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Comment by john61 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to also be true for piano playing. Basically Friedrich Gulda said he only practices 3-4 hours a day sitting at the piano. The rest of the day he is sitting in the café thinking about music and piano playing.

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Regarding "thinking" about music ... I recently took up playing drums again after a 20 year hiatus. During those 20 years I was never able to stop tapping rhythms on things (to my own and everyone around me's great frustration). Every song I listened to I couldn't not imagine playing that drum track. That must have kept those neural pathways alive.

Now that I'm finally playing again, I feel like I'm back to my previous levels, or even better, after just 3 months of playing 1x week.

Having said that, there's also the 10,000 hours thing.

> he only practices 3-4 hours a day

only... Deep sigh!

I spend 6 to 8 hours sitting at the computer thinking about C++. 3-4 hours then sitting in a cafe seems like a sweet deal.

If I found time at work for 3-4h of concentrated, uninterrupted programming I would be happy.

Even if I have time for more, around 4h of focus is my limit, and after that quality is lost very quickly.

I’ve found sitting in a cafe (or going for a walk) often allows me to think more productively about code: sometimes the screen is just a distraction.

For me, most of the time the hard part is not writing the code, but understanding all the code around it so that I figure out where to get my inputs from and not break anything. I can't do that without sitting at the computer and reading the code.

Assuming you're talking about your job, I'm not sure this is the same as "practicing" C++ for 3-4 hours the way you would practice piano. For us programmers there's usually no difference between practice and "the real stuff" unless you consider side projects as practice but that's "outside" our job.

Unfortunately, for us as a profession we still haven't yet figured out what "practice" looks like.

The closest we've done is just "more game time". The closest we've found is when learning a new tech doing a small project. But that is learning a tech and distinctly different from "practicing" the craft of programming.

I feel like a good start would be to reflect on what we do on our job, time ourselves, see where we struggled, practice these parts. But that's still far from deliberate practice. Griding leetcode is one, but it's practice for leetcode problems.

Every line of code that you write and later delete is practice. We practice a lot.

It is practice, but usually not "deliberate practice" in the way musician or people that talk about 10 000 hours think about practice. I'm not sure how big the difference is between practice and deliberate practice.

I immediately had the same reaction. Granted I am beginner and more on the pop side of things than classical.

But it still surprises me about the amount of effort to master the instrument.

That is very low for professional pianists.

Many professional classical musicians of all sorts of instruments will practice 6-8 hours per day or more. Whether that's necessary or not is up for debate. Either way, many of them have an almost obsessive relationship with music and their instrument -- at least at the highest levels -- which means they probably want to be playing that much.

I was wise enough at the early age of 12 or so to realize that whatever that "commitment" gene was, I didn't have it, so I kept piano a personal passion rather than try to go to school for it like my parents wanted.

Ah ... I think you are onto something with this statement. What's the name of the cafe? /s

Commenting as I have heard of fellow musicians sometimes performing almost ritualistic steps or 'cargo cult' emulations of 'famous' musicians to try and replicate their success.

This comment reminds me of the book "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work"

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