What is the significance of ten thousand hours? Apparently that is the approximate amount of time it takes to achieve mastery in a complex undertaking such as playing an instrument. That roughly equates to three hours a day for ten years - which corresponds to the amount of experience a young conservatoire graduate will have if they start playing at a precociously young age.
Really focused practising not only improves performance. It produces a state of great happiness - what psychologists refer to as "flow". Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
In English - the purest form of happiness there is!
Positive psychlogist Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following as accompanying an experience of flow:
 | Clear attainable goals aligned with current skills |
| Deep concentration and close focus |
| A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness |
| Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered |
| An effective feedback loop, mistakes are noticed and corrected |
| Balance between ability level and challenge |
| Sense of personal control |
| Intrinsically rewarding, music for music's sake |
Of course there will be days when you don't want to play. After an exam or a concert you should rest. And every now and then you may want to step away from Bach and play Piazzola instead. But I hope that when you do sit down to work on something, you do usually find that you get so involved in it that you experience at least a little bit of this feeling every time. If not, please find something that does give you that sense of 'flow', break the new gently to your teacher and sell the piano!
Ideas to make practising more effective:
