In an era of human history in which we prize comfort above nearly every other virtue, we have overlooked an important truth: comfort never leads to excellence. What it takes to become great at your craft is practice, but not just any kind of practice—the kind that hurts, that stretches and grows you. This kind of practice, which Ericsson called “deliberate” and we might consider more appropriately as “painful,” is extremely difficult. It takes place over the course of about ten years, or ten thousand hours—incidentally the average length of an apprenticeship. But this is not where the practice
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