Dan and I just had a lovely 24-hour date to Chicago. We left on Sunday after church and returned late Monday night. We spent the bulk of the day Monday in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it was heavenly. I love art museums so much, but visiting one with the children is so not fun. We just wandered around looking at all the beautiful, cool, thought-provoking things our hearts could desire, with no one complaining or trying to damage the art, no evil looks from the museum guards, no sounds of tortured animals coming from our giant, overloaded strollers. Ahh.
I see from the date of my last post that my promise to return to blogging after a short break for my brother's wedding back in May has gone unfulfilled. We shall see if I can get back on the blogging train after a few months off. Thank you to my beloved LL for her recent comment requesting that I start writing again. I just finished a great book today, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, and it inspired me to return to my daily writing exercises.
The Art Institute's website allows a user to create their own gallery of favorite pieces from the museum and comment on them. Yesterday I wasn't quite ready to return to the real world, and I spent several hours setting up my own online memento from our trip. If you would like to see it, I believe this link will take you there.
Here is my question of the day, inspired by the book I just read. If someone told you that you could become extremely good at something just by putting a set number of hours of time into practicing it (say 10,000 hours), what thing or things would you choose to become extremely good at? Write in and let me know!
4 comments:
I've heard the same thing. There are a few things on my list that I think I'll get to eventually:
Piano (I just didn't understand practicing when I was little)
Writing Fiction
So good to have you back.
Let's see....parenting....kindness...patience...listening..
and piano.
Nothing. I've read that you actually can become proficient at anything if you spend 10,000 hours practicing. I'm waaaaaay too lazy to invest that much time in anything.
What I'd LIKE to be good at is the stuff Suzanne said - a good mom, kind, patient, good listener, I'd add a good wife and a good friend. The problem is just the time investment. Say I spend a full half day every day without fail practicing. That is over 830 days - over 2 years. But your practice can't just be 12 consecutive hours - you can really only practice something properly for, like, 2-3 hours at a time before you have to take a break. So if you figure I have 2 sessions per day at 3 hours each, I'm practicing 6 hours per day and in only 4.56 years I'll be a good mom. If we're being realistic, I can't practice things simultaneously, so to achieve all 6 goals will take 27.4 years of perfect practice and never screwing up. By then the kids are all grown up and I'm in early stage Alzheimer's and I can't remember my husband or friends anyway. :-)
But seriously, I've thought about it before and I find the idea of such a huge investment to be really discouraging.
I would like to make changes needed to be a good parent, kind, patient, etc. And I have always wanted to learn to paint, and maybe learn to play the guitar and harmonica.....
Forgot to ask - which book are you reading?
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