I’m currently reading Bounce, the book by Matthew Syed that debunks the “Talent Myth”. It’s a well-written exposition of how the individuals we think of as being child prodigies or otherwise abnormally gifted, often had circumstances that were highly conducive to their later success.
He writes convincingly of the 10,000 hour “rule” for developing expertise. This states that in order to develop world class expertise in a particular field, one has to apply focussed practice for around 10,000 hours in order to achieve it. In the case of many of the highly recognisable names, they had accumulated that level of practice by their late teens or early twenties.
So what do we do if we want to become expert-level (not necessarily world-class) at something later in life? How do we accumulate the expertise when we are typically much more time-poor?
Continue reading “Practice, obsession and the catch-up game”
There have been warnings for many years about the potential for disaster with Artificial Intelligence implementations. Many luminaries, from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, have warned about the implications if we unwittingly create a robotic overlord who deems that we are irrelevant at best and destructive at worst, and decides the world will be better off without us.
I don’t know how many times this has come up in conversations with staff members and mentees over the years, but it’s been quite a few. “I’m too busy to take a course..”; “My manager won’t let me study.”; “I would have to do the study in my personal time..”; “The tools are too difficult to use.”. I don’t have time to learn.
On the day of my daughter’s 15th birthday I stood in the cold in the local churchyard with her, and well more than a hundred others, and waited for the body of her best friend’s father to arrive.
I 
(An edited version of this piece appears in “Salmon of the River Lee”, a recently published ode to the river by Dan O’ Donovan. It’s a lovely book, with countless hours of research between the covers, and is available online
If you’ve managed teams or organisations for a while, you know there’s invariably one. The team member who gets categorised as “high-maintenance” or sometimes even “highly strung”. They are valuable members of the team, often solid engineers, technologists or other specialists, but they consume a disproportionate amount of your time as a manager.