10,000 hours of practice by age 20. Thus the rule. Many elite
performers complete their journey in about ten years, which, if you do
the math, is an average of about three hours of deliberate practice a
day, every day, 365 days a year. Now, if your ONE Thing relates to
work and you put in 250 workdays a year (five days a week for 50
weeks), to keep pace on your mastery journey you’ll need to average
four hours a day. Sound familiar? It’s not a random number. That’s
the amount of time you need to time block every day for your ONE
Thing.
More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested.
Michelangelo once said, “If the people knew how hard I had to work
to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all.” His point is
obvious. Time on a task, over time, eventually beats talent every time.
I’d say you can “book that,” but actually you should “block it.”
When you commit to time block your ONE Thing, make sure you
approach it with a mastery mentality. This will give you the best
opportunity to be the most productive you can be, and ultimately the
best you can become. And here’s what’s interesting: the more
productive you are, the more likely you are to receive several
additional payoffs you would otherwise have missed. The pursuit of
mastery bears gifts.
As you progress along the path of mastery, both your self-
confidence and your success competence will grow. You’ll make a
discovery: the path of mastery is not so different from one pursuit to
the next. What might pleasantly surprise you is how giving yourself
over to mastering ONE Thing serves as a platform for, and speeds up
the process of, doing other things. Knowledge begets knowledge and
skills build on skills. It’s what makes future dominoes fall more
easily.
Mastery is a pursuit that keeps giving, because it’s a path that
never ends. In his landmark book Mastery, George Leonard tells the
story of Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo. According to legend, as
coco
(coco)
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