CupOfTea's comment above about practicing for many hours as often as possible and falling into the timeless zone brought to mind something I've been thinking about lately. I'm lucky enough to have a job with an instrument builder; most of the people I talk to on phone are musicians or want to be musicians. I'm often asked how long it takes to learn an instrument, and the obvious answer, of course, is that it depends on how much you practice. And then people often talk about how great it would be to have the discipline to practice that much every day.

What I found in my own learning, however, is that discipline had very little to do with whether or not I sat down and played for six hours straight -- the real answer is that I couldn't conceive of doing anything else. It's not like I was giving up doing something else I wanted to do, it's just that music was (is) about ten times more interesting than anything else. It's like a compulsion, which makes it hard for me to take credit for it. I've talked to other people about this and found that most of the pros I play with were the same way as kids and teenagers. We just played all the time. Starting at about age 13, I'd get home from school in the afternoon and sit down at the piano or the drums, get dragged away to eat dinner, and then play until I was told to shut up and go to bed. I never noticed that time was passing. I carried drum sticks with me all the time and played on my legs whenever I sat down. When I took up the guitar just after college, I did the same thing. There is a zone of passion that makes the hours speed by unnoticed. I don't think that I'm a really great musician, but I am very fluent and musical in my playing, and I think that comes from putting in the 10,000 hours because I couldn't do anything else.

Is it possible to teach this passion/compulsion/monomaniacal focus to people who are trying to learn to play? Is someone who doesn't have this able to achieve the levels of fluency that we expect from performing musicians?