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10,000 HOUR RULE

CONVERSATION LESSON

Hello, hello, Aaron Campbell.

How’s it going?

Super successful Aaron Campbell.

Yeah, right.

That’s what they call you. They call you the ‘outlier’.

No, I don’t think so. No. I have been on my grind recently.

Oh yeah? What do you mean by that?

I’ve just been grinding. I’ve been working hard just every day from early in the morning ‘til late at night.

And that’s the secret to your success?

No, I’m just trying to pay the rent and make good things happen in the world.

Well, today we’re talking about outliers, people who fall outside the norm on the higher end of the range of super successful people, the Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates, the Beatles, rock stars, professional athletes, and what separates them from all the other talented people who don’t make it. In this month’s story, we talked about the 10,000-hour rule, that that seems to be that everyone needs a base level of talent. If you want to be successful, you got to work hard and you got to be talented, but there’s a distinction between not just working hard but putting in the hours.

Yeah, it’s working hard. It’s putting in the hours. But doesn’t it also have to do with working smart, though? I mean just because you work hard and you’re talented, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to make the kind of progress that you want unless you’re working in an efficient way or a smart way or you have some coaching. I mean that’s just the way I take it.

Well, that seems logical. But at least the study by this guy, Erickson, I think his name was, what he found was it wasn’t necessarily that these violinists were practicing in any different way or more concentrated way.

They were just talented and they just had more, it was just the amount of hours.

His analysis was to get into this elite level school, you had to have a base level of talent. So everybody was talented. But who are the superstars that objectively other professors would say they’re way better? They had more hours. It wasn’t necessarily they could find anything different about their practice habits but the amount.

Just the amount of time.

But I don’t know. It wouldn’t make sense that the kind of practice you’re doing would be important. I mean, certainly in learning language there are efficient uses of time and inefficient uses of time.

Yeah, for example you could spend years learning all the vocabulary that is non-frequently used in the English language, it’s not really going to help your fluency so much.

Or conversely you can learn all these grammar rules but you don’t have a wide enough range of words. So certainly you need to know where to focus and I think that probably the type of practice needs to be done with like a high level of awareness because you can work in kind of a spaced out, unfocused way.

One of the things I was thinking about this 10,000-hour rule, I was wondering how many hours actually is that in terms of our daily rhythms and patterns? And with just some simple math, you can take it if you work a 40-hour week, if you focused on something for 40 hours and let’s say you worked 50 weeks out of the year, you took couple of weeks off here and there or a couple of days off here and there, you’d rack up about 2,000 hours, close to 2,000 hours in one year. Maybe a little under, about 2,000. So it would take 5 years of full time focus on something to actually get to a level that you are either masterful or very, very good at what you’re doing.

So that would mean that you could not have another job, you couldn’t have a job or a family and expect to reach mastery in 5 years.

No, but you could have a family and a job and if you are able to find 20 hours a week, just like if you work nights or you focus and you find that time, in 10 years you could actually change careers. You could become something completely different than you are.

But if you’ve got a family and another job, that’s an incredible effort, but for an incredible result to master something.

Sure, it’s a heroic effort.

That’s actually one of the points that Malcolm Gladwell makes in his book, is that the opportunity to put in those hours just is not there for people who don’t have well-off background.

Sure, they don’t have access to resources. They don’t have the money to pay for coaches or to put them in schools where they’re going to have this kind of opportunity.

Or take these violinists, the ones who were putting in 10,000 hours by the age of 20, certainly they did not have jobs in high school or there’s no way they could have gotten those hours together. In university, they probably didn’t have jobs, either. Probably the ones that did were the ones that were ranked as mediocre or just good as opposed to elite. So the ability to be able to focus, that’s like a huge gift that society or institutions can give some people and not others.

But you definitely have to have the talent. I just don’t think you can… For example, if you were to give me a violin and I practice for 10,000 hours, I’d probably be like, at best, an average violinist, at best because I just don’t have the musical talent.

Yeah, I think Paul McCartney apparently bristled a little bit at the idea of this. He said, yeah we did put in huge hours but there’s loads of bands that put in 10,000 hours and then they were good but they weren’t the Beatles. So certainly there’s the element of luck but I think he is on to something that the amount of time you put in to something, if you put enough time into anything, it’s inevitable that you will improve. You might not get to a level or mastery or you’re like world-class at something but if you put in hours, you can’t help but improve.

Sure, and I think getting better at any kind of skill. Of course a lot of the people listening to us talk are people who are trying to improve their fluency, they’re trying to get better at speaking, they’re trying to understand native speakers better, and you have to put in the hours. It’s not something magical just because you have a good lesson or you have a good teacher or you have some good technique. You still have to consistently put in that time, and as you keep working at it, you do get better and better, and you get more and more skillful.

And I think the important thing to remember is you don’t need to put in 20 hours a week for 5 years. If you put in 20 hours a week for 5 years, you would be a linguist, like a professional linguist.

Right. And most people just want to get good enough.

Yeah, they just want to be able to communicate and express themselves and be understood.

And that can happen a lot faster.

So what things in your life have you put in 10,000 hours?

Oh, goodness.

Juggling, right?

What’s that?

Juggling.

Yeah, juggling.

Tap dancing.

Yeah, tap dancing, juggling.

Maybe we should save that for another lesson. That’s a whole ‘nother story, the tap dancing.

The tap dancing, juggling thing?

Yeah.

Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever made a concerted effort at one thing because I’ve never found like a passion towards one particular activity. I’ve always seen myself as more of a generalist.

A jack-of-all-trades.

Yeah, a jack-of-all-trades. It’s interest in many, many different things. I think that’s why I became a teacher because I–

Because you like to push people around.

No, the opposite. I like to help people to find their own passions and get them excited.

Yeah, that’s what I meant. That’s what I meant.

But no, I think I’ve spent the most time in the classroom and working with people. I’ve spent, wow, lots and lots of hours. Probably more than 10,000 hours in the last 15 or 20 years.

Can you remember your first couple weeks in the classroom?

Yes, I do remember it.

Can you remember what that felt like?

Yeah, I mean looking back at that, it was just-- I really feel sorry for the people that were in my class.

Everybody’s got to start somewhere.

You got to start somewhere. Absolutely. But yeah, I’ve definitely put in more than 10 hours as a teacher.

10 hours? You put a whole 10 hours into teaching?

Did I say 10 hours? Okay, I’ve put 11 hours in, Dan. No, actually 10,000. Definitely more than 10,000.

Yeah, I’ve certainly almost… Actually I think 20 years, in some form of other teaching. So yeah, I’m sure I’ve hit 10,000 hours.

Yeah, we’re about the same, about 20, about 20 years.

So I think there are some interesting implications of how institutions are setup and how the rules of institutions could possibly be changed to make it more fair so that talented people who work hard have the chance to focus.

Yeah, especially in a society like the United States which I think the difference is between rich and poor, and ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, in the developed world is much more striking than in places in Europe or here in Japan. So many people lack opportunity and it’s just not fair. And I wonder which countries do have a more level-playing field that identify talent from a young age and help to cultivate that talent and support those people. I wonder about that.

I was reading about one country, maybe Denmark, that they don’t make any decisions about who is talented and who is not talented until at least 10 or 11 years old.

Well, that makes sense.

In the US, I think as early as maybe even first grade, six years old, they start streaming people, at least in my elementary school, by your reading level is higher so we’re going to split you off from the first grade class for the next hour and you’re going to be in this more high level. So you’re being challenged more, you’re getting more attention. Then that just starts to snowball, that small advantage just like the hockey players. These kids, these bigger kids, it accumulates at a higher and higher speed or rate. So I think that’s interesting to not stream kids, to not categorize a student’s level until they are old enough to focus and be at a similar maturity, because the maturity of a kid who’s six years and a day, and six years and 11 months can be quite different.

Yeah, it can be drastically different.

There’s actually so much so that some parents hold their students back a year and they call it ‘red shirting’.

Red shirting, right. Interesting.

I guess that’s from soccer, you know, red card.

Well, with our daughter that really helped her. We didn’t purposely do that. It just happened that she was born right at the very beginning of the school year or just after the cut-off date, so she’s like the oldest in her class. And when she competes like in karate for example, she’s competing against people who are slightly younger than her. Naturally she’s just a little bit bigger than other kids not only because of her age but also maybe because of her genetics, so she has an advantage and she does quite well in terms of her competition with people at the same age or the same level as her. I can see it and it’s really helped her confidence. She’s a lot more confident because of it.

My kid, she’s the exact youngest.

Oh, she is the youngest.

She was born on March 31st and April 1st--

April 1st is the cut- off date.

Would be the cut-off date. So she can’t get any younger. She’s just in pre-school now but I went and visited and I watched them playing some games where they were throwing these balls in a bucket and I was just like, man, my kid, she’s not even getting close. I got to spend some time doing some sports with her. I can understand some parents who decide to hold their kids back. So how do you restructure the rules? How do you change the rules of organizations and schools and governments to make these opportunities more fair? One of the things that I’ve heard proposed is to get rid of summer vacation. Summer vacation, if you’re from a well-off family, you’re going to have all kinds of educational opportunities. And if you are from a very poor family where your parents don’t even have time to spend with you because they have to be working so much and they don’t have time, they don’t have the money to put you in to educational opportunities, you’re going to fall behind these other rich kids. I mean if I was a kid I really wouldn’t like this Gladwell character. But I grew up in a middle-class family and I really didn’t do much during the summers. I was just playing around.

Did you go to camp? I went to camp but it wasn’t--

A little, maybe sometimes. Was it real educational?

No, not really. When I got into high school, I went to a few educational-type camps but that was just for like a week here, a week there. It wasn’t like the whole summer.

Another issue is the high cost of higher education of universities which cause students to have to work through university and they don’t have the time to focus on their studies and their skill development at the same level. Of course there are some countries, I think in Germany where higher education is free. Incredibly, I’ve heard not even just for citizens, also for foreign residents.

I think for foreigners, too, yeah you can go over there and get an education.

That’s amazing!

Yeah, it is amazing.

So anyhow, how are the rules holding some people back and pushing some people forward? I think that’s the main point that Gladwell wants to get at. It’s kind of a no-brainer. You put in more hours, there’s more chance you’re going to improve, and it’s not just about putting in the hours but it’s also not just about talent. It’s a mixture of preparation and then opportunity that comes along.

And when those two things sync, then you can have a world-class success on your hands.

But is there such thing as too many hours? Isn’t it possible that you overdo it and you lose focus or you tire too easily? I would think there’d be an ideal amount of hours in a day where you get the maximum out of what you do, and if you go beyond that you’re not necessarily gaining anything. I’m thinking like sports practice, for example. My older daughter played volleyball on a kind of a very competitive travelling volleyball team. On the weekends, for example, they would practice for like 8 hours or 9 hours, every day. On Friday night for 4 hours and Saturday for 8 or 9 hours, and Sunday for like the whole day. Really, do you get more benefit out of practicing for 8 hours or wouldn’t it be better to practice less? So I just wonder if Gladwell’s theory holds true in all cases. Maybe it depends on the skill being practiced. I wonder.

Yeah, certainly in sports you could over train and back to what we’re talking about before, you can focus on the wrong things which won’t get you to your goal. It’ll help you improve in that little niche-level aspect.

So what are you going to be focused on?

What am I going to be focused on?

In the coming years, where are you going to put all your time and effort?

I’m going to put all my time and effort into mentoring you.

Oh, great! Alright!

Into how to be a better human being. Not to say you’re a bad human being.

Well, you know I have a lot of improvements to make.

That’s the kind of attitude I like.

So you’re going to mentor me.

Yes, what about you? Are you going to mentor me? Do we get to do a mentoring exchange?

No, I’m definitely not going to mentor you.

Well then I ain’t mentoring you, either. Deal’s off. Alright. I’ve had enough of this. Alright, until next month.

All right, see you.

Bye-bye.

The End.