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Deliberate Practice

Turn Off the TV

tv_iconNumbers to consider:

First, there are 168 hours in a week.

Then there is the amount of television that the average American watches per week.

According to the South Dakota Department of Health:

  • 4 hours per day for young children.
  • Slightly less for older children.
  • 29 hours per week for an adult male.
  • 34 hours per week for an adult female.

So let’s say you sleep eight hours a day, and you watch about four hours of television a day. That certainly doesn’t leave much time left over for excellence.

Every day the evidence mounts that you can achieve mastery of a skill through 10,000 hours of strong practice.

Have you ever found yourself singing or remembering a commercial jingle from long ago? This just shows your incredible brainpower – you can absorb and retain information for years. But it also underlines the choices that people make. If you watch television for hours every day, what you wind up with years later are lots of jingles in your head. But if you spend those hours in practice, what you wind up with is skill.

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