At age 16, my bedroom looked like daVinci's studio or Einstein's lab. Electronics, chemistry, philosophy, literature -- it was all right there. I could explore nearly any universe from early in the morning until late at night. While I didn't know it at the time, though, I was really studying human productivity. Malcolm Gladwell, in the book Outliers , proposed the "10,000 hour rule." He suggests that you master a particular subject when you've had about 10,000 hours of practice. You can do that math, but I'll tell you the answer: It takes a really long time to amass 10k hours of decent practice. And it's probably more a rule of thumb, because there are some people who aren't 10,000 hours old who master things that the rest of us could never do, and there are some people who've been doing the same thing for seventy years, but still aren't really that good at it. All things being equal, though, it's probably a useful approximation.
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