Outside the Lines With Rap Genius - OTL 61: Robert Greene Excerpt #2 "The 10,000 Hour Rule" lyrics

Robert Greene: The 10,000 hour rule is a very exciting rule, because basically it gives a figure, a statistic, a number to something that's very very real. Like what happens to the human brain after so many hours of practicing something? A change occurs. A really exciting change that you can see happen in almost anyone who reaches that point. One of the things that they studied for the 10,000 hour rule was chess, because chess is the usual field where you can really demonstrate what happens. You can literally count the hours of practice; you can see at 5,000 hours this is the level where they're at; at 10,000 hours they're a master. What happens to a chess person when they go past the 10,000 hour rule? You go into Bobby Fisher area. Even greater leap occurs in that 10,000 hour point. You've literally played so many games of chess -- literally, I don't know how many thousands of games you have played -- that you're not thinking anymore in terms of moves. You've got a picture. I call it a -- there's a dynamic to the game itself, it's something you can't put into words, that encompa**es the whole game. It's almost a spiritual thing that has to do with you and your opponent. And you're feeling that dynamic and you're thinking on a much higher level. That's what happens after all of these thousands of hours of practicing chess You can see it in music; you can see it in the sciences where Einstein literally has his 20,000 hour moment with the 2nd Theory of Relativity; you can see it in business in Edison or whatever. It's not just some wacky spiritual occult concept. This is really what I want to get away from; I'm not saying that it's like this woo woo phenomenon that happens. You can explain it in terms of science, but you bring about an*logical thinking. It's not a logical process that's going on. When you've absorbed so much knowledge and information, it's thinking instantly. You're feeling what comes next before you can even say what it is. And it's powerful and everyone who's ever done anything important will explain, "I've had that feeling." It's an intuition. Steve Jobs talks about it, Einstein talks about it, and anyone else. Nobody else has written about it -- Malcolm Gladwell and others will talk about that 10,000 hour rule but what happens when you go beyond it and what kind of creative levels happen at that point