Success: 10,000 hours of cooking

Perhaps you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers?  He talks about people who are generally considered to be talented geniuses – the Beatles and Bill Gates are a couple of examples.  Gladwell’s premise is that  these people are not just geniuses but actually became masters due to the crazy number of hours spent practicing their craft.  Specifically, he estimates 10,000 hours as the rough amount of practice it takes for someone to truly master a complex skill. 
 

This is the sort of information that could make a person feel inadequate.  I haven’t even been employed for the last seven or so years, much less have I been closing in on mastery of some respectable and lucrative skill like writing legal briefs or tying tiny sutures in heart valves.

However, as I reflected on this, I realized that I must be approaching 10,000 hours of cooking.  True,  I am at a very safe distance from being a genius chef.  But I have been cooking one whole day a week, every week, for almost the last twenty years.  Missing a few days a year here and there, figuring a seven-hour day, I’ve probably got a solid 7,000 cooking hours under my belt.  And I have to say, I have noticed subtle but solid improvements lately.  I improvise a lot more, and a lot more successfully.  I have a better sense of what flavors go together well.  More often I can open up the fridge and throw something delicious together from unlikely and uninspiring ingredients.  I have more cooking mojo. 

No matter how many thousands of hours I cook, I will never be a celebrity chef, nor do I aspire to this.  I’m not spending my 10,000 hours practicing restaurant food.  That’s not the point.  I cook for me, my family and sometimes my friends.  Every hour I cook I’m aiming for an elusive combination of food that is healthy, inexpensive, varied, local-ish and organic-ish, and made from ingredients available in my fridge and pantry, among other considerations.  Mostly, it has to be delicious to four different people with varying tastes, two of whom aren’t tall enough to get a drinking glass out of the cupboard.

Perhaps in a few years I’ll have developed enough talent to subscribe to a CSA farm box.  Maybe be then I will welcome the challenge of weekly winter squash for four months.

Do you have 10,000 hours of practice with anything?