So, what is a decade anyway? Well, here are a few facts I’ve come across these last days since I’ve been thinking about this (just the numerological, round aspect of a decade amazes me):

• A decade is half of the time the Simpsons and Achtung Baby have been around. It’s the time it took the Beatles to reach the peak of their career since they first started playing.
• As Gladwell describes in Outliers, a decade is roughly what it takes to accumulate 10,000 hours practicing a given discipline, which in turn will make you an expert or erudite in it.
• A decade is what it took me to complete all the studies that I was destined to do in my life (my first semester in college started exactly 10 years ago and I finished grad school only a few months ago).
• I can also imagine that a decade is a fair estimate of the time it takes to actually accomplish something significant when working for a single organization. I keep asking myself whether I will be of the “decade type” and in which company will it be. What will be that substantial change that I will steer inside that company? In any case, I hope to find hints of this soon.
• A decade is a lot of time but it’s also merely one tenth (roughly) of the time we’ll all live.

Today it’s the beginning, which is the end, which is the beginning of a decade. What do you think of it? Of the one past and the one starting? Any decade-ish thoughts?

And FYI, the decade commonly referred to as the “two thousands” ended on December 31st, 2009.