Beware those who use time spent as a proxy for skill or credentials.

It's the difference between the guy who has gained 12 years of experience and the guy who has gained one year of experience, and just did it 12 times.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell helped popularize "The 10,000 hour rule." When I say "helped popularize," I more accurately mean "unleashed onto the populace at large, setting off a game of telephone played by unknowing participants at impossibly massive proportions until ultimately the researchers' (Ericsson, et al.) message inevitably became so distorted as to bear virtually no resemblance to the actual finding reported."

Or, as Ericsson puts it more eloquently in a 2012 rebuke, "Gladwell cited our research on expert musicians as a stimulus for his provocative generalisation to a magical number."

Though he doubtless meant well, this meme unfortunately became part of the problem.

Granted - if you spend time practicing a skill, you are probably going to become better at that skill. It’s extremely likely in fact.

However, it's how you spend the time you have more than how much time you spend that matters more.

Consider this one truth about time: everybody has it, and everybody has the exact same amount of it (speaking purely on a micro, day-to-day level). It's the great equalizer: it’s the one resource everyone has.

If that's true, doesn't it follow that someone saying they've spent X number of hours on Y activity has no qualitative meaning or value in itself? Ridiculous example but indulge me the analogy: It's one thing for a Harvard grad student to spend 10 hours working on a dissertation about social media addiction among adolescents in urban China. It's another for your 4-year old nephew to spend the same amount of time on the same dissertation.

The point is this: Are you crystal clear on what are you seeking to achieve with that time you are spending?