“”In my experience it takes about twenty hours of practice to break through the frustration barrier: to go from knowing absolutely nothing about what you’re trying to performing noticeably well….If you invest as little as twenty hours in learning the basics of the skill, you’ll be surprised at how good you can become.”
Josh Kaufman
The First 20 Hours
“I’ve never read a screenwriting book. I’m really superstitious about it too. I don’t even want to look at them. All I did was I went and bought the shooting script of ‘Ghost World’ at Barnes and Noble and read it just to see how it should look on the page because I like that movie.”
Screenwriter Diablo Cody
So much has been written about the “10,000 hour rule” that I think Josh Kaufman has done the world a favor by talking about it a little bit more in his book The First 20 Hours; How to Learn Anything…Fast. Kaufman writes in his opening chapter:
“In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book titled Outliers:The Story of Success, In it, he sets about trying to explain what makes certain people more successful than others.
“One of the idea Gladwell mentions again and again is what he calls the ‘10,000 hour rule.’ Based on research conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, expert level performance takes, on average, ten thousand house if deliberate practice to achieve.”
Kaufman isn’t trying to do any myth-busting on the 10,000 hour rule (though others have)—he just clarifies the conclusion that Dr. Ericsson discovered. Because knowing that something can take on average a decade to master can be overwhelming. A wall too big to attempt climbing.
“World class mastery may take ten thousand hours of focused effort, but developing the capacity to perform well enough for your own purposes usually requires far less of an investment.”
Josh Kaufman
It’s easy for “expert level” and “world-class mastery” to get left out of the 10,000 hour discussion.
If you’re just starting out in screenwriting—and especially if you live outside of L.A.—then screenwriter Diablo Cody is a great example of someone who did not have 10,000 hours of screenwriting before selling her first screenplay (Juno) —which just happened to win her an Academy Award in 2008. (Cody was much closer to 20 hours than 10,000 hours of actual screenwriting experience.)
But I did point out in the post Beatles, King, Cody & 10,000 Hours in the 15 year run between the ages of 12 & 27 Cody probably spent 10,000 hours reading books, watching TV shows & movies, getting a Media Studies degree, and doing her own creative writing (short stories, poems, etc.) in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. It helps that she’s wicked smart and found a cheerleader in Hollywood with producer Mason Novak (who discovered her unique voice via her blog).
“Here’s my unsolicited advice to any aspiring screenwriters who might be reading this: Don’t ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one else is capable of doing what you do.”
Diablo Cody
Introduction, Juno: The Shooting Script
You may not be the next Diablo Cody, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get your start the way Oscar-winning Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio did—by writing spec scripts for nothing that led him to independent producers who’d pay him $5,000 to write a script—or as he says, “on a good day maybe 10,000 bucks. Or just here’s lunch if you’ll let me be the guy to take your screenplay around, and you’re grateful for that.”
But the bottom line as screenwriter Bob DeRosa says, “There are no shortcuts. There is only hard work. Perseverance. Luck. Craft. Failure. Success. Mistakes. And Yes, dreams that come true.”
And sometimes dream don’t come true. There are plenty of decent golfers who spent 10,000 playing golf who not only didn’t become the next Tiger Woods—but didn’t even make the PGA Tour. There are no guarantees even if you hit the 10,000 hour mark. May you find joy in the journey.
Over the seven years of writing this blog I’ve come to see my role as a curator of sorts—a place to gather some of the best screenwriting and filmmaking thoughts found in books, interviews, and movie commentaries. Starting next week I’ll start a string of posts by Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls.
P.S. This week I put Kaufman’s 20 hour test to work by doing a deep dive learning Apple Motion 5 for a motion graphics opening I’m working on. I started the week never having touched Motion 5, did about half of a lynda.com tutorial with Ian Robinson, and with the help of a Videoblocks Motion template, and completed a nicely polished opening. I tell you that because, while I’ve worn a lot of production hats over the decades working in video production—motion graphics have always terrified me a little. Something that I was all to pleased to farm out to talented motion graphics artists. But sometimes, for various reasons (usually budget related), you just have to step up to the plate and swing the bat for yourself.
P.P.S. A good companion book to The First 20 Hours is The Art of Leaning by Josh Waitkin. (He was the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher. Someone who was not only a chess champion, but also a World Champion in the martial art Tai Chi Chuan.) It’s a book that has come up a couple of times on screenwriter Brian Koppelman’s podcast The Moment.
Related posts:
Start Small…But Start Somewhere
The Secret to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously)
Can Screenwriting Be Taught? (2.0)
Screenwriting from Iowa 
I really appreciate what you have to say here. It even helps with my quest to write my small essays. It takes me a lot longer that 20 hours to break through the frustration to even beginning, but when I cross that barrier when the frustration finally empties itself out into the work field so to speak, I know what to do. By the way, did Terry Gross of NPR ever interview you?
One of the great book of essays (and one I return to again and again) is “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion. And while I’ve listened to a lot of Terry Gross interviews on NPR I’ve never been interviewed. Could have been what I call “The other Scott Smith”—Scott B. Smith— who wrote the novel, “The Simple Plan.”