Playing the piano for 10,000 hours

I've not read Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers: The Story of Success", but I've come across the theory that an expert at anything is not an innate genius, but has practised for an average of 10,000 hours. This has been attacked as over-simplified or plain wrong, but it has revolutionised by attempts to learn to play the piano.

I have tried to learn the guitar, piano and even penny whistle many times over the years. I decided to try again in January 2019, but decided that this time I would practice every single day for at least an hour. That made me think of the 10,000 hour theory. I did a calculation and found that if I practised for just over an hour per day then I would reach 10,000 hours in 26 years' time.

That brings home how much practice is involved.

I was not put off, however, reasoning that after even a few hundred hours, I'd be able to knock out a tune as a party piece without becoming flustered.

I investigated apps promoted for forming good habits and downloaded one where I have set my target of 10,000 hours and enter my daily total of actual hours to eat into this. I already use a pomadoro timer on my phone to time 30-minute chunks of time for work activities and added the category of "music" to log the time spent on this.

And away I went, working through the exercises in a piano tuition book I had downloaded on a previous attempt to learn the piano.

This time, I did not get so disillusioned with apparent lack of progress, or the fact that my progress showed me still far off being half-competent at playing "London Bridge is falling down". I checked my app and I had only done, say, 30 hours, so what could I expect? That's less than a week of full-time study.

One of the criticisms of the 10,000 hour theory is that it is not just the time spent practising, but the type of practice, which has to build up the fundamental skills. This led to two thoughts. Firstly, it doesn't matter if my playing is plodding or error strewn, as long as I am building up a particular skill.

I once taught myself - and then many friends - to juggle. In that, my approach was to focus on one thing at a time. Throwing from your right hand towards your left, for example. Throw it in a nice arc and catch it. Once you've seen you can do that, take a second ball in your left hand and drop it before catching the first. Don't worry where it goes, just get rid of it. Once that is mastered, think about throwing the second ball in a reverse arc in the direction of your right hand. The throwing and catching of the first ball goes to hell. Just remind yourself you have already cracked doing that - and remind yourself a few times, so that you do it out with a corner of your mind - then go back to the task in focus. Before too long, you can do arcs from both hands, then introduce the third ball. Soon you are juggling, without having to focus overly on any single task, although you can zoom in on any aspect to perfect it.

So I focus on my left hand playing the piano. Then the right. Then matching the rhythm perfectly to the metronome. Then thinking about the chord changes. And so on. Once I've mastered a song – or I'm tripping myself up by over-thinking it – I'll increase the speed, or play it with my eyes closed, or change the instrument. When I return to it again, usually better than before, I'll focus in on different aspects, looking for patterns, rhythms, muscle memory, coherence of notes, expression and the pleasure of playing. Moving on to the next piece, I can see that a new element has been introduced to develop another aspect of skill.

The second thought arising from the need to focus on skills was to have some lessons. So I booked a trial lesson, where some answers to my questions made an immediate difference to my abilities. I had tried guitar lessons a couple of times previously, but a combination of the tutor's approach and my lack of time investment meant I didn't progress – or, at least, didn't notice the progress.

Three months' later, I'm on 110 hours practice. Which, if this was a full-time endeavour, would be about three weeks' study – nothing at all if you think about how long you spent studying at school or college. Yet, even in this short time, I have pieces of the jigsaw coming into focus, if not yet coming into place, and feel that I am getting somewhere.

Just 9,890 hours to go.

So many days, so many years

I'm now over seven years into this process of remembering every day that passes, having started on 17 December 2011.

I've had to adapt the refresh process to review the images pinned to my mental calendar, but I still aim to revisit each day once per month.

Sometimes an image evades me now. But, even so, I do not accept they are fully lost, because on a subsequent run-through, I've had them come back to me with a flash of endorphins and relief that pins them more firmly to the calendar for next time.

This process has changed my concept of time. Many of these years are so long ago that, save for this process, the whole year would be largely lost to me. If I choose a year before I began – let's say 2009 – I can work out where I was and what I was doing in that year and, if I think about it, maybe remember some specific events, some of them vividly. But the images are sparse. What did I do on my birthday that year? My wife's? My mother's? I have no idea and, if I do scratch up a memory, then I'd have no certainty it was for that year.

I can answer that question for every year since I began this process. Of course, I only easily remember the images pinned to my mental calendar. Sometimes these will open a door to much more regarding both the event represented and the rest of the day, but often, they are all I have left. After all, as I write this, there are 2,669 days stretching behind me.

The most curious – and even disturbing – aspect of having these memories and revisiting them as I do, is the shock at how long ago these years are. I will recall an event at, say, the Olympics in 2016 and it seems staggering that was almost three years' ago.

As I have carried these days and years with me, like no others, there is a freshness to them that makes it hard sometimes to separate one year from another. In the normal scheme of things, the fading of our memories perhaps gives us a sense of how long ago a time was.