Just started reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the first chapters in the book is titled: The 10,000 Hour Rule. His theory is that being truly great at something doesn't take talent so much as practice. Doing it over and over again, educating yourself, training, making mistakes, working out problems. Effort and time is what distinguishes the Great from the good. Ten thousand hours is a lot of time to spend on something, and really requires perserverance and a great amount of passion, perhaps this is what actually makes a person Great at what they do. That is what is their talent actually is; Great perserverance and passion. Of course being the self absorbed writer that I claim to be, I thought immediately how I don't have enough hours of doing one thing: Maybe I have an accumulated 8,000 hours doing a bunch of things that are kind of related: Candymaking, Cooking and Baking, and writing about it . I wasted at least 2,000 hours shopping, gossiping, and psuedo-existential cotemplation. Not sure 10,000 hours of Mothering can even be claimed.... Technically I've put in much more than 10,000 hours, as there are 8,736 hours in a single year. But how many of those thousands of hours were performed with full gusto,consciousness, and awareness? I'd like to hope at least a coupla thousand.
