In “This is Your Brain on Music”, Daniel Levitin, writes that:
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
Ten thousand hours is a long time. Right?
Well… Not really. Not if the thing you’re spending your time on is a passion. I guarantee that most of you reading this blog are, by that definition, experts at a lot of things. Expert gamers, expert readers, etc.
Conventional writing wisdom says that you have to write a million words of crap before you right anything worth reading. I don’t think that’s very far from the truth. I know I wrote reams of drivel before even pretending that this was a career I thought I could pursue.
Wait… That sounds way more noble than it should. The truth is I’ve always written. I can’t stop. It’s a disease, and there isn’t cure. The chance to make a living doing it is a boon, but if I were locked in a room by myself with nothing to write on, I’d be composing (and recomposing) sentences in my head until my brain was full.
So if you’re out there and you want to write, do it. And don’t stop. Be willing to write crap because, at least for a while, the ONLY thing you have to do is get the old, familiar, useless, cliche, redundant words out of your system so that you can find the right ones, buried down deep.
