Experts and Flying Potatoes

Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most influential non-fiction writers of our generation. In his book Outliers, he claimed that it takes 10,000 hours to make someone an expert.

This is really overly simplified, and even Gladwell will probably agree you cannot boil a book down to a headline like “be an expert in anything in only 10,000 hours.” This 10,000 hours concept is just what most people came away with.

So does it take 10,000 hour to be an expert?

The answer lies somewhere between “sometimes” and “it depends”.

When he was in college, Russell Brunson became an expert in only about a week. He goes into this story in much more detail in his book Expert Secrets.

Russell went to Boise State on a Wrestling scholarship and got married young. Due to NCAA rules, Russell was not allowed to work, so his wife was the only breadwinner. Since Russell was not earning an income, and his wife was working hard to support her new college athlete, Russell made the decision to skip the Spring Break trip to Vegas.

The problem is that since he had no work, no school, and his teammates were in Vegas, Russell was bored out of his mind. It was only Russell and one other teammate who was also married watching movie after movie, going bored out of their minds.

So in a decision that seems like it was written by a hack comic, they decided to build a potato gun. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to come up with a more stereotypical Idaho activity, you would probably have to shoot me.

If you don’t know what a potato gun is, it is a gun that shoots potatoes. They are made of PVC pipe. You spray hairspray down the barrel, put the potato in, and click a BBQ ignitor. The ignitor sparks the hairspray, and the potato goes flying.

Russell and his teammate had a blast shooting the potato guns. They spent the rest of their spring break studying different accelerants, barrel to chamber ratios, and which ignitors work best. By the end, he estimates that he knew more about potato guns than 95% of the world.

This is when Russell became an expert. It did not take 10,000 hours. He became an expert in only a couple weeks. The key was he became an expert in a niche, not a massive subject.

Sure, this was a small step. If Russell wanted to become an expert in propulsion, aerodynamics, combustible chemical compounds, or anything else, it may have taken the 10,000 hours Gladwell discussed.

So why did I talk about this? It is simple. In an age where terms like “imposter syndrome” get thrown around, too many people do not accept they they are, in fact, experts. They think because they did not roll the Odometer for 10,000 hours they don’t have anything to contribute to the conversation. It is simply not true.

You are probably already an expert in some niche. Even if it is only an expert in the product you sell. Embrace it and brag about it.