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10000 hours

Started by The Void, 18 January, 2014, 15:20:28

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The Void

Perhaps this has some crossover with Kev's thread here http://www.kendama.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1579.msg11842.html#msg11842 , but I felt it was a different topic too.

The "10,000 hours rule" suggests that in order to gain true proficiency/mastery of any field, 10000+ hours of practice are necessary.
http://www.wisdomgroup.com/blog/10000-hours-of-practice/

I began playing kendama in 2006, but didn't get truly hooked in until late 2007. Let's assume I've played on average 1 hour a day. So that's 6.25 years x 365 days x 1 hour = 2281 hours. Well, that would explain why I don't feel like I'm a master of kendama. (Okay, 5th Dan isn't bad, but I still feel like I have a long way to go in the kendamasphere, and I don't just mean one more grading level.) Sure, there will have been days when I played much more intensely - almost certainly whenever I've met up with other clickers at events or just hanging out, I'll spend perhaps 3-6 hours a day playing (And I think it's fair to say that in these cases "playing" covers not just the time holding a kendama and attempting tricks, but all the interaction/discussion time between clickers too- it all coalesces into the KD regions of the brain.) - so perhaps my average is 2, or maybe even approaching 3 hours per day.

Is this depressing or encouraging? Perhaps at best estimate I could say I'm 66% of the way there, but when I look at the skills of Japanese players who have many more years under their belt, it sure feels like well under 50% is a fairer comparison.

But one of the great things about kendama (also true of my background in the juggling world), is that there's always another trick to learn, always another level of difficulty to step up to, always another element to bring to your freestyling or performing.

So, yes, perhaps a little bit depressing that there is such a long road ahead. But also encouraging and inspiring that that road is full of personal challenges, encounters with friends new and old, and fun times. So here's to my next 5000 or so hours of clicking - which starts with today's 1 hour of Dan training... Now!

So, what's your estimate of your hours total? Do you care? Is "mastery" not even on your target, and you're just enjoying having fun clicking? Or are you a driven addict, with clearly set goals? Whatever your answers, it's nice that there's a place for us all in kendama land.

Cheers guys and gals!
If you don't want to BUY MY BOOKS 😉, then why not ask your local library to order them in, and read them for free? That would help too. Cheers!

AptDweller

10000 hours.  Let's see, I'm 66 years old and just picked up a kendama for the first time a couple of weeks ago.  I think I'm in trouble.  Right now I am still working on the spike with getting a little consistency so I guess I have a long way to go.  I do love to hear the click , though.  No goals at this point, just enjoying the play.  By the way, ever played kendama with bifocals?
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society - the enormous prosperity of Fools.

Wilkie Collins

The Void

Quote from: AptDweller on 19 January, 2014, 13:19:39By the way, ever played kendama with bifocals?
Ha, fortunately for me, I've not needed to try that yet. Must add a certain dimension to play!
If you don't want to BUY MY BOOKS 😉, then why not ask your local library to order them in, and read them for free? That would help too. Cheers!

the milky oolong

Really good point for discussion, [user]Void[/user].

First off, I think each person's attitude to Kendama progression will be different depending what other crafts/skills/disciplines they have previously tried to 'master' (a dubious verb at the very least); I imagine it will come as a great surprise to someone totally new to juggling/skill toys/props of all types that ones rate of progression is often drastic but always relative - you can't really remember how incredible the transition from Cascade to Mills' Mess was (sorry, non ball-jugglers: from Aeroplane to 1-Turn Scoop Spike), and the achievement somehow never outweighs the thirst for more. That's seemingly just the way it is; the unthinkable quickly gains the tarnish of mediocrity in the intensity of our search for 'the next step'. Skewed? Ungrateful? Self-deprecatory? Depressing? Perhaps simply human.

From my own point of view I have been quite relaxed about my rate of progression in Kendama; I have ignored whole groups of tricks because my inability to get to grips with them has gotten in the way of my aesthetic appreciation of the 'game'. I know that this is kind of like skipping the parts of a really enjoyable novel  that one doesn't quite grasp , but personally I don't suffer for it; a time comes, I feel ready to finally start mucking about with Whirwinds, and off I go - the desire for the aesthetic leads me in the direction I want to go.

Then I see you guys tackling the Kendama Consistency stuff, and I realize that there is a whole different way to play Kendama, a whole different way to perceive it, and I think that if that's fun (and what's not fun about landing every other 1-Turn Aeroplane/Lighthouse? Though I got there a different way) then that's what your kendama routine should be about. I think if I were to meet up with other kendama players, I would regret my lack of consistency, but be happy about my sketchy/rickety grasp of certain tricks and runs that have become symptomatic of my playing situation.

I was once on the island of RĂ¼gen in the Baltic Sea. Someone had set a little cairn of pebbles up on a great boulder a few yards out to sea. We made a competition to see who could be the first to knock the cairn down. When we were finished, I happened to say, 'who can be the first to get a pebble back up there?' The boulder was rounded by the waves, wet, and seemingly quite slimy, but not that far away. We started half-heartedly, then got pretty serious. We experimented with under-arm, side-arm, spin, back-spin, cork-screw, 'skate' (trying to slow the pebble down through friction), and suddenly, after an indeterminate time, someone got a pebble on. 'Pebble on!', the cry went up, and by the end of the little sit-down session, almost everyone had managed to get a pebble on, some knocking an old pebble off and becoming 'king' in the process. I hope this does express something. If not...

Part of me hopes that [user]Void[/user] and others will reach a point where they're seeing the results of the practice they're putting in, and I'm glad, [user]Void[/user], that you defined a kind of active KD time regardless of having the Kendama at your fingertips (because the gaps in practise are pretty important too). But I hope all the same that there's an equal understanding that Around the Bird is just plain bloody infernal, and that part of the real pleasure of kendama and anything else like it is to see the apparently impossible, watch it for a moment, and then say, 'I'll take a crack at it'.

Love each click. TMO
Kendama Berlin
German Kendama Open 2014: 1st Place Speed Trick, 2nd Place Knockout
German Kendama Championships 2015: 3rd Place Speed Trick
KEN FEST Hannover, 2016: 3rd Place KEN Battle
KENDAMA CLASH Berlin 2016: 1st Place Intermediate

Spirit Kendama

#4
Satoru Akimoto is getting pretty close to 10,000 hours if you ask me :O
http://www.kendama.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1523.0.html

Kev

To answer your question Void, for me this is encouraging, a major part of the appeal. As you progress the horizon moves further away, there's always more to learn. Unlike most things, you'll never run out of kendama, it's a vast world of possibility.

Although there are a some masterful players out there, mastery in the sense of 'knowing all the tricks and doing them well' is an impossibility as every time you learn a new trick another new trick becomes possible, and so on ad infinitum.

From this perspective, we should widen the scope of the term 'mastery' to not only include the very high skill levels that you and the other top players have achieved but also to include mastery of the approach, the method of play, and the player themselves.

You've seen a lot more kendama players in real life than I have, but I'd bet that you have seen beginners showing signs of mastery in terms of how they approach the tricks and how the go about learning?

My limited experience of this is - give a kendama to a person who has never seen one before and they give it a shot but seem to be almost attacking the kendama, trying to battle it - partly through frustration, partly through lack of learned dexterity, partly through self consciousness and the feeling that they are failing under another person's gaze.

If you give a kendama to someone who has not seen one before BUT has learned a different skill masterfully (From my own experience, I'm thinking, jugglers, musicians, climbers, skateboarders) then they have a better chance of initial success partly because they've already learnt how to learn in another discipline and applied it, albeit subconsciously, to kendama.

Once you have a conceptual understanding of what you're trying to learn and the map to get there (e.g. BIG CUP > SPIKE or any other trick etc.), from then on the mastery of that trick is about you and your approach to practice. It's about how you learn to develop focus, flow and consistency. How you cope with frustration (throw the kendama to the floor or take a breath and carry on?), about knowing when to quit (sometimes rest is more beneficial than carrying on), and of course to some extent, the time you put in.

The important thing to say about time is that in any good learning experience (and arguably any good experience at all), is that quantity matters but not as much as quality. A short focused and flowing practice is worth so much more than a long distracted one. I totally agree with you that talking about kendama and hanging out with / watching other players is important to progression - we could call this learning by osmosis?

So, what I'm saying is, the more experienced you are in knowing how to learn, and how to keep practice fruitful, how to regain focus when it's not going well, and how to get your game back on track when you're down 3 match points, the more masterful you become. I guess, in a nutshell, this leads to something like, 'you don't master kendama, you master yourself'.

:)


P.S. On that 'match points' analogy, don't you love it when doing your Dan practice and it comes down to the final catch and you land it? Great feeling!

P.P.S. Regarding the 10,000 hours thing - although there does seem to be evidence supporting this, we should be cautious as Gladwell is a master at marketing such memorable sound bites and information. That's not to reject his hypothesis but just to suggest it might not be the whole story,  take a look at this too for additional food for thought - http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/22/daniel-goleman-focus-10000-hours-myth/



Kev

Another read for you [user]Void[/user] with a different viewpoint - not sure if this will available for everyone worldwide but certainly the UK,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26384712

The Void

Yep. Whether or not you need an "innate ability", it's for sure that you have to put the time in.
If you don't want to BUY MY BOOKS 😉, then why not ask your local library to order them in, and read them for free? That would help too. Cheers!