Mastery

"It’s an oft-quoted truism in books on learning and productivity that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve true mastery in any skill, from composing symphonies to playing tennis."

10,000 hours sounds like a lot of time. Let's say you're in college, taking 16 units per quarter. 16 hours a week of studying in class plus maybe another 8 outside of class. That leaves you at 24 hours a week. Let's estimate and say that you're in school for 40 weeks a year, giving you 3 months of vacation. After 5 years of school, you're still only half way to becoming a master of taking college courses, and that's assuming that you stayed in the same school and took generally the same kind of classes for 5 years straight. On top of that, it's only mastery of taking those classes. Those classes are almost definitely varied in subject and more so in focus, so you're probably not even anywhere near a novice(2000 hours) at any particular skill that you've touched upon.

We could also look at the example of a martial art. Assuming you're a real go getter and actually have the time to put in a full hour of practice each day, it's still going to take you 42 years to master something. If you start when you're 20, you won't have the art mastered until you're over 60, and by then you most likely wont have the physical ability to practice the art..

I don't know what the point of this post is, just something that came to mind and upset me a bit, but now that I think about it, I guess that this must be the reason that I never really feel comfortable saying that I'm good at anything. And even if I have a general knowledge of lots of things, I would still say that I'm not even a Jack of All Trades, I'm more like a 10 of all trades at best, probably more like a 5 or 8...