A couple weeks back I posed this question to some folks at work, and then again on Facebook, and it got some interesting responses. So here it is again: If you could spend two thousand hours diving into any one new hobby or skill, what would it be?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites 10,000 hours as the amount of time required to become a world-class expert in a subject. To be fair, Gladwell’s embrace of this rule might be more breezy than scientifically accurate. That aside, I’m willing to accept 10,000 hours as a gut-level assessment of how long it takes to become a real expert.

What about a smaller time investment, a couple hundred hours or less? Last quarter, I took a basic drawing class at Mission College. Those of you who were art students remember this stuff — ink and charcoal, the prerequisite for every class you might want to take in visual arts, you know the drill. I’d never had any talent for art, but I do like looking at art, and I figured what the heck. Don’t be afraid to try something you suck at, right?

Conservatively speaking, between evening classes and homework, I sunk about 150 hours into that drawing class. And compared to most the kids in the class, particularly the ones who were future visual arts majors, I did suck. But the good news is that after 150 hours, you do get better. I went from being barely able to sketch little plastic toy dinosaurs with vine charcoal to drawing actual human faces. Not that these faces actually looked like the original people. If you’re slightly off on the shape of the nose or the mouth… well, let’s just say that Homo Sapiens‘s built-in facial recognition software is powerful and damned unforgiving. Still, being able to draw any faces at all was way more progress than I expected.

Two thousand hours is an interesting timescale because logarithmically, it sits sort of close to the midpoint between 150 hours (starting to make progress) and 10,000 hours (mastery). It’s the equivalent of taking a full year off to study, or of taking one class at a time for several years. It’s enough time to learn a skill that will impact your life forever, without necessarily making that skill your full time job. It’s enough time to become “pretty good” at just about anything, even if you lack God-given talents in that direction. It’s enough to actually know something.

Nothing about this is mystical. Lance Armstrong has trained for well over ten thousand hours and is a mutant for cycling. Henri Matisse painted for well over ten thousand hours and was a mutant for art. So no, you can’t be Armstrong or Matisse, unless you’re a mutant with lots of free time too. But you can still be accomplished — in playing the violin, in metalwork, in basketball. I think that my two thousand hours is in painting and drawing. What’s yours?