10,000 Hours Later

A Photography Journey

Prologue: First Things First

This is probably the longest article I’ve ever written. I’m putting it out on July 4th. Maybe you’re by a lake, or a beach, somewhere. Maybe you’re in a lawn chair, by a pool with a drink. I’m hoping, if you’re seeing this today, that it finds you well, relaxed, with time and in the mood to read the long story of my photography journey.

When I first got very serious about doing photography, I engaged in the endeavor in a very methodical way — not so much purposefully, but out of a passion that had lain dormant for too long. The act of committing, after so many years of thinking about it, was like horses leaving a gate at a racetrack. I don’t think I worked at it much differently than most — but my energy for it was immense, my pace intense. For some set of reasons that we’ll get into, that energy never waned for me. Ten years later, give or take, I find myself arriving at an infamous, if not semi-outdated, number.

10,000 hours

I’ll get into the math of it in a second, but it’s important to note that 10,000 hours is no longer the claim it once was. We now know it as an out-of-context way that Malcolm Gladwell summarized the findings of Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool who discussed, in much more scientific detail, the notion of deliberate practice. But it’s still a valuable evaluation tool, as it’s simply a lot of invested time. And a measurement of time that coincides with a lot of other…