10,000 hours…that’s a lot. Well in reality, it is. In The Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcom Gladwell, 10,000 hours of practice is required to truly master a subject. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Sounds easy right? Well that practice takes work–hard work. We often see it as boring or unnecessary–studying, homework… effort—We tend to delay it at all costs. Whether it’s writing an english essay the night before it’s due, writing notes right before a notebook check…chat gpt. And that doesn’t mean you should be jumping for joy as you write a 5 page research paper for the science fair. We can’t just embrace hard work. Because hard work is hard. Instead, let’s avoid it. Not in the sense of making excuses or finding alternate ways to do something. But let’s change the word and meaning itself. 

You know that feeling when you get home from school and really want to call your friends or just do nothing? But then you realize you have math homework. And AFTER checking schoology you see the 10 missing assignments you have? Yeah. I’m sure most of us have been there. Nobody WANTS to do hard work, but we HAVE to. But why does “have to'' have to be so negative? 

So back to the “10,000 hours”… I actually haven't read the book. Because those 299 pages seemed like way too much hard work. But as I was writing this I realized how much harder it was to write, not actually having read it. The 10,000 hour rule doesn’t just require hard work. It requires passion and genuine interest. I’ve been doing ballet and singing since I was 4 because I enjoy it. But how can we relate this type of enjoyable work to work we don’t want to do? I believe that people do things because they either have to, want to, or it’s just a natural habit. But hard work will never turn itself into a habit, and neither will we ever want to do it. So it just circles back to the “have to.” We can never change the fact that we have to do things. But what if we looked at the bigger picture? We often think “I don’t want to do this because I don’t like it.” But WHY don’t we like it? Instead of thinking “other people are MAKING me do this or that,” we should ask ourselves  “why should I WANT to do this?” Science homework may not be your PASSION, but look for something about it that you enjoy. Open yourself up. Accept that things can be hard but find something enjoyable in everything you do. Our obligations shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. WE can decide how WE view them and that weight of obligation can turn into an opportunity to discover a new interest.

 Let's see things not as what we THINK they are but as what they COULD be. Hard work is only unpleasant or meaningless if we see it as something we are forced to do. So let’s make it enjoyable. Let’s make it meaningful so that we want to do it… and eventually we’ll realize that that hard work isn’t so hard after all.