Ten thousand hours

I just spent a lovely couple of hours watching the National Figure Skating championships, a run up to the Olympics.  It's so beautiful to watch. Even with an occasional missed landing or slip I have to marvel at the sheer beauty of it all and I'm reminded of a comment I heard recently, "It takes 10,000 hours of practice to really master any skill." A little math showed me that that works out to about 3.5 hours a day (365 days a year) for nine years or 5 hours a day for five years.  No matter how you figure it that's a lot of time spent working toward perfection and I'm sure that's actually less time than most of the skaters have spent. That's a lot of hard work to make it look so easy.  Can't wait for the Olympics.