So I finished Levitin's The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
and really l liked it so I gamely purchased his first book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. It was wonderful. Really. Until I got to the part about 10,000 hours."... 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 the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years."
For some reason I became irrationally irritated by this. Particularly since he mentioned "fiction writers" by profession...along with master criminals. Rather an interesting sensation to be grouped with master criminals.
Posts
