I'm about half way through it, and it's a fascinating read.
In the book, Gladwell studies the traits, characteristics and commonalities of the most successful people in a variety of fields, as well as cultural and social issues that impact the professional development of those in different fields of work.
One chapter is called "The 10,000 Hour Rule", and the premise of the chapter is this...
It takes about 10,000 hours of sustained, committed engagement with a subject to become a world-class expert. This applies whether you are talking about athletics, concert pianists, fiction writers, composers, plumbers, or even master criminals. It's a minimum of five years of full-time engagement, unbroken, coupled with an unyielding commitment to apply new principles, learn from mistakes and persevere when others quit.
The book discusses how, when other bands were playing gigs one or two nights a week, the Beatles spent their formative years playing eight hours a night, seven days a week in Hamburg, Germany before they burst on to the global scene. It talks about Bill Gates, who became infatuated with computers at the dawn of the mainframe era and often spent 24 hours a day working on code as a student at Lakeside High School in Seattle. And Mozart had been playing the piano 20 years before he began to write his greatest concertos.
The point of this posting is that, in real estate, I see this principle play out every day. It takes years to master many of the complexities of this business, as well as persistence and a commitment to finding out the answer every time you run across a question or issue you have not seen before. Over time, we become a collection of our experiences... but only if we are committed to learning from them and applying the knowledge we acquire going forward.
Real estate brokers are not commodities, any more than second basemen, defense attorneys or practicing physicians. We are all different, with different skillsets, experiences and levels of commitment.
