The Power of Long Ten Thousand Hours
By Doug Gehman
December, 2021
In March 2020 a new book came out called “Before You Quit – Everyday Endurance, Moral Courage and the Quest for Purpose.” I am the author, but I can’t take credit for the idea. That was Moody Publishers. One of Moody’s acquisition editors approached me in 2018 about “publishing my next book.” I asked what they wanted me to write about, so we sat down for coffee. After an hour of small talk, Duane Sherman said, “You need to write a book about perseverance.”
I guess he thought my story had enough of that quality and quantity to fill a book. So, I began writing… again. This was my fourth book. Writing a book about any topic takes perseverance. Book writing is not for the faint of heart, or the sporadically inspired. It is born of inspiration. But it finds its wings in perseverance: patient navigation through the inevitable valleys of tedium, discouragement and difficulty.
In her book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” Angela Duckworth says that one of the biggest deterrents to success is unrealistic expectations along the timeline from dream to reality. “We want to believe,” Duckworth says, “that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don’t want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity.”
Some things – especially the worthwhile ones – take a lot of time and a lot of mundane, tedious activity. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Outliers,” says that ten thousand hours is the magic number of excellence. Ten thousand hours to become an expert in something!
• If you practice the piano for two hours per day, every day, it will take you over thirteen years to become a concert pianist.
• If you worked at computer programming for forty hours per week, every week, it will take you two hundred and fifty weeks to become a world-class computer programmer. That is nearly five years.
This same principle applies in doing the work of ministry. Whether you are a Bible teacher, an evangelist, a pastor, or a missionary, there are skills and knowledge that are fundamental to success but are only acquired over a long, difficult road.
I’ve been doing ministry for over forty years. I look back on those first years and remember how naively over-confident I was about my success trajectory. I was having fun! I was enjoying doing God’s work. I was seeing God use me! It was heady stuff for sure. But I soon hit a few walls. Things didn’t go as I expected. My goal aspirations weren’t happening as quickly as I had dreamed. There were setbacks. Attacks. Challenges. I soon learned how much I didn’t know, and how unrealistic I had been about my expectations.
In short, inspiration was not enough. It had to be tested in the crucible of a tedious, patient slog. Could it survive the valleys? Could I endure discouragement? Could I weather the storms? Did I have the discipline and the grit to press through?
Think about this. If God calls you to be a missionary – to go to another culture and language – and settle into that new place. To make friends. To bond with an unfamiliar culture. To really understand people who are very different than you, and for them to understand you, how long will that take?
The best way to answer that question is to think about it in the inverse. A person of a different culture moves into your neighborhood. Let’s say it is an Albanian family. They live right next door, but they don’t speak English. They don’t eat American food. They hang odd art on the walls of their home, and plant different flowers and plants in their front yard. They have awkward mannerisms, and don’t even know how to say “HI!” or shake hands properly. How long will it take for you to figure them out? To trust them? To know with certainty whether they are friendly or meanspirited, trustworthy or deceitful? Are they normal or crazy? Realistically, how long before you could be close friends? Do you even want to make the effort?
Be honest. What do you expect from them? What must they change to “fit in” to your life and make you comfortable enough to relax when you are with them?
• I assume you expect they will learn to speak English fluently.
• Even better, they should understand local slang.
• They should be able to tell or hear an American joke, and “get it.”
• They should enjoy American football and baseball.
• What if they wanted to share their religious beliefs with you? How long before you would have any interest in having THAT conversation?
We do a great injustice to people when we are not willing to make the same investment of time and effort into fitting into THEIR CULTURE and LIFE. Gaining the skills to have meaningful conversations with them, so they are no longer objects – even objects of our kindness – but rather have become close friends.
Could it be true? Do I really need to invest ten thousand hours of work to make a real cross-cultural friend?
Jesus moved to our town. He invested way more than ten thousand hours. He spent thirty years in Nazareth before starting his work. Then, for three years he had unbelievable success. Wow!
If we hope to change the world, we too must be willing to move into the neighborhood, settle into a life there, and invest everything into our new home and life and people.
