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I just finished reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell titled Outliers. It is a book about some extremely successful people and how they came to succeed.  In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell  looked at things about these successful people such as their family, birthplace, and even their birthdate.  What I want to write about, and it is just one part of the book, is about the 10,000 hour rule.

I’m only going to cover two of the examples that he wrote about, after all this is not meant to be a book report. In the first example I’m going to use, Gladwell states that achievement is talent plus preparation. He tells of a study done at Berlin’s Elite Academy of Music. They divided the school’s top violinists into 3 groups. The first were the stars, the students most likely to become world class soloists. In the second were those judged to be merely “good”. The third students were the ones who were unlikely to play professionally and who intended to become music teachers in the public school systems. The researchers found that all of the students started playing at the same age, around 5 years old, and all practiced roughly the same amount, about 2 to 3 hours per week. But when the students were around the age of 8 is when the real differences started showing. The students who would turn out to be the best began to practice more than everyone else; six hours a week by age 9, 8 hours a week by the age of 12, 16 hours by 14, up and up until by the age of 20 they were practicing their instruments with the intent to get better- well over 30 hours per week. The elite players had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers totaled just over four thousand hours.

The researchers did this study on other musicians and came up with the same results. The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. And what’s more, the people don’t just work much harder than everyone else, but rather, much, much harder. The researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise, ten thousand hours.

One other example that Malcolm uses and which I wanted to add, because I have been a fan of theirs for years, is The Beatles. What was interesting about the Beatles is how long they were together before they came to the United States. Lennon and McCartney started playing together in 1957, seven years before coming to America. If you looked into their history you would find that in 1960 they were a struggling high school rock and roll band. During this time they were invited to play in Hamburg Germany. Hamburg in those days did not have rock and roll music clubs. They had strip clubs. The idea was for these clubs to have non-stop shows hour after hour, with a lot of people straggling in and out. And the band would play all the time to catch the passing traffic. They were playing 8 hours a day, seven days a week! The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and 1962. All told they performed 270 nights in just a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers! They were no good on stage when they got there and they were very good when they got back. They weren’t disciplined on stage before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.

What I got out of this story is that with some talent you can be extremely successful in whatever endeavor you choose, as long as you are willing to put in long hours of practice in order to achieve it.

People start training in the martial arts for many reasons. Some train because they saw a cool martial arts movie and they wanted to be able to do all those neat moves they saw the actors doing. Others may have seen a karate demonstration and thought that might be a nice activity to try, or maybe their friend or neighbor invited them to a class. Some are looking for a good way to learn self-defense, others for a way to lose weight and get into shape.

One of the families that train at our dojo (father, mother and two daughters) started with us close to three years ago. The father and daughters had some previous training; I don’t recall that the mother had any. Mom was a little on the heavy side and out of shape when she started, but much to her delight she has been able to lose 40 pounds! I don’t think that this was her main goal when she began, but it is a definite plus!

I think the family thought it would be a good family activity and they found all the benefits that one gets through training in the arts. They learned good self-defense techniques which enhances one’s self-confidence and self-esteem. They were able to overcome fears. In the mother’s case she was able to lose the weight and to get in shape. They started out as something to do as a family and now several members of the family is on the verge of testing for black belt. Now, that is quite an accomplishment!

One of the first students that enrolled in my dojo was a young boy named Ricky. Ricky came from a troubled home where there was a lot of strife. He came to us as a shy, timid individual. He was so shy that he wouldn’t look you in the eye when you spoke to him, and his eyes were always downcast. When you asked him a question you had to lean close to him to hear his answer because he spoke so softly.

Part of our training involves point-sparring, and when it came to that he was very bashful. I don’t want to say that he was afraid, but he was reluctant to engage in the matches. As time when on, with a lot of encouragement, his confidence grew. I can still remember the first match that he won and how happy he was with himself. He went on to become  pretty good at karate point-sparring, but where he excelled was with ju-jitsu techniques. I still talk about him to my classes even after all these years. I wish I could say that Ricky got his black belt with us, but as I mentioned, he came from a troubled home and he had to drop out shortly before his black belt test.

This young man will always stand out in my memory because of the transformation I saw in him. He reinforced my belief that martial arts can change people’s lives!

One of the questions that I am often asked by a prospective client is “why do you teach?” It certaintly isn’t about the money, because quite truthfully, there are a lot better ways to become wealthy. The simple answer is that I teach because I love it! I think that is very important, because if the teacher, in this case the sensei, doesn’t have a passion for what he is teaching then he won’t be a very good teacher; but there is so much more to it than that.

It is about the student who isn’t the best in sports and often feels clumsy. Watching that student win their first point-sparring match and seeing how proud they are, is my reward. It is about the shy introverted student gaining confidence in himself because he got his first belt promotion. It’s about the chubby little kid who, because of hard work, was able to shed some weight and now isn’t being teased about it any more. It is about the young lady who can handle herself in difficult situations, because she knows good self-defense techniques and knows what to do. It is about the older student who is stiff and rigid, becoming more flexible, or the student with balance issues overcoming them. It is about the pride that is shown in the parent’s eyes as their child wraps the black belt around their waists for the first time. That is why I teach!

I never wrote a blog before and to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I ever read one! I guess I’m a little old fashioned and having a hard time keeping up with things like Facebook or MySpace. I wonder what the attraction is to those things. Maybe I’ll ask my sons because all three of them have one. A blog will be a good way for you to get to know me better, and a good way for me to express how I feel about things that are important to me.

Watch out 21st century! Here I come! I even went ahead and got a facebook page!