Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff.

Have you ever heard the story about 10,000 hours?

How it goes is if we want to learn something and we spend 10,000 hours on developing our skills in that area.

And so that if we stick with it and keep learning over 10,000 hours,

at the end of those 10,000 hours, we'll move from a novice to an expert, a very good expert in the field that we studied.

Some of us, for example, may have wanted to learn a language, and we study that language, we get good of that

language, we may spend time in the other country really learning that language.

And let's say we hit that 10,000 hour mark, most likely we'll begin to dream in that language too.

It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort, but with time and effort we just keep getting better.

Now initially the improvements are but with time and effort we just keep getting better.

Now initially the improvements are huge.

We go from not knowing how to speak that language

to learning a few phrases.

And with time we get better.

But the further along we go, it's more of fine-tuning.

We won't necessarily see drastic changes, but we'll see subtle changes.

And these subtle changes keep making us a better foreign speaker in that language.

I don't know if you saw the movie Rocketman about Elton John, but he didn't just one day wake

up and become an excellent musician. He worked at it for years and

years. And with all that training at some of the top schools in the world, he became a world-class

expert.

Here in the US, the top paid profession overall is surgeons. There are people that make more than surgeons,

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