An NFL game totals 60 minutes on the clock and it takes an average of 3 hours and 12 minutes to play. But do you know how much football is actually played in any given game and what any of this has to do with becoming an expert in your field?
There are two sides to the coin of police work: proactive and reactive. We can either initiate calls for service or start an investigation by making a traffic stop or checking on some suspicious activity or we can go where the radio sends us and handle the calls that come our way. Generally speaking, your average shift is probably a winning combination of both.
Size Matters
The size of the town or city you work in, the population and the people who make up the population, the shift you work, and a myriad of other factors will play into how much time you spend doing actual police work versus sitting in a cruiser picking your nose, behind a desk playing solitaire, or doing paperwork and typing reports during your shift. If the stars align and the mood strikes, you may even pitch a no-hitter — zero calls for service and zero proactive work. We all have those days, because sometimes, like firefighters, we don’t need to actually do anything, we just need to be available.
How much work we actually do, the type of calls we get exposed to, the things we experience, and the training we get are as varied as the people in the uniform. All that to say that no two careers are equal. Ten years of experience for you might be one year for me, and vice versa. It all depends. A rookie with one year on the job in Los Angeles probably has seen more and done more than a ten year veteran in Podunk, USA where the population is 12. Though the ten year veteran in this scenario has worked more shifts and spent more time on the clock, the amount of their play time is in reality a whole lot less. And that’s where the NFL comes in.
Not Equal
The average NFL game takes 3 hours and 12 minutes to play. There are an average of 154 plays run in a game. The average play takes 4.3 seconds to go from snap to whistle. So, in total, there is only about 11 minutes of actual football happening during any given game on any given Sunday. 11 minutes — that’s about 6% of the total game time. Let that sink in.
Now think back to your recent shifts and how many calls you went to, cars you stopped, search warrants you executed, or what have you. Then think about how much down-time you had. I know it’s hard to quantify but I think you get the idea that the amount of game time does not equal play time. It’s actually a whole lot less.
Good News and Bad News
If you’re like me you want to continually learn and grow to be the best in your field, to be an expert. So what does it actually take to rise to the top? Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. I’ll give you the good news first.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers¹ he says that, “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” He goes on to say that once a certain level of ability is present that “the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.” In other words, we don’t need to be the most talented, the smartest, or the fastest, if we have a baseline level of talent then success comes down to how hard we work. The good news is that you and I don’t have to be born a superstar, it can be learned and earned.
That bad news is that “the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”
The 10,000 Hour Rule
Gladwell goes on to say, “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” And how long does it take to rack up that many hours of practice? Ten years. Which is “roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number for greatness.”¹
Now that you know it takes 10,000 hours of hard, meaningful practice in any given skill set to become an expert, if you reverse engineer the timeline you end up with about 20 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for ten years. That’s a lot of work.
A Big Fat Slice of Humble Pie
If you’re a rookie with a huge head and think you know the job and that you’re at the top of your game, think again, because you’re not even close. If you’re a veteran cop who thinks that just because you have over ten years under your belt that you’ve seen and done it all, remember what we just learned from the NFL and factor in all your down-time before you get too excited. The reality is that it’s a big fat slice of humble pie for all of us.
And if 10,000 hours of hard work and practice seems insurmountable, you just need to start. After all, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It won’t happen overnight, and it’s not supposed to. In whatever area you want to achieve expertise, be it tactics, or shooting, or hockey, or chess, or jujitsu, or whatever, get that ticker rolling with your first hour. And then do another, and another, and another. Even if you’re not the most talented you will get there if you swallow your pride and put in the work.
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- Of your years of service, how much of it has been down-time?
- Are you further ahead or behind than you thought?
- How can you better use your down-time to work toward 10,000 hours?
- Are you willing to put in the work?
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¹Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 38-42.
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