Today is my birthday, so I’m ruminating about my past, the present, and the future. Of these three categories, my past is definitely the largest. The present will be gone tomorrow, and the future is yet to arrive.
I’ve decided when it does I am going to pay more attention to my piano playing. I have spent myriad hours and many dollars in pursuit of learning how to play this instrument. Still, it baffles me. I’m not one to do things I don’t do well; so I admit that often the first hurdle to overcome is to simply sit down at the piano and play, because it is a struggle.
I read a quote recently that said (and I paraphrase) that it takes ten years or ten thousand hours to become accomplished at something to the point where you can repeatedly do it well. Reduced to mathematical components, this equates to twenty hours a week for ten years. I try to practice piano four hours a week, which means I need to live to one hundred to reach elite status.
I think about this, since I’ve been a freelance writer much of my life. I’ve certainly exhausted more than ten thousand hours in that endeavor, and writing is more like breathing than working. I hope in the next year I can say piano is starting to move in that direction too.
Then I won’t have to come back as a child piano prodigy in my next life.
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