For a couple of years now I had heard this rather new adage that mastery of anything comes at about ten thousand hours. The idea is basically that if you spend ten thousand hours of concentrated study on a subject, then by default you have mastered it. It's a great idea and definitely a way to give some sort of quantifiable idiom to mastery.
But, I don't necessarily believe it.
Still, the challenge of getting ten thousand hours gets at me. If you break that down, that is 416.66 days. Over a year straight of playing before you are a master at your musical instrument. When you put in all the other things in life like family, food, sleep, church, video games, movies, driving, etc, etc... That sort of commitment and achievement is sort of awesome!
Doing a small amount of research as I am writing this post, I came across someone who is working on 10,000 hours towards golf mastery. Apparently, this guy quit his job and devoted himself to it. I can't tell if I'm inspired or skeptical. Either way, I'm not alone on my quest.
For me, I can't see myself getting more than about a an hour to two hours each day of practice and play time. I would wrap any time on the fretboard as counting for this because I try earnestly to be learning even in a performance situation. I don't believe you can ever not be learning. So, at 2 hours a day, it should take me 5,000 days to achieve. That's 13 years. Damn.
But what about just a thousand hours? I mean, I've already been playing music since 1992. I've got a lot of back time to look at. Now, we are just talking 500 days. Even though I see 13 years as obtainable, just under two is much more palatable.
So, there is my first goal... Log 1,000 hours of play time. Once I've accomplished that, we'll see what is next.
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