"The author Malcolm Gladwell speaks of needing to invest ten thousand hours working at a particular skill in order to become proficient at it. He tells the tale of Bill Gates as a young teen slipping out of his home in the middle of the night and walking to the nearby University of Washington so he could work on the school's mainframe computer; he'd stay there for three hours before walking home and crawling back into bed. He racked up twenty to thirty hours a week at the university's computer throughout high school. His mother recalled years later that she never understood why her son was so tired every morning and why it was so difficult to wake him up. By the time Bill Gates was in his sophomore year at Harvard, he was way past ten thousand hours.
"Gladwell advances the supposition that those who attain extraordinary success do so because they have invested their ten thousand hours honing their skill, craft, talent, or brilliance. If a person such as Bill Gates has put forth this degree of dedication to achieve mastery and unparalleled success, what about you and I pursuing our forgiveness work? How many hours does it take to become a master at anything?
"The Dalai Lama suggests we meditate four hours a day. So if a young monk meditates four hours daily, seven days a week, he would be meditating twenty-eight hours a week or 1,460 hours a year. After six or seven years of such focus, he would be nearing 'nirvana.' I had to practice forgiveness work on my ex-husband for a number of years — adding up to more than ten thousand hours."
