Life Accounting

As someone in his mid-to-late twenties, I am naturally interested in learning what separates the good from the great.  Two books I have recently enjoyed are Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Robert Greene’s Mastery.  Both of these books investigate the common characteristics of outliers/masters – people who have far surpassed the norm.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, most extremely successful people are extremely hardworking, with both authors highlighting 10,000 hours as the threshold for an individual to become an expert in their field.

After hearing this mythical 10,000 hour threshold quoted so frequently, I decided to estimate how I have invested my most precious commodity – time.  The below table summarizes my findings:

Macklemore's song "Ten Thousand Hours"

The table offers some interesting insights.  First, I smiled to see I spent nearly 10,000 hours studying at university.  I admit I was a rather industrious student who attended a particularly studious school, but I do think the message is clear: the college experience turns young adults into “masters/experts” of society.  Post-graduation, a college grad should be able to handle the demands of the average workplace.  Similarly, one can presume a PhD/medical/law student would surpass the 10,000 hour threshold studying his particular subject, turning him into a expert of his respective field.

Next, I was somewhat surprised to see that I have already worked nearly 15,000 hours. Hence I pondered – does that already make me a "master" of the financial markets?  The answer is not yet, and that is because while I have logged many hours working, I have only devoted a portion of that time to high-level projects such as trend analysis or algorithm development.  As a young analyst in the financial industry, one must earn his stripes and that can entail running a few repetitive/unchallenging tasks.  There are thus two takeaways: 1) make your career your passion as you will spend so much of your life at work 2) while on the job, focus on high-level, in-demand tasks.

Lastly, as an ardent sport fan, I found it insightful that I have played roughly seven-thousand hours of sports split between a number of sports (tennis, basketball, soccer, and football).  Seven-thousand hours is a considerable amount of time and explains why I am pretty athletic (I was the fifth fastest runner in the 2013 Singapore Bloomberg Square Mile which had more than 1,500 participants).  However, because I split my sport time between multiple sports, I never approached a level of mastery in a single discipline.  Here, the message is simple: if you want to be great, you must specialize.

This life accounting exercise took me only 30 minutes to complete and I found the process to be meaningful.  People invest countless hours managing their finances to insure wise spending.  As the saying goes, “Time is money,” and I recommend anyone who is wishful of making the most of their life to invest the half-hour to analyze where they are allocating their time.