Yes, the old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall. And the idea behind this 2016 Savage Chickens cartoon (thanks to Chris Waigl for bringing it to my attention):
(#1)
Cognitively complex performances of all kinds — especially those that require creative fashioning for some audience or for the exigencies of the context — can be mastered only through long practice, the point of which is to automatize most aspects of the performance, which then do not require conscious attention, reflection, or decision-making in the moment, but leave room for that creative fashioning.
Although some simple skills can be acquired through mere repetition, all kinds of practice work better if they’re engaged — intense, focused, even enjoyable. Meanwhile, for complex performances it’s going to take a lot of practice: the more cognitively complex the performance, the longer it takes to get really competent at it. Ten to fifty thousand hours, seven to ten years. For playing basketball, discovering the organization of social practices, ballet dancing, analyzing philosophical issues, playing and composing music, analyzing genetic mechanisms, writing fiction, revealing the mechanisms of population movements, creating computer languages, reviewing movies, playing chess, understanding the structure of a (natural) language, and much else.
