Skills, Talent, and just enjoying the damn moment - Page 3

"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," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. "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. Of course, this doesn't address why some
people get more out of their practice sessions than others
do. But no one has yet found a case in which true worldclass
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."

This is true even of people we think of as prodigies.
Mozart, for example, famously started writing music
at six. But, writes the psychologist Michael Howe in his
book Genius Explained,

by the standards of mature composers, Mozart's early
works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were
all probably written down by his father, and perhaps
improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang's childhood
compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for
piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works
by other composers. Of those concertos that only contain
music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now
regarded as a masterwork (No. 9, K. 271) was not com-
posed until he was twenty-one: by that time Mozart had
already been composing concertos for ten years.

The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart,
he argues, actually "developed late," since he didn't produce
his greatest work until he had been composing for
more than twenty years.