In December, upon releasing Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell gave Charlie Rose an interview.

Fantastic stuff.

Especially for us folks interested in modeling. As I’ve said countless number of times, you must master modeling to master NLP. I dig Malcolm Gladwell’s books. He always offers a slanted perspective on stuff we consider obvious.

One of the keys to excellence he brings up is the notion of the “10,000 hours”. This is the idea that you need to practice deliberately — that is, with the intent of improving your skill and eliminating weaknesses — for at least 10,000 hours before you can truly hone your skill.

Of course, he cites the usual suspects as evidence that the 10,000 hour theory holds: Bill Gates, Michael Jordan and the like. Since we’re interested in mastering NLP, we want to shrink that number down. How can you achieve Jordan’s proficiency in less time? How can you achieve Bill Gates’s business vision in less time?

Can it actually be done?

Tim Ferriss purports that it can and even created a TV show around the idea. In the end, what is the key to excellence? Is it really the number of hours? We might ask ourselves “what’s important about the number of hours invested in honing a skill (read: master NLP)?”

In a nutshell: pattern detection.

(And then, of course, pattern mastery.)

Repetition makes it possible for our mind-body to detect and, subsequently, assimilate patterns in what we observe and what we do. Incidentally, this is one of the key distinctions that differentiates NLP Modeling from other modeling modalities: assimilating behavioral patterns prior to attempting to code them.

So, as an NLP modeler, I find it useful to dig deeper into Gladwell’s findings to identify the lynchpins that lead to excellence. Of course, in NLP, we knew it all along, Just kidding.