How long does mastery take

Some experts have attempted to answer the question: How long it takes to learn a skill? The biggest factor is a desired level of expertise with the skill. Do you want to become a master? One properly referenced article says it takes 10, hours to master a skill , which translates to about 9 years consider 5 days a week, spending 4 hours a day. The masters of your field are often busy and inundated with requests for mentorship.

Greene suggests volunteering your time for their benefit as a strategy for wooing a potential mentor:. Do not shy away from anything menial or secretarial. You want person-to-person access, however you can get it. In these cases, though not ideal, turn to other sources for expertise: peer groups, books, podcasts, Twitter. Often the people whose skills you want to acquire are a click away, sharing their thoughts in an interview or tweeting about the early failures they faced in their career.

This can give you an up-close view of their thought process and how they work. Learning by observation , through a slew of virtual mentors, can be a temporary substitute for a real mentor. However, most performance experts say real-life mentorship is the gold standard. Leonard echoes this sentiment:. Your mentor can help you along the path of mastery, having embarked on the same one themselves.

However, at a certain point your mentor-mentee relationship will make a shift. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, your goal should eventually be to surpass your mentor.

Many historical examples of mentor-mentee relationships have resulted in eventual jealousy and discontentment. Your aim should be to avoid this and instead become peers, egos unbruised. In all, the best mentorship relationships can supercharge your growth and accelerate your learning. He had no concept of what awaited him when he moved to compete internationally in Taiwan.

Waitzkin lost his first match there and resolved to come back and win it all. He eventually secured a victory. But his initial mistake was in underestimating his opponent:. And sure enough, the top competitors were armed with a skill set I had never dreamed of. Mediocrity can be self-nurturing, and frankly, many U. Push Hands players delude themselves about their level of proficiency. Achieving mastery necessarily means we have to rise to the level of other masters.

The former will challenge us and force us to rise to the occasion. The latter will leave us complacent with no real way to improve. Meet the masters of your field on their home court. If you want to be a prolific filmmaker, move to Los Angeles. If you want to study artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley remains the largest tech hub in the world. While mastery remains a journey rather than a destination, setting goals and milestones can spur your progress forward.

Leonard, explains this seeming contradiction:. Playing big, by concentrating in areas of expertise, competing against strong opponents, and setting ambitious goals, are all strategies to move along the path of mastery. Playing with amateurs is comfortable as you rack up win after win.

On the path to mastery, get comfortable with this feeling of failure. Instead of fearing it, move towards it. We learn more of our life lessons from failure, not success. Failures cement what we did wrong in our brains, a permanent mark on our minds that reminds us to do better. In fact, without failure, you would be unable to ascend to new levels. He suggests the following:.

He could have taken my improvement as a chance to raise his game, but instead he opted out. Failure is uncomfortable and makes us feel weak and powerless. On any important pursuit, obstacles will arise. Mastery is no different. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean. Our greatest power over resistance is knowing of its existence and the many forms it can take: complacency, stagnation, distraction, emotional turmoil, rejection, and burnout.

Leonard cites the same phenomenon:. This section will detail the various setbacks that can lead us astray from our chosen path and pull us away from mastery.

Mastering your own emotions is the skill on which every true pursuit of mastery is built. Without a foundation of mental resilience , the practice of mastery is built on shaky ground and often comes tumbling to the ground. Ascending fields often means working closely with collaborators. It requires mastering the forms of your field. The distractions of everyday work and life have a way of whittling hours from the little time you do have.

Waitzkin bemoans a culture that emphasizes distraction over focus:. We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. But distraction is much broader than digital disturbances. Often we use other distractions as a form of procrastination: workplace drama, demands on our time, or shortcuts that promise a fast path to where we want to go.

By maintaining a singular focus, we can be more equipped to handle distractions. Here are a few strategies to combat them head-on:. These plateaus can last weeks, months or even years. As we watch peers brush past us and feel our own passion fade away, it can be tempting to give up on our deliberate practice and forgo the path of mastery all together. Recognize this phase as part of the journey. The path to excellence is long and arduous.

Leonard provides reassurance that plateaus and normal and expected:. Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it. By recognizing this phase, you can cultivate patience. Greene describes overcoming this obstacle:.

You develop patience. Boredom no longer signals the need for distraction, but rather the need for new challenges to conquer. It asks people to practice going through life with a sense of openness and to avoid being jaded with expectations and preconceived notions.

Rather than let plateaus and backslides derail you entirely, take a step back and find ways to recapture the energy and openness you felt when you were just starting out.

Waitzkin describes the importance of staying curious while facing challenges:. You have to make obstacles spur you to creative new angles in the learning process. When we stay the course while experiencing a plateau, we often come back better than before. Waitzkin describes his own plateaus as a chess competitor and how he dealt with them:.

I had a burning love for chess and so I pushed through the rocky periods with a can-do attitude. Avoid complacency. For some, a plateau brings insecurity and sadness. For others, it brings complacency. Greene warns against this feeling of complacency:. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die. A study of musical trainees at the Music Academy of Berlin supports this theory.

The researchers studied superior students who went on to become concert pianists and have future concert careers. They practiced 24 hours a week. Good students practiced nine hours per week. Similar patterns of long and intensive practice are found among athletes, chess players, mathematicians, and memory virtuosos.

Therefore, the year rule alone does not explain the success of experts. Rather, it is putting in the time and effort on a daily and weekly basis over a sustained period. Restak asked professor K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University who has spent his lifetime studying superior performers in the arts, sciences, and sports. Key to the debate of practice versus talent is the generally accepted year rule, which says it takes 10 years of learning and practicing a skill or craft before reaching an expert level of performance.

Talent Versus Hard Work Important implications arise from the answers to these questions. Professor Restak also maintains an active private practice in neurology and neuropsychiatry in Washington, D. About Kate Findley Articles. Kate is a writer, novelist, and blogger living in Los Angeles.