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the time to be Great
BILL JOY, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems In total they played 270 shows in a year and a paddles two to four hours a day, five to six days a
and writer of much of today’s UNIX (the operating half—more than most bands in their entire rock week, not to mention five days a week at the gym.
system behind the Apple laptop I’m typing on), and roll careers. The youngsters from Liverpool He is unquestionably one of freestyle paddling’s
logged 10,000 hours of programming at the Uni- had played 10,000 hours of live shows before most elite athletes. He’s talented for sure, but
versity of Michigan Computer Centre. they walked onto The Ed Sullivan Show. Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule would suggest that
“Bill Joy was brilliant. He wanted to learn. That There is a certain amount of talent required to his real greatness has come because Billy has
was a big part of it. But before he could become be good at something, but at the highest levels worked harder than everyone else.
an expert, someone had to give him the opportu- the ones at the very top are the ones who worked Ten thousand hours of paddling to a guy with
nity to learn how to be an expert,” writes Malcolm much, much harder than everyone else. It doesn’t an office job looks like this. At an average of two
Gladwell. Learning how to be an expert takes matter if we are talking about computer program- eight-hour paddling days every weekend for the
time. According to Gladwell’s latest best-selling mers, pop musicians or even whitewater paddlers. four summer months—so 32 days, 256 hours
book about success, Outliers, 10,000 hours is In the rafting staff cabin next to mine lived a per year—it would take 39 years to complete a
pretty much what it takes to be really, really, really young and athletic paddler named Billy Harris. 10,000-hour paddling log. If you started pad-
good at anything. It was the summer of the Perception Whip-It; we dling at 20 years old, like me, you’ll be as good
Bill Gates logged 10,000 hours’ programming think it was ’93, but neither of us can remember as Billy Harris when you’re 59.
time long before anyone else had a computer. for sure. Humbling.
The Mother’s Club in his Seattle private school Billy spent the next six years chasing swim- And so, a little over halfway to being really
raised money and purchased a time-sharing mers down the Ottawa and guiding and teach- good, I sit at my UNIX-based MacBook typing
computer terminal for his school’s computer ing kayaking in Nepal, Taiwan, New Zealand, into Gates’ Microsoft Word listening to The White
club. Big deal, you say? For a nerdy eighth grad- Costa Rica and Ecuador. He’s trained winters in Album, paying tribute to my friend and the man
er in 1968, it was a big deal. Australia and travelled the U.S. freestyle circuit. who taught me to surf, Billy Harris. To you boys
While still in high school the Beatles gigged These days Billy spends 300 days a year on the I drink from a bottle of The Balvenie single malt
strip clubs in Hamburg where they played non- water and is training for the 2009 World Freestyle scotch that, like you, took the time to become the
stop seven-hour shows, seven days a week. Championships. Now in his mid-thirties, he still very best. —Scott MacGregor
www.rapidmag.com
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