I thought I’d be good at something by now
Are you familiar with the concept of 10,000 hours? I learned about it via Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers; it states that it takes about 10,000 hours (5 to 10 years) to become good at something and I have adopted it as my expectation. I expected that at this point in my professional life I would be hitting my stride in an area of expertise where I could feel confident and assured in what I was doing. Instead, I am re-skilling in data science and will be embarking on a new chapter of my career, in a new industry. And there are days when that conflicts with where I thought I’d be, and it’s hard not to be hard on oneself in those moments.
I share with you that I have these feelings (this insecurity) so that it is normalized. It is a problem of the construct we have built around ourselves, and I hope reading this can help you to become aware of that.
A new construct
The [right] mindset empowers you to consistently make the right choices that fit your unique interests, abilities, and circumstances and will guide you to a life of passion, purpose, and achievement.
Harness your individuality in the pursuit of fulfillment to achieve excellence.
- Dark Horse, Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas
Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment puts it far better than I can, but allow me to deconstruct the fallacy around the construct that we were all put on the earth to do “some thing”. This is a system that restricts us and sets us up for failure.
We have been conditioned to follow the straight-line path, assess and compare ourselves to the standardized tests and metrics for the average person who in fact does not truly exist. We derive our value from doing the thing we are supposed to do and may continue pushing in a pursuit that does not fulfill us and consequently look for external sources of happiness.
What if instead, we stopped for a moment to ask ourselves what happiness looks like to us, what success looks like to us, and what we would do if we weren’t afraid?
For me, that was to embrace the opportunity to re-skill (even if it was well into my career) in the pursuit of fulfillment. Somedays, it’s hard to keep that front of mind and that’s okay; it took a lot of years to build the straight line construct, it might take some time to embrace a new path. Dark Horse details how it is actually the process of our experience (learning, job, hobbies, etc.) that leads to fulfillment and not the end result (“happiness is not a destination”). So do the thing you want to do; there’s a great chance you’ll be good at it… or at the very least you’ll be fulfilled.
Maybe if you know that I feel this way sometimes too, you can pivot unafraid and improve upon yourself without feeling insecure about it.
Pivoting doesn’t mean you’re still not good at something.
It means you’re unstoppable.
This post is for anyone starting over. Anyone trying to pivot. Maybe especially the mom who is coming back from child-raising. To the people who have moved across the world. To anyone who didn’t have any other choice. Maybe especially to the thousands of people in Alberta who are trying to figure out what’s next.
