“Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” – Malcolm Gladwell
This line made a small home of its own in my mind when I was a teenager. Setting aside the debate around the claim itself, the idea I held onto was simpler: spend enough time, consistently, doing the same thing, and you will get somewhere.
I thought about it occasionally. Out of the blue. Every couple of months.
What I didn’t see until recently was where my hours had actually been going. Not into doing but into wondering, planning, reflecting, and sometimes overthinking and doubting. I fell in love with exploring my interests and developing my sense of things through reading, watching, and occasionally making. Introspection was how I spent most of my teenage years. It made me more knowledgeable in certain ways, helped me avoid mistakes where errors would have been expected. But it had also quietly stolen time from doing things, especially publicly, because I had become too comfortable inside my own head.
On Time
As a third culture kid raised in a community where punctuality wasn’t a primary concern, there was always time. Time to do things, meet family, learn slowly, depend on people to guide you. That was my baseline for a comfortable life. What nobody mentions is what happens when you leave a polychronic culture and move to the west, where you might as well be competing with light. The adjustment changes your perception of time more than anything else could.
I understood that timing matters. But somewhere along the way it started feeling less like timing and more like a race. Suddenly, I was surrounded by extremely punctual high achievers who understood the weight of deadlines in a way I hadn’t been raised to. I felt stagnant. Despite the knowledge and curiosity I had spent years developing, I was standing still with a strong wish to return to my hermit crab life of introspection and exploration.
At least there, I felt like I was doing something.
Until I wasn’t. I had reached a point where I couldn’t go further alone. I needed people. I wanted to make something for people.
Imposter Syndrome
A couple of years ago, in an editorial interview for the Creator’s Collective Adrift Edition, I said:
“Imposter syndrome is not new nor is it real.”
I hadn’t expanded on it much then, but here’s what I think about it still:
It is true that an individual can feel like they don’t know what they are doing, or whether they are doing enough. That nervousness is normal, especially in spaces you are new to. But I noticed it only gets worse, to the point where you genuinely feel like a fraud, when you begin watching others accomplish things–
- without any context of their struggles and efforts.
- with a tired mind that has started discounting the praise you receive and overemphasizing the doubts you hear in your own head.
- in a competitive setting where everything feels like survival instead of a healthy challenge.
- without a growth mindset, which is itself a challenge to adopt, so you feel perpetually left behind.
What we call imposter syndrome is largely a crisis of comparison without context.
You are seeing someone else’s output without their process, their failures, their years of quiet accumulation. The nervousness you feel in a new space isn’t fraud, it’s the natural discomfort of being at the edge of what you currently know and that edge is exactly where growth happens.
“Out of balance, the self trusting no becomes yet another way to hide. If your no becomes a habit, a way to hide out, you may end up cutting ties with the very people you set out to serve, but if your no becomes too seductive, you can become too comfortable there instead, never actually shipping your work, because shipping your work means reentering the world with a yes” – Seth Godin
You don’t think your way past the discomfort. You work your way past it. The feeling doesn’t disappear before you begin. It disappears because you did. That discomfort isn’t evidence that you don’t belong. It’s evidence that you’re doing something that matters.
Practice gives depth to your knowledge
“The very nature of innovation is to act as if you’re on to something, as if it is going to work, as if you have a right to be here.” – Seth Godin
There is a kind of knowledge that only comes through making, not through reading about it, not through planning it, not through thinking carefully about what you might one day do. The act itself produces understanding that no amount of prior thinking could have arrived at. The hand knows things the mind hasn’t figured out yet.
Michael Polanyi called this tacit knowledge:
“We can know more than we can tell.”
The things we know that we cannot fully articulate. A surgeon who feels when something is wrong before they can name it. A musician who hears a note slightly off before consciously processing the sound. A designer who looks at a layout and knows something isn’t right before they can say what. This knowledge lives in practice, not in instruction.
When you make something – paint, write, design, build – you are forced into a series of micro-decisions that thinking alone would never surface. Should this be darker or lighter? Longer or shorter? Does this feel right? These questions cannot be answered in the abstract. They only become answerable in contact with the material. The material talks back and in responding to it, you learn something about what you actually think, value, and know, which you couldn’t have accessed any other way.
This is why artists often say they don’t know what a piece is about until it’s finished. The making is the thinking. They are not two separate stages.
I learned this the hard way with an interactive installation I once designed. I was aware of the potential limitations going in, but I trusted my knowledge too much and didn’t have enough practice to pivot when I needed to. I doubled down on my trust and I ran into exactly the mistakes I had been warned about. The installation became one I wanted to erase, not because observers didn’t find it interesting, but because it didn’t come out as I had envisioned. The journey was painful and informative in equal measure and one I will not forget.
What I understand now is that expertise also carries a risk. The more you know, the harder it becomes to see a thing freshly; to encounter it the way someone without your knowledge would. In design, we call this the curse of knowledge. We test our work with real users precisely because our own expertise has overridden our beginner’s eye. Practice keeps that eye alive. It forces you back into contact with reality before your assumptions calcify into certainty.
The Hours
If you aren’t result focused, if the trust you had in yourself has become a fragile cycle in need of reassurance, shipping your work to the world is fraught. And so it might be easier to stay warm in the narcissism of only saying yes or always saying no,” – Seth Godin
I’ve been thinking about those ten thousand hours again.
For a long time I believed I was spending them well: reading, watching, reflecting, building a private interior life rich enough to eventually become something public, and in some ways I was. The knowledge accumulated. The taste developed. The curiosity deepened.
But knowledge without contact with the world is only half the equation. The hours I spent inside my own head were real hours. They just weren’t hours of practice and practice hours count differently because they are the only ones that leave something behind. Something that exists outside of you. Something that can be seen, responded to, built upon, and corrected.
Gladwell’s ten thousand hours always implied a practice. A repetition. A showing up. What I missed for a long time was that thinking about the practice isn’t the practice; you cannot accumulate practice hours by thinking about your practice.
The loop only breaks one way: you begin.
Not when you are ready. Not when the conditions are right. Not when you have thought about it long enough to feel certain. You begin because beginning is the only thing that produces the kind of knowing that makes the next beginning easier.
The hand arrives before the mind catches up. The work it leaves behind is the only evidence that ever really mattered.
Here’s what I’ve been up to:
- Leading the brand design for TechNisa, a new hackathon in the GTA happening this summer for muslim women in tech! Registrations are open here.
- Looking forward to the launch of Ihsan App very soon!! Learn more about Ihsan App here.
- Joined the RGD project-based mentorship program for the summer. Hope to present a new project by August!
- Completed a creative strategy bootcamp! Definitely an informative journey and I’m excited to test out what I have learned.
- Resumed learning French for the nth time, but with real hope of getting somewhere this time. Shoot a message if you are a French learner or speaker. I would love to have language learning buddies!!
In The Light
- Luvi (IG @thruluvislens): a really dear friend of mine who is a content creator for brands and weddings. I love how she really shows the rawest moments of people. Her professionalism and persistence amazes me and pushes me further. She has repeatedly proven that action beats thought at every step of the way.
