I don't think that this rule (I don't know Gladwell's version, but I hear this often in Karate) is meant to say that nothing less than 10,000 hours is worth doing.
Why do you do anything, after all? Do you have to be an expert for it to be worth doing? If this were the case, certainly no one would be a parent. It's just a guideline to keep people from claiming expertise that they don't have yet, which is often a problem with people who have been doing things for a very short time.
Or for a specific example, I've been doing karate for 10 years very seriously. Overall, I've probably spent about 4,000 hours doing karate in classes. Of that, I've spent probably about 1,200 hours teaching, which I started doing after only maybe 800 hours of training. I've trained two students from white belt to black belt, and have introduced on the order of 100 students to karate.
But I'm not an expert. According to this rule I need about another 10 years to be one. Does that mean that I don't enjoy doing it? Or that me doing it doesn't contribute to the state of the art? Hardly. Being an expert and being able to contribute are not the same. I'm not going to have karate masters coming to me for advice. But I still have made the world a better place, in a small way, for ~100 people.
My father and mother both started new careers at 40, again at 45, again at 50, and now they're both moving to new things again at 53 (they were young when I was born). Neither of them will probably be experts at what they're working on in a technical sense, but they're still making substantial contributions to the world. Heck, my dad just got his very first journal article published this year in an area that he started working in at 50!
Why do you do anything, after all? Do you have to be an expert for it to be worth doing? If this were the case, certainly no one would be a parent. It's just a guideline to keep people from claiming expertise that they don't have yet, which is often a problem with people who have been doing things for a very short time.
Or for a specific example, I've been doing karate for 10 years very seriously. Overall, I've probably spent about 4,000 hours doing karate in classes. Of that, I've spent probably about 1,200 hours teaching, which I started doing after only maybe 800 hours of training. I've trained two students from white belt to black belt, and have introduced on the order of 100 students to karate.
But I'm not an expert. According to this rule I need about another 10 years to be one. Does that mean that I don't enjoy doing it? Or that me doing it doesn't contribute to the state of the art? Hardly. Being an expert and being able to contribute are not the same. I'm not going to have karate masters coming to me for advice. But I still have made the world a better place, in a small way, for ~100 people.
My father and mother both started new careers at 40, again at 45, again at 50, and now they're both moving to new things again at 53 (they were young when I was born). Neither of them will probably be experts at what they're working on in a technical sense, but they're still making substantial contributions to the world. Heck, my dad just got his very first journal article published this year in an area that he started working in at 50!
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/8/8/study-conflic...
In the end, don't do stuff because you want recognition as an expert, do it because you care. Expertise will follow, for the things that are worth it.