Have you ever heard of the ten thousand hour theory? It says that in order to become an expert in something you need to invest ten thousand hours. Really it’s just a fancy way of saying that if you want something- to get great at an activity, to master a skill, to acquire knowledge- you have to work hard. It’s a great message and I’ll tell you how it applies to learning how to DJ.

In today’s world people always want the quick fix. Just look at the infomercials advertising the latest weight-loss pill or ab-sculpting device. In the era of something-for-nothing, it’s an important lesson that if you want something you have to be willing to make the investment. Put your money where your mouth is.

At the same time though I hope you’re doing some math in your head and asking yourself “10,000?! Really?!” By working 40 hours per week, the average American spends 2,000 hours a year at work. That means by using this logic, if you treated your hobby as a full time job it would take you five years to become an expert in it!

Does that mean that unless you treat your side pursuit as a second job you have no hope of becoming an expert? Does that mean the waitress can’t start a consulting business on the side? Does that mean the cubicle-jockey can’t launch a successful blog on nights and weekends?

There’s a growing group of people, many who identify as “life hackers”, who would say of course not. The ten thousand hour believers embody hard work, but life hacking is all about working smart. They constantly ask themselves “How can we maximize our time to make the greatest progress? How can we use minimal inputs to achieve maximal outputs?” That’s just a complicated way of saying how do you make the most of what you’ve got?

Life hackers would argue that rather than focusing on the number of hours spent, it’s more important to focus on how the hours are spent. Sure, 10,000 hours will bring you closer to mastery in any given pursuit, but are those all productive hours? Are you spending your time on the most important things?

The best gameplan is to figure out what the most high-value activities are. What is the one biggest bang for your buck? Spend your time doing that first to achieve the greatest improvement in the littlest time.

For example, learning a second language is high on many people’s to-do list. Just look at how popular Rosetta Stone is. Unfortunately though most people give up quickly and say “I’m just not a natural language learner.”

Did you know though that in Spanish, if you were to memorize the most common 300 words you would be able to understand 75% of spoken conversations? Add 700 words and memorize the most common 1,000 and you’ll be able to follow almost 90%! But, if you want to understand 95%+ you will have to memorize the 5,000 most common words. It’s called diminishing returns. So the point is, it’s not about learning the most words possible, it’s about learning the right words.

Let’s apply this to learning how to DJ. Sure you could buy some equipment and some software, start playing around and try to mimic the sounds of your favorite artists. This is the equivalent of stumbling blindly in the dark though. It would be like picking up your Spanish dictionary and memorizing words at random. You need someone to show you the most important things to focus on first.

That’s where DJ Courses Online comes in. It’s run by expert DJs who have learned how to DJ the hard way so that you don’t have to. They’ve broken their skills down into easy-to-learn courses so that you can make huge improvements extremely fast. If you want to hack your way to becoming a great DJ, there’s no better way!