By Chris Howard
Warren Buffett was once asked, "What's the first thing someone ought to do in order to become wealthy?" Buffett answered, "Invest in yourself. That's number one."
Time and time again, hugely successful people are those who have made personal development their first priority. That means education, but in the broadest sense of the word. It doesn't necessarily mean sitting in a classroom. In fact, in the 2008 Forbes list of billionaires, 73 of them had not completed traditional schooling. Li Ka-Shing, Hong Kong's richest person (net worth over $26 billion) dropped out of school at age 12, and began selling plastic flowers.
There are really only three things you can do with your time. You can waste it. You can sell it. Or (by far the best choice) you can invest your time. That means you will never take a job just for the money. Work because you have a dream and because you're committed to your dream. Or work because it adds to your skills. One way or another, your employment should be an investment in yourself.
Most successful entrepreneurs don't come from inherited wealth. Most don't come from poverty either. They usually came from middle-class families and build on the work of previous generations. All of them, however, deeply believe in developing themselves to the greatest possible extent. By seeking out mentors, guides, and sources of inspiration from the marketplace.
How big an investment are you willing to make toward your personal success? Would you be willing to invest 10,000 hours in yourself? In his book titled Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes, "Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness." Gladwell refers to a study performed in the 1990s by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two of his colleagues at Berlin's Academy of Music. They gathered the school's violinists and divided them into three groups:
Among these three groups, the difference proved to be the amount of time spent in solitary practice in the course of their skill development. The amateur group totalled around 2,000 hours of practice by the age of 20. Group two, the good violinists, averaged around 5,000 hours by the age of 20. Group three, the group with the ability to be concert violinists, totalled around 10,000 hours by age 20. Along the same lines, neurologist Daniel Levitin states, "In study after study — of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, and chess players — this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn't address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."
But 10,000 hours is an enormous amount of time. In most cases it would take about 10 years to accomplish. You may not want to become a concert pianist, basketball player, or a fiction writer—so how does this apply to your entrepreneurial dreams?
Consider this: To be able to play a violin—not necessarily well, but to even get a sound out of it—you must know several things: for example, how to hold the violin, how to position your hands, and what amount of force you'll need to make a sound. Each element, regardless of how small, needs to be learned through spending time practicing before you can play well.
Now relate this to all the smaller but still important elements that make up your entrepreneurial dream. No matter what your dream is, time would be definitely well spent attending classes or seminars or in an apprenticeship in which you can model successful people, Every hour will lead you closer to the 10,000 hours it takes to have the expertise in your field that would allow you to live your entrepreneurial dreams to the full.
For example, even after earning $87 million in one year and ranking fourth on Forbes magazine's list of 100 celebrity top income earners, Beyonce Knowles still spends tireless hours practicing. She believes in "repetition, repetition, repetition." While on tour, after every performance she spends two hours reviewing the tapes from the show, even when she's performed it 100 times, in an effort to constantly improve herself and her performance. She says, "I'm never satisfied."
Stop looking at your watch. Stop looking at the calendar. Start making an open-ended investment in yourself in whatever way your heart tells you is best. As Warren Buffett puts it, "That's number one!"
Chris Howard is a world renowned wealth and lifestyle strategist and author of the new book Instant Wealth – Wake Up Rich! from which this article is derived. To purchase the book now please go to: www.instantwealthbestseller.com
