It’s been said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice and preparation to be an expert at something (notably in the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell). 10,000 hours to be a genius, to be a success. The Beatles are the common example. They were no overnight success; by the time they started hitting it big, they had played over a thousand shows (mostly in Germany).

Ten thousand hours is a pretty long time. It’s well over a solid year of practice with no sleeping or eating to get in the way. If you practiced something for two hours a day, every day, it would add up to over 13 and a half years. At the time of this writing, I’ve been playing guitar for about 15 years. Sometimes I’ve played for 4 hours in a day. Sometimes I’ve played for no hours in a day.

Am I an expert musician? I wouldn’t personally say so. But I’ve certainly come a long, long way. The thought of going back and doing it all again is almost excruciating. I’m at a point where I really feel good things are happening and I’m actually ready, willing and prepared for them to happen. But that’s a tough place to get to. If you had told me even a couple years ago that I’d have to wait at least another couple years, I’d have gone a little crazy. Sometimes it’s really good to not know things.

But what I wonder about the 10,000 hour rule is if emotional time counts. There have been countless minutes that I did not spend working on music, for example times when I couldn’t do it because I was stuck in a classroom learning about the symbolism of The Great Gatsby. But many of those same minutes were spent in a place completely away from where I physically was. A place where I was composing music in my head, conjuring ideas for promoting the next show, dreaming about the feeling of being in the recording studio with a guitar in my hand, laying down a track that moved me. Those were genuine emotional hours I’ve put into music. If they counted, I’d say I reached the 10,000 mark long ago.

Practice makes perfect, but passion makes it authentic.