This is part of the transcript from a high school leadership workshop Dr. Lauber conducted in Indiana, PA in 2011.

Procedural knowledge is different from semantic knowledge. For procedural knowledge, I don’t care if you can talk about it.  Sit down and get it done efficiently, quickly, correctly.  That’s what I need.  Some jobs demand this kind of knowledge. Other jobs need semantic knowledge – I need you to talk; I need you to write; it’s got to be verbalizable.

Interestingly, there’s this very special job called teaching which involves some of both.  You have to verbalize what other people have to do.  My favorite college football coach is Lou Holtz.  You guys know Lou Holtz?  He’s on the ESPN broadcast. Maybe you’ve seen him on ABC and CBS and NBC.  Lou Holtz is not a good football player by any stretch of the imagination – little tiny guy.  But he’s great at verbalizing the information.  And that makes him a great coach because he can tell you what you need to do to get that job done.

Well, that’s one fundamental thing I want you to keep in the back of your head.  “I’m developing different kinds of knowledge throughout my entire life.  Some of that knowledge is proceduralized; some of that is verbalizable; some of it goes both ways.”

Next demo: anybody here learning how to drive a car yet?  Couple hands going up.  Anybody have a stick shift?  Keep your hand up.  All right, let’s pick on this table.  Tell me how to drive a stick shift.

Press the clutch in with your foot.  Give it a little bit of gas at the same time.  You’re all close enough to drive, and you kind of know what he’s talking about.  The stick shift has an extra gear at the bottom called a clutch.  It’s a fairly complicated thing to do in a sense – you’ve got to do this, and you’ve got to get this in there, and you’ve got to let up, and you’ve got to press the gas.  It takes practice, doesn’t it, my friend?

Yeah, your first time does not produce beautifully shifting gears, but it gets better and better.  Has anybody driven long enough that it’s automatic? You don’t even think about it now?  Yeah, can you drive a stick shift?  You don’t even bother saying to yourself, “Press the clutch; move the shift.”  How about our advisors?  Driving a stick shift is automatic?  It becomes an automatic behavior.

So some things start verbalizable, and over time, they become proceduralized and automatic.  That means you become an expert at it.  You now have expert performance at it.

Now if you want to be really, really good at some particular discipline in life, then people have done these studies.  Carnegie Mellon is one of the leading institutions that researches this.  Guess how many hours it takes to get to the cutting edge of any discipline – art, science, math – doesn’t really matter what.  How many hours?

A few hundred hours.  Anybody else?  Do I hear a higher bid?

Five years, how many hours would that be?  That’s a good guess, though.

That’s actually really accurate – 10,000 hours – 10,000 hours of hard concentrated study to be an expert.  And by expert, I mean you’re really at the top of the field, computer programming, art, music doesn’t really matter.  That’s 10,000 hours.  If you work 40 hours a week, you get about 2,000 hours of work in a year.  That takes about five years.  So she was dead on.

Here’s the good news, folks, within five years if you work hard enough, you can get really, really good at something, and it could be something that you proceduralize and you become automatic at.  It’s something that you can develop as a skill.  It’s not going to happen overnight.  I don’t care what your natural talents are.  It’s not going to happen overnight.  It’s going to take some of that study.