My 10,000 Hours!

In an attempt to practice what I preach… over the past several years I have been looking for a way to demonstrate how valuable putting in the time and work is for an entrepreneur. In my teaching I used to assign a book by Malcom Gladwell. In his book, Outliers, he wrote about the importance of 10,000 hours. I am very passionate about putting in the time. I will tell anyone that wants to know the secrete to my success with AvidXchange. It comes down to two numbers… I have made five thousand cold calls and over six thousand five hundred (give or take… mostly give a few hundred) pitches. When you do five thousand and sixty-five hundred of anything you get good at it. Good to the point where it looks easy or it looks like you had acquired a set of skills or had by birth a set of skills that others just can not have. There may be things I am predisposed to, but putting in all the time is what made the skill, not anything else.

I am going to document my journey of 10,000 hours on a passion that I have had for years and wanted to do something about it. Since I was fifteen years old, in 1985, I have been playing music. Mostly spilt between bars and churches. I like to tell people that I am classically trained in a bar. I love to play and I love to sing. The problem is I go to bed at 9:30pm and have zero desire to hit the bars again. I saw a documentary on busking called “Find Your Way”. It gave me the notion that I can play… I can do it at my own speed and do not have to be beholden to anybody… just play for the pure love of it.

Here I go… My 10,000 hours is going to be as a street musician… busking. I have no goal or outcome to this… just want to see what happens… who I meet and how the music I play can speak to people. I don’t really want to do this for money so I am going to donate my street musician earnings (after paying a few expenses) to various musician relief funds in the cities I play. This should be interesting.

On with the show and stay tuned!