The trick is that some professions have a greater scarcity of people putting in that 10,000 hours which colors what is perceived as out of the ordinary. I am a software engineer, and have been working at it for, I estimate… probably 25,000 hours or so. I’m pretty good, but am I a virtuoso? Well, the thing is engineers with 25,000 hours logged doing that kind of work isn’t that rare.

In fact people with 25,000 hours playing the cello are much rarer since it’s non-conformist and generally not easy to make a living from.

So, the idea of virtuosity is making it sound a bit more romantic than it really is. You could spend 30,000 hours on something, but if the level of competition is high within that area, no one would see it as special.

In a nutshell, it’s better to focus on doing something different, rather than be a beancounter trying to hit the magical 10,000 hours threshold.

I ended up going to Naturopathic medical school and then specializing in an even more obscure domain, Homeopathy. Coming full circle back to art and making money from it….is exciting. I’m getting pretty close to 10,000 hours of each. (love Gladwell’s books, haven’t read his most recent yet.)

I remember a teacher once saying it’s hard to be good at one thing, nevermind many things. That idea was planted long ago. I’m so impatient and ADD (and I’m in my 40′s) that it took me ’til now to reap the benefit of having gone back, over and over and over, to those two things I love most.

In the end, that thing that gets you excited is the only one that will stick, is what I’ve learned. I never get bored of those two things, and I was excited from the first minute. Blink!

The idea of having to do hours of practice to become a virtuoso is pretty firmly backed up by evidence. That it goes against the hectic Western lifestyle is a pretty stark comment on our society, where life is driven by business that wants people to have profitable skills and not necessarily extraordinary ones.

The truth is that if you tell a kid (or an adult for that matter) they are going to have to devote 10,000 hours to working on something before they will be exceptional, that is going to have almost no bearing on whether or not they will do what it takes.

Yes, a very disciplined adult or child’s parent might take the steps necesary to force themselves to do the practice, but I think that’s a pretty bad idea. From what I’ve found when it comes to a passion for something the time finds you, not the other way round. If you truly want to be a virtuoso it will happen, so long as you let yourself slack off things that don’t interest you and give yourself the time and tools to become highly skilled.