As I sit here in a coffee shop killing time while Snacks is across from me being productive I may have stumbled onto a blog post that could quite possibly explain my life, my thought process and the entire meaning behind the name of this blog, Tangential Arguments. It’s a quick little example for the outside world as to what may be going on in my head at any given point. The post that follows may have been better served as a topic of Friday Conversations featuring Delberto, Lead but instead turned into a distraction from trying to get caught up on some of the blogging I’ve been neglecting since some time in April.
Often times it’s apparent to me that I do some of my best thinking in the shower. No distractions. I can’t get side tracked by my phone, the dog, an email or a goal. It’s just the obligatory part of the day that everybody must abide by. It recently occurred to me that along with the no distractions, I’m often on autopilot, going through the same routine over and over. Maybe, the reason I was able to focus my mind on all of these other thoughts was because I’d mastered the art of showering. “I must be an Expert at showering” I thought.
Luckily the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell popularized a (questionable) study by Anders Ericsson which points to a way to classify an “expert”. According to the study there is something called the “10,000 Hour Rule” which dictates that once a person has spent the required time practicing a specific task they will be an expert.
With this theory all it takes is a little research and a little math to find out the truth.
According to a couple of quick Google searches I found the following two pieces of information. The first, a fact: I was born on March 12, 1984. Today is May 25, 2014. That makes me 30 years, 2 months and 13 days old. That’s 1575 weeks and 6 days. Or, even better for the follow up math, 11,031 days. The second, I would call an estimate as opposed to a fact: The average American shower lasts for 8.2 minutes.
At this point I had to make a couple of assumptions. I figured I could get a number that was “close enough” to determine Mythbusters style if “I’m an expert at showering” was a plausible claim.
Assumption 1: 11,031 showers in my life. In other words, I’ve showered once per day for everyday that I’ve been alive. I know that’s not true. When I was a child this most certainly was not true. And as an adult I know for a fact that on days I run/workout in the evening this also is not true. With no way to know for sure I’ll assume those two facts cancel each other out.
Assumption 2: 10 Minutes Per Shower. Again, no way to know for sure. I don’t time my showers. On a cold winter morning it’s safe to say 8.2 minutes is a joke. After a long run, a nice cold shower feels great, but how long can you really stand 0 hot water. Inflating the so called average by nearly 25% seems like a safe bet.
Now for the maths:
11,031 Showers * 10 Minutes per Shower = 110,310 Minutes Showering
110,310 Minutes Showering / 60 Minutes per Hour = 1,838.5 Hours Showering
LESS THAN 2000 HOURS? If over the next 30 years I found a way to double my average shower time (which would require me to spend 30 minutes a day in the shower) I would still only be approaching being 75% of an expert.
At the pace that I’m going I would have to live a little longer than 164 years in order to achieve “Shower Expert” status. Debunked!
If you made it this far, I’m shocked. See if you can extrapolate this out to all of the times I’ve needed to be distracted over the last 11k or so days and just imagine all of the random thoughts I’ve had and how much time that has consumed. And if anybody can tell me how far it would be if you laid out all the shoelaces of all the shoes you’ve ever owned end-to-end, I’d love to hear about it, on Twitter (#TangentialArguments).
for more profundity or pithy humor follow me on twitter – @bicb
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