Malcolm Gladwell, writer, seeker of the anthropologically quixotic, geek savant, came up with a catchy idea in his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, the “10,000 hour rule.” Simply, the thought is that for one to become an “expert” in a skill or field, it requires 10,000 hours of practice. N[...]

One of my closer friends is a musical conductor and through osmosis, I’ve learned a teeny bit about musicology. He once lent me composer/conductor Pierre Boulez’s “Orientations: Collected Writings” when we were stranded on a rainy beach in West Africa, both completely out of [...]