I have also spend a lot of hours. I’m not sure if doing the right things.

Thanks for sharing this!

However, I would like to point out that most people are not simply given piano’s or other instruments. Musical gear is expensive.

And more so, in the case of my 10,000 hours: photography.

My camera was 3K with the lens, and I need other lens which are multiple hundreds each. A light set isn’t cheap either, or a flash.

Starting out all you need is time and a camera someone gave you, but once it becomes more, there is definite cost, too. It is 100% worth it though.

AndreaS has in mind all the young men (and some young women, surely) who while away the hours playing computer games. I have in mind the young people who grew up pushing themselves incredibly hard at incredibly competitive activities (activities that often either were chosen for them when they were too young to do anything about it, or that they chose themselves, but less out of genuine interest than out of the desire to have something suitably impressive to put on a college application), constantly hearing that if you’re not one of the best, you don’t deserve to be there at all, and that there’s nothing more shameful than quitting.

I’ve seen what that kind of pressure can do to people, and it’s not pretty. They (well, we) really do need to hear that it’s OK not to care about MASTERING a particular activity, and just to do it for fun.

The point is that you *may have to* spend that much time to MASTER a skill.

If you don’t care about MASTERING anything, then ignore this. If you do care, then quit saying it’s too much time. No amount of time is too much if you truly want to master something. It takes as much time as it takes, and if you care, the time doesn’t matter.

I think AndreaS has the best comment here so far. She gets it.

Jiu jitsu in particular, is time consuming and needs to be done regularly otherwise you will not improve. I have considered giving it up because music is my dream… but sometimes I don’t feel particularly inspired to create music. Plus, I think it is important to maintain yourself physically with some kind of activity involving exercise.

I think the best solution for people like me is rigid time management.

Post is a waste of time… you’re basically saying the more you do, the more money you spend. Well, yeah, obviously right?

Speaking from experience, I know it opened the doors for my becoming a video game tester. Which opened the doors for further analytical thinking, which translated into running stores and employees. “Wasting time” playing video games is an archaic mentality; just witness the success of Facebook applications.

“Just playing games” is a school of thought best left in the past. There is game theory, building physics engines, crafting 3D models, world design and artistic rendering that goes into the entire process. These people get paid quite a bit of money, and that’s before we extend the sphere of influence into science, space travel and programming in general.

“Ruined a generation of men?” Hardly. I think it more likely that the older generation has spent more time trying to quash the enthusiasm instead of harnessing it and seeking alternative methods of expression.

So put me in the camp that says it’s OK to just enjoy doing something without striving to become (or even wanting to be) an expert at it. And it’s also OK if your interests change long before you hit 10,000 hours, as they sometimes do.

Not only is it morally OK (and…why wouldn’t it be?), but it can also be plenty frugal. Suppose your friend the piano teacher spent $1000 in piano-related start-up costs, but ended up giving it up after 1000 hours (say, an hour a day for three years). That’s still just $1/hour – and if she sold the piano at the end, she could get a lot of that money back. Unless you’re really strapped for cash, the difference between ten cents and one dollar for an hour of leisure activity is not that much.

It seems a bit strange that you’re using your own piano playing as an example here, since it hasn’t even been 10,000 hours, total, since you started your piano lessons (and I don’t suppose you’ve been practicing for anywhere near 24 hours a day). All that your example really proves, so far, is that certain activities become more enjoyable once you gain a basic level of competence.

That could have been an interesting topic for a post, itself. But to say that it’s always a great idea to pick a hobby and become an expert at it, when you haven’t actually done that yet, is a bit like saying (if you’ll forgive me for bringing this up), “It’ll be so much fun to drive all around the Midwest with three children under the age of five,” before you’d actually done it.