By Tomo Taka

10,000 hours

It takes 10,000 hours to become great at something. That’s according to writer Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers, which is all about how some successful boys and girls are able to reach the gold standard.

At SCA, we’re all aiming for greatness. Marc constantly reminds us that good isn’t good enough. And as it stands, at the end of our third week at SCA, we’ve honed our creativity and practised our craft for just over 100 hours. If we go by the 10,000-hour theory, we’re only 1% along the way.

Of course we won’t ever reach the 10,000 hour mark while at SCA. There are only 8,760 hours in a year and we spend almost a third of that asleep.

Maybe in several years’ time some of us will achieve Lionel Messi levels of greatness.

But that means little at the end of the day. What really matters, as Ben the Buddhist told us, is focusing on the here and now.

Creativity isn’t necessarily a natural gift. And our brain is a muscle that needs exercise. So taking the time everyday to employ some of the creative techniques we’ve learned will help towards the 10,000 hours and ultimately make us better at what we do.

Exploring the world and its collection of art, music, cinema and literature will inspire us to create work with the same values of elegance and gravitas.

Using our SELF journals will put us in the right frame of mind to tackle the day.

These are some of the new habits we’ve formed over the last three works. A few of us are even looking to break our worst habit by giving up smoking.

SCA really is changing our lives. Forget the 10,000 hours. I’ll take each hour at a time.