If you’ve never painted before, you wouldn’t decide one day to go out and buy oils, brushes, and canvases, start painting, and then try to show your artwork at a high-end gallery and sell your pieces to the public next week.
If you’ve never played guitar, but you’ve listened to music all your life, can you buy a guitar, figure out in a day or a month or a year how to make it produce the sounds you want, and go out and get a recording contract or land a gig with a famous band? Or buy a piano and expect to be on stage at Carnegie Hall in six months?
But: “I’ve read and written English all my life. I’ve read novels. I have stories in my head, so I’m going to become a writer. What else could I possibly need to know?”
Ten thousand hours of practice is a good rule-of-thumb for almost any endeavor. That’s how long it takes to build natural muscle memory in order to begin mastering any such task.
The 10,000-hour and million-word axioms
All the various factors th…
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