7. So, you rack up those 10,000 hours of experience very quickly: in just a little over a year.
It’s fair to say then that many people impacted by an unjust society can become experts at navigating it. An unhoused person will quickly learn where it’s safe to sleep at night and where it isn’t; where they’ll find public toilets and where they won’t; which shelters fill up quickly and which ones don’t; which public assistance programs are actually helpful, and which ones aren’t.
When you live and breathe an experience, such as living in poverty or being a Black person, you quickly learn the ins and outs of a system that tells you to ‘work hard to get ahead’ but makes it practically impossible for you to succeed.
To put it simply, people with lived experiences of inequity are experts not just at surviving, but they are experts at knowing how the system works – and how it doesn’t. They become experts in a system that’s stacked against them.
That’s why you might consider it strange that the people who try to pass laws with the best intention of eliminating poverty are usually people who often have zero hours of experience in it.
Strange as it may be, this isn’t all that surprising. In the US, college education has become a shorthand for expertise. We simply expect lawmakers to have college degrees. And we accept their college degrees as proof of their expertise. Look at the US Congress. 94% of Congress members had a bachelor’s degree in 2021. Only 56% did in 1945-47.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with going to college. But there are things you just can’t learn from books. The problem, says the philosopher Michael J Sandel, is that “Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue – an ability to deliberate about the common good.” However, he says, “these capacities aren’t developed very well in most universities today.”
What we need instead is genuine community engagement: for people with real experiences (“practical wisdom”) and a genuine stake in the wellbeing of everyone (“civic virtue“) to get a say in how our society works.
“Governing well requires practical wisdom and civic virtue – an ability to deliberate about the common good… [R]ecent historical experience suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment, which involves moral character as well as insight, and the ability to score well on standardized tests and win admission to elite universities.”
Experts in Washington
The idea that 10,000 hours of practice makes you an expert was all the rage about 10 years ago. Today, the idea that people with lived experiences should be invited to make policy decisions is finally gaining traction. And some of the most exciting developments come from the State of Washington, home of the hip-hop duo that wrote “Ten Thousand Hours.”
In the recently published Community Compensation Guidelines, Washington state officials argue that it’s important to invite people who have experienced or are experiencing poverty or homelessness to participate in making laws. But to ask these folk to “volunteer their time and expertise while state employees and representatives of advocacy organizations receive compensation … ultimately hinders full and open public participation.”
In plain language, Washington State wants people with lived experiences of inequity to be included in policy work. And they think people should be paid for their expertise.
We’re thrilled to see this happen! Partly because some of the work leading up to Washington’s compensation guidelines was funded through DASH’s Learning and Action in Policy and Partnerships (LAPP) program.
You can read more about the work on our partner organization’s website:
But we’re thrilled most of all because this compensation guideline is a very big deal. And it’s a big deal beacause it’s ‘upstream’.
Upstream Is Mainstream
Desmond Tutu was a bishop and a famous human rights activist. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his activism in ending apartheid in South Africa. There’s a very famous quote attributed to him that can help explain the importance of Washington’s work:
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Whether he really said those words or not is beside the point. The quote itself is very useful.
Let’s say you manage to practice 10,000 hours to master a skill. And let’s assume that you manage to turn that skill into a source of income to survive. Pay rent. Pay the bills. Buy food. Buy healthcare.
Even if you manage to do all that, expecting every single person to be the next Kobe or Macklemore is unrealistic. First of all, this approach lacks humanity. It condemns people to a lifetime of struggle if they are not able to practice 10,000 hours… or if they can’t master a skill in 10,000 hours… or if they can’t convert their hard-earned skill into a source of wealth.
But more importantly, this approach fails to look at the ‘upstream’ cause and ask why so many people are struggling to get by in the first place.
The moment you look ‘upstream’, you find a society with specific rules and structures in place. Those rules and structures make for an unjust world. They make a few people very rich by making everyone else very poor.
And the truth is that you can never 10,000-hours-of-practice your way out of those rules and structures. Because working on yourself will do very little to fix things when you are not the problem. It’s very much like the hope that if you put a single-use plastic cup in the correct recycling bin then it will somehow convince petrochemical companies to stop churning out 400 million tons of plastic every year for profit. It won’t. They’ll just keep at it.
But inviting people with tens of thousands of hours of lived experience to participate in changing the rules and structures that keep people poor? Inviting them to make better policies that would ensure that every person can live a happy and healthy life regardless of talent, expertise, or hard work?
Now that’s a big deal.