Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, talks about how you need 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something. Think about it. To be good at something we have to spend 27.397 hours per day to “get there” in a year. No time off for holidays. Over three years, it would take 9.13 hours per day including holidays.
Early on, I read all the time about how to improve this or that, what the meaning of real love should be, how to improve my business that in essence had a flawed business model that no “new” management approach could ever correct. They wrote with such certainty. They made it sound easy. They made it sound like “it” could be attained quickly.
I never found anything involving doing something different as being easy.
In fact, everything was “damn hard” the first few times.
Sometimes it got easier. (But not always)
I had to fight my past, my surroundings, my circumstances, my limited knowledge, my bad behavior, my routine, my responsibilities, my fatigue, my confusion. My circle of friends was way too small and too much like me to understand or teach me anything different.
I no longer look at the 10,000 hours with envy.
I focus simply on the 1 hour that I need to commit to anything new for the first time.
And then look for the next hour to commit again
hoping that, in time, the hours would come more easily
before I become discouraged when trying something new.