10,000 hrs of practice

You often hear in performance studies that the number of hours of practice required to achieve mastery in a particular domain is 10,000. I don't know how legitimate this number is but it seems to have entered the public discussion. Even meditators in studies are often compared by how many hours they've sat in meditation. Because of this, I was interested to see how long it would take to reach 10,000 hrs given a certain number of sessions/day for a certain amount of time. So I turned to Excel. Attached you will find a little tool to plug in the amount of time you sit for each session. It will spit out a graph showing how many years it would take to reach 10,000 hrs as a function of minutes per sessions and sessions per day. Thought it was a fun little tool and wanted to share it with everyone.

Take care.

Jake2


Attachment: # Yrs for 10,000 Hours of Meditation study.xlsx (13.0KB)

I can't bear to look!

It's seemed to me that meditation is a skill that one can get very good at, and one can also get very good at different kinds of meditation. I've done Tibetan visualizations and I'm sure I'm no where near as good at maintaining the details in the imagery in my mind's eye as the lama who is leading, who has been doing it for over a decade or more. I never have mastered Jhanas, which some friends of mine can whiz through with no effort after years of practice or sustain different ones for long periods.

The same's true for ritual magick, and I admire people with immense knowledge of arcane rituals, all committed to memory and performed with lovely equipment. But results can be obtained without that, which is a relief, because it's apparently my fate to be a jack of all trades type dabbler in many things, rather than a specialist with deep skills in one or another particular technique.

Chris-- PALABRA in excelsis!