During several extended gigs in Hamburg, Germany, The Beatles had to play 8 hours straight, 7 days a week for more than a month. Years later in an interview about Hamburg John Lennon said: We got better and got more confidence. We couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long. . . In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing."
In Outliers, Gladwell describes an early 1990's study at Berlin's Academy of Music which divided...
the school's violinists into three groups: the stars, the good", and those unlikely to ever play professionally but who could probably become music teachers. They were all asked: Over the course of the years, ever since you picked up a violin, how many hours have you practiced?".
All of the violinists had started practicing around age 5 and practiced 2-3 hours a week during their first years. But by the age of 8, differences emerged between amount of hours they each practiced. By age of 20, the stars had all totaled 10,000 hours of practice, the good" students had worked 8,000 hours and the future music teachers had practiced just over 4,000 hours.
Are you willing to commit 10,000 hours to your dreams?