Mastery - and the question of time
There is an old rule of thumb in martial arts: 1,000 repetitions to get the basic idea of a movement, 10,000 repetitions to get it more or less right, 100,000 to get it near perfect. And that's just a movement. We've not yet talked about application . Application takes much, much more practice. Let's put it in the perspective of some other art - say, music. You might want to be a world-class jazz guitarist, playing lead solos off the cuff, with no two performances alike. And that's how jazz is meant to be played. You're responding to your environment: the other musicians, the crowd, the venue, its atmosphere, your own mood, the time of day... practically anything and everything. So what does it take to be a good jazz guitarist? 100,000 repetitions of scales won't cut it. I don't know what the figure in repetitions is, but it's going to be a lot higher. Actually, it's measured less in terms of repetitions than it is measured in time . ...