I think it’s rather scary how easily and frequently the word “expert” is thrown around. But perhaps what is even more unsettling is how easily the word is accepted by others. Write a book – you’re an expert. Create a product – you’re an expert.  Call yourself an expert – you’re an expert. There are even tactics, language tricks and “strategies” taught to help you make yourself sound like an expert so people believe you to be the expert when that’s not really the truth.

But, it’s kind of seductive right? Go from unknown to “expert” status with a simple turn of a phrase or tag line.

So when I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, I was thrilled when he devoted an entire chapter to the 10,000 Hour Rule. This is an idea I have heard many times throughout my life. I come from a very academically oriented, work hard, be productive type of family and just getting down to work and DOING whatever it is we were doing was valued greatly. The word expert was not taken lightly.

I have often struggled with the word expert because while I believe I am good at some things there are very few things I have given 10,000 hours of my time to.

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything….No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.” Daniel Levitin, Neurologist in an excerpt from Outliers.

If you have ever tried to calculate 10,000 hours you will likely be blown away by how much time that is. If you practiced something 8 hours a day EVERY day for 1 year you would only be at 2920 hours. If you worked a regular 9-5 job where you clocked approximately 2000 hours a year and ALL of that time was devoted to “the work” then it would still take you 5 years.  That’s amazing, right.

So naturally I went back and attempted to calculate how many hours I have in on the things that I love and that I would like to be considered an expert in and a funny thing happened. I only reached the 10,000 mark on ONE of them (not counting Lifestyle Design which I am way too far OVER the 10,000 hour mark to even track it.)

Yoga lands me at about 8,300 hours
Tennis lands me at about  5,600 hours
Running about  9,000 hours
Counseling, Coaching, Psychology, Human Behavior, Sociology about  13,500
Numerology about 2,700

I did not even include marketing because while I have gotten pretty darn good at it, I don’t attribute that to any marketing education or practice but rather all to my education and practice in psychology and counseling and human behavior. A true marketing expert would not consider me one!

Why does all of this matter? Well, what I keep noticing with some of my clients is a tendency to move away from their work, their practice, to get all of the “stuff” done in their business that they think they’re supposed to be doing.

I know that one of the things that happened to me when I started my own business was that I was very clear why I went into it, because I wanted to do MORE of my work, but it wasn’t as easy to keep the “practice” going as I thought. I wanted to work with more people, to deepen my practice by doing more and more of it every chance I could. But what happened was that soon I started wearing the business and marketing hat and my practice suffered. I cut back on the amount of hours I was devoting to my work, which made me feel more and more disconnected to my passion. Sure, if you want to make money you have to wear your business hat but not at the expense of your expertise. Because if you don’t have that, pretty soon you’re selling air and dressing it up with a big old “expert” sign just to bring more clients in the door. Not good.

I think this is why many true practitioners make not so great entrepreneurs.  They aren’t willing to give up the work, to bring in the biz. That’s okay. My mission is to find out how to do both.

So, if you’d like to learn more about this, join me and my biz partner Sandy Grason for our upcoming call “Are You an Imaginary Expert? 3 Simple Steps to Go from Hinky to Reality” on October 21, 2009 at 12pm Pacific. We’ll be talking about this and a whole lot more.

And, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic as well. So leave a comment or share your story.