116,799 To Go

My wife had a hint of what was in store for her on one of our first dates - a trip to Great Adventure. She's recounted the story many times of how I calculated how long we'd be waiting on line for one of the popular rides. It was easy to do - number of people in front of us on line, how many were admitted for each cycle of the ride, approximate length of time per ride cycle, including loading & unloading. I'm not necessarily proud this is how my mind works but work this way it does.  

Which brings me to the title of this post. With idle thinking time available to me while driving to the Adirondacks yesterday, I figured out I have about 116,800 waking hours of life remaining.  Twenty more years - a reasonable estimate based on my health and family history - 365 days per, sixteen hours each day, given my current sleep patterns. That's a lot of hours, especially if I continue making good use of them. And, if Malcolm Gladwell and others are onto something when they conjecture that doing anything religiously for 10,000 hours helps ensure your expertise in that anything, I've still got time to become a really good writer.

All right, doing the math is creepy; skip it. But unless you're a lot older than me, you've got multiples of 10,000 hours remaining. What do you want to get really good at?