A Line Or A Cube?

     In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggested that expertise comes with 10,000 hours of practice. I certainly agree with his premise, but I wonder if those hours follow linear time, or if they might come from multi-layered time, more of a cubic form, so to speak.

     I recall my childhood piano teacher telling me I needed to practice a piece continuously to get it right. She suggested I practice even when a piano wasn't available, even when riding the school bus. She said I could visualize a keyboard on my notebook and move my fingers accordingly. This way the music could move from my mind into my fingers so that the fingers would remember the music. My mind would be free then to work on technique. Her suggestion worked like magic! Using my travel time on a virtual piano greatly enhanced my performance in my lessons! 

     Let's take this a step further and into the idea of time as a cube. What if this greater concentration kept me focused on whatever piece of music I was learning even in my sleep? What if  I continued to play a piano in another realm as my body slept in this one? I have had many mornings when the activities of my dreams left me feeling tired upon waking, haven't you? If time is a cube, there are many different sides and angles to it than if it were a simple line. This being the case, those 10,000 hours to expertise might actually be a billion!

     To imagine what humankind could do with this amount of focus, we have only to look at the people who are working on their craft in the linear 10,000 hours. Genius!