10,000 hours rule to become an expert

Have you ever heard of 10,000 hours rule ?

This seems to be key time generally to be able to be professional and successful in any field. 

I had never heard of it until I came to the U.S. At that time, I unfortunately had nothing much to do in the office even though I came here to do, and I had much time to do something after work. So I tried to read books which I had wanted to read since long time but I had not read due to lack of time. In order to find something interest books, I used to hang out in book stores daily and do web surfing to find them. A good point of bookstores is obviously that we can actually read books there whenever we want to read, but an issue of finding interesting books at bookstores is too many books there, and we usually can find best seller books which are usually recommended and arranged in a book shell by book store clerks, although your smart phone can help you find past bestsellers.

The easiest way to find them is to search bestseller lists in the web, for example, The New York Times. A great point of these lists is that bestseller books are generally categorized into specific field, for instance, politics,  business, self-improvement, science, heath, history, etc. At that time, I had interest in business and self-improvement books, so I did search by focusing on these topics, and happened to find a book, "Outliers".    

Truth be told, I haven`t read this book and I don`t know much about detail, but I have read about online reviews much and got the outline of this book which reminds me of my experience through my job. I would like to write about it. The book is about 10,000 hours rule, and an author, Malcolm Gladwell, have investigated that exceptional performance in any field comes both from generic heredity and heavy effort by interviewing famous athletes, entrepreneurs, and people who is doing well at their own field. Regarding this experimental rule, another person, Anders Ericsson, seems to propose same thing separately. Anders`s paper is available for free on line so it`s worth going through it once. I put the link at the bottom on the page.

Let`s look at 10,000 hours in other words. If you spend 3 hours per day, then 10,000 hours is going to be achieved by 10 years. If you spend 9 hours per day, it is going to be 3 years. "3 years" is very important to me because it makes sense from my experience. 

My job is analog circuit design in semiconductor industry. I can say that I was able to do the job better than other colleagues after 3 years since I began to learn the design. My major was pure theoretical physics when I was in a university both for bachelor and master degrees, so when I joined the company, I did not have background for the design and electrical engineering background. What I had at the time were basic behaviors of RCL (resistor, capacitor, inductor) with ohm law as well as electromagnetic knowledge in terms of pure physics. My company employs on-the-job training for new fresh employees. It is called OJT in short, and one senior is supposed to be assigned for one fresh employee for one year to teach whatever is necessary for doing jobs. Fortunately, I could work under one superior senior who is 2 years older than me, although he already left the company for personal reason. I did not have spoiled idea that my senior teaches me everything, and I had an idea that I tried to learn faster and contribute him and the company soon. In order to do them, I had studied the design whenever I had time and wherever it was. If I look back the past, I am sure that no other colleagues who joined the company at the same time had studied it harder than me. My senior was very kind, and he is very good at teaching intuitively and qualitatively with mathematical back ground. Consequently, I could feel growth almost every day. After one year passed, I kept studying harder because I felt that I still needed to learn a lot. Throughout job experiences and study, I could feel that I could do design well by myself before just 3 years passed. If I look back the past, I spent 9 hours averagely on it every day including weekends. This experience make me feel that 10,000 hours rule makes sense to me. I was very luck actually by surrounded by many respectful peoples, so my experience is owing to them much.

At last, let me tell you one thing. In Japan, there is one quote since long time ago which is strongly correlated with 10,000 hours rule. When I check it   on line Japanese to English dictionary, it gave me "Perseverance prevails". This does not make sense to me a little bit, so English does not seems to have direct translation of it. Let me give you example of the quote. If you begin to do something new, you have to keep doing it for 3 years patiently, then a result comes out. (3 years is necessary for you to keep doing it until a result with which you feel satisfied comes out)

Link to the paper
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf

Autonomous car from Google will help many peoples.

California governor Jerry Brown signed lay about autonomous car on the state`s public roads for testing this revolutionary technology. This lay allows autonomous cars to run on the roads as long as licensed drivers are behind the wheel to be able to take over if needed. Google co-founder Sergey Brin told that we can count the number of the years on one hand until product version comes out in public. He has already contacted many auto companies to achieve this technology.

When I heard of this news, I felt that the technology is developing rapidly, but on the second though, I felt that this technology does not develop faster than peoples think. Regarding autonomous cars, many people have imagined, considered and anticipated it, so the concept itself have existed for long time. When we look back the 1980s, many people already imagined that we would have autonomous car and cars could fly in air. In the "Back to the future II" which was filmed in the1989, flying cars were depicted as common vehicles in 2015. Flying cars would not happen in 2015 as commercial products even with current technology, although it might be possible in military secret technology which does not come out in public yet.

I considered lists of what kinds of benefits and demerits we could have when the autonomous car comes true as commercial usages. It can definitely change many industries.

Benefits

• Peoples who have physical difficulties can travel further without being afraid of walking outside together with other peoples. For example, blind peoples does not have to walk much while fearing cars. For example, elderly peoples can go to hospitals without concerning driving a car, although elderly peoples might not be going to have to go to hospitals later thanks to developments of internet and health technologies.
• People can drink alcohol at restaurants without worrying about driving a car. It would contribute to food industry very much. 
• Peoples who are afraid of driving a car can go anywhere they want to go. They don`t have to worry about changing lanes etc. It`s my wife.
• People can travel much while sleeping in the car.
• It seems to be able to reduce numbers of car accidents. According to the news, car accidents usually happen because of human errors, but the Google autonomous car have run over 300,000 mls without any accidents.
• We can expect less transportation fee like taxi because there would not be divers in the car.
• This can create new business opportunities for auto inductry.

Demerits

• Many people who are involved in car transportation industry would lose their jobs to the technology. Autonomous technology is one step toward driverless car. Taxi and bus does not need drivers. This kind of story happened before at gas stations. As self service gas station increase, peoples working in gas stations decrease. 
• HWY patrol officers would lose their jobs because car accidents, DUI and over speed would expect to decrease.

Computers and technology can replace peoples. There situations have happened a lot so far when we look back the past. This is not unusual but usual and natural phenomena since industry revolution. For example in car industry, technology of robotics have replaced many peoples jobs. A important thing which I think is to accept the fact without denying it and to consider next potential industries which would benefit from technology developments, and move quickly.


Link

http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/autonomous-cars-google-receive-approval-california-gov-jerry-brown-article-1.1168509

One moment please this channel should be available shortly again ! and good service of a local center

My Comcast TV box was broken again !
Situation was exactly same with previous one.
This time, I was not irritated and did not fell anger because I am unfortunately used to this situation. Actually last time when I replaced my old box by new one, I wrote about its situation detail and process which I followed to exchange it at. Here is a link to the previous post of mine about it. Last time I called to the call center, but it was painful time for me because it took much time for identification as well as remote test to check weather the box was really broken or not. It was also because it took a few days to expect a mechanic to come to my apartment and replace it by new one. I was sick of this process even though it was not my fault. 

Therefore, I tried to follow advice which my colleague suggested to me before. He advised me to take it to a local service center because he has seen many people do that to replace their own box by new one. Today I had time to do that, and I thought that it would be  cumbersome but could be experience and a thing to talk about. When I checked where a local service center is, fortunately I found it near my apartment. It is the local service center at Sunnyvale. Before I visited there, I checked its reputation at Yelp, but it was not so good and everyone complains about its service : link.  It looked like to be going to be tough, but it was fine with me because I gave up high quality service here. When I visited there actually, I was very surprised to see many people holding their TV boxes. I realized soon that one of reason was lunch time and second reason was that Comcat planed to stop its analog TV service from October 1 and many people would come to replace own TV box which can deal with only analog signal by new one which can deal with digital signal. The size of the service center is, for example,  as same as Seven Eleven, and there are 7 or 8 service desks but only half of them were available at that time.  When I visited there, there were already 15 peoples ahead of me, and one lady was noting customer names by using tablet at the entrance. The tabled looks like connected to internal network, and customer names are send to a big monitor in order to show their name in their service order. When it comes to your order, your name will be displayed largely at the monitor, and service person in own desk will call your name loudly. I waited for around 15 minutes during which I was doing people-watching to see with what reason peoples came here, to check how service persons deal with customers, and I was thinking how to explain my situation about cable box. It was because I was thinking it would be tough negotiation and it would be obviously better to tell a person in charge clearly in order to make process go easier. A person in charge of my service was a lady, and she could understand my situation easily even though I just said "My cable box has not worked since one month ago and I can only see blue error code". She immediately said that she could replace it by new one without cumbersome identification and process which I had experienced before. Additionally, she checked my account information by looking at the number of TV box, and pointed out that I`m paying too much to the current service, and proposed me that I could upgrade TV service but expect $40 less. I was embarrassed to realize that I paid too much without knowing breakdown of price which I paid so far. I, of course, followed what she said. Finally I got new cable box soon, and it took only 10 minutes for process and 25 minutes totally including waiting time. My expectation started from bottom, so I was feeling comfortable very much even though the broken TV was not my fault. She gave me the easy instruction paper to activate new box kindly by highlighting activation code and online URL. I would like to thank her to make process easier. What I am regretting now is to forget to ask her name.

When I returned home, I connected cables to new one and tuned on it,  and make it ready for activation. I went to the link on the paper which I got from her, and enter my account number and cell phone number. When I clicked a bottom for activation, new cable box was turned off remotely, and remained turned off. The activation site told me that it would take 45 minute to complete activation. Around 45 minutes later, I turned on it actually and confirmed that it works well finally, and I could confirmed that new service (Channels) are available.

If you suffer from same situation for TV boxes and if local service centers are close, I recommend you to visit them. Many peoples say that service at local centers sucks, so I might just happen to be able to get very good service and it might be just lucky.