The Journey Within

A bout of sickness, a torrential rain of work, the lack of tai chi practice, migrating to a Mac, playing too much word challenge on facebook… and probably there are more excuses, but there’s been a lot going on in my mind, which explains the dry writing season. I’ve even stopped writing in my journal till a few days ago. It’s been one uneasy silence. Silence in words, but in my head, the silence is deafening.

Today, I treated my silence with words from a page.

I walked into a book shop, and picked up a book called “This is water” by David Foster Wallace. I finished it within the 20 minutes I was there. It’s not so lengthy like a standard book. You can even find the whole text online (if you google hard enough). I read it quickly because I felt the message. It seems to be talking to me there and then, when I needed it.

And then another string of words jumped at me. It’s one of those motivational wallpapers (those that are literally on a wall, rather than those that fills your computer screen). And , surprise surprise, it’s on water again. It’s about a lecturer meeting a group of his ex-students who’s complaining about the stresses in life. He then asked them to pick up a cup of water from a table. Everyone did, only to find out that they picked the best looking cups. The lecturer’s message?

If all you want is water, why go for the pretty cups?

Maybe these water messages will drown out the drought. And I thought of these while having my dinner by the pool. Must be a sign…

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Now, the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point and Blink fame, suggests that to be very good at anything you do (and I mean VERY good), you need to clock up at least 10,000 hours of doing that thing. This includes anything you can think of – basketball, golf, investing, programming, Tai Chi…

Now, I did a quick calculation on what this means to a mere mortal like me, and here is what I have:

If I train for 1 hour per week, e.g. go to a 1 hour Tai Chi class every week but not practising at home, I’ll need 192 years before becoming very good.

If I train for 20 minutes a day, like what I’ve set out to do this year, I’ll need 82 years before becoming real good.

If I train for 3 hours a day, it’ll take me 9 years to be very good.

If I train for 6 hours a day, like what my current teacher did when he was younger, it’ll take me 4 and a half years to be very good.

Contrast this to my 40 hours work-week, I should be very good at my work after about 5 years.

So… how many hours of effort do you want to put into the things that you love? I guess it’ll depend on how old you are now, and how long you think you can keep doing that thing…

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