Numinous Nonsense

My buddy Duff made a great point, echoing someone in the personal development blog community, about mastery taking something like 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. From his blog:

A great article was published today on LifeClever about the oft mentioned claim that mastery of something takes about 10,000 hours of practice.

From what I’ve seen, this is true. This means that we are unlikely to master very many things! For it would take 5 years of 5.5 hours a day of practice, or 10 years of 2.75 hours a day of practice to master something by this formula. …

What one thing would you like to master? What is your life purpose and passion?

I left this comment: Yeah, that sounds about right. The one thing I’ve devoted the most time to (and obviously you already know this) is to formal meditation practice. From the little over 5 years practicing daily about an hour a day + the 6 1/2 months of full time practice I’d say I’ve spent about 4,000 hours meditating thus far, and I could totally see it taking near to 10,000 hours to really see having a handle on some of this stuff. That being said, it is amazing to see how hours in really do equal results out. Without getting to reductionistic about it, I do really think that looking at mastery in these terms makes anything possible, though as you mention one doesn’t have the time for everything (at least not until radical life extension becomes a reality) and so we have to narrow some of it down and go deep. Here’s to mastery!