I see the logic behind the idea, if you do something consistently for that long you will surely iron out a lot of the problems you have with it and become better. You may not become the best, there may be some innate talent involved that you do not posses. For sporting prowess, anatomically you may not be able to surpass some other people. But practice anything for 10,000 hours and you will become a whole lot better than you are right now. One important point is that you probably do need some guidance (training) during these 10,000 hours, otherwise you may develop bad habits that will hold you back and will be difficult to break once they are deeply ingrained.
So coming to the technical skills of programming, Sonmez argues that practicing, repeatedly trying to build systems and applications, whilst trying to extend you skill set is simply a matter of perseverance and habit. That you must get yourself into the habit of practicing (coding for instance) on a regular basis (daily?), and that motivation and drive have little to do with it. I disagree with this.
In order to be able to commit and persevere with the practice you need some form of motivation, something to keep you going. The simplest thing that motivates most people is greed. Sounds dirty, but its true. We all live at a level beyond necessity (materially speaking) so we need money to do this, we may not all strive for more more more, but living above the level of having food and shelter could be perceived as greed (I'm not saying we are all greedy, but we all like comfort and the nice things that are accepted as normal in modern living, and these all cost money. So we all look to have an income, and as programmers/developers/coders writing code is a way of getting this. So that is a base motivation achieved. But how does that equate to practicing skills and getting better? Most of us work for someone else, we have fairly clear objectives of what our employer needs us to deliver in order to maintain that employment and be paid. This is often not enough to drive us to get better. We can drift along, doing enough to get by without getting better. 10,000 hours of this will not get you very far.
So how do you get better? What form will the 10,000 hours of practice take? Well you could potentially use this employment time, if you use it wisely. This is easy when you are starting out, all of your time will be spent on new things and so will be useful, but give it a year or so and your day-to-day work will stop stretching you.
10,000 hours equates to 1,250 8 hour days, or nearly 5 years of normal employment (8 hour days, 260 days per year). So it is not a quick thing. And if only about the 1st year will really stretch you and be useful practice then these 5 years will not actually amount to the 10,000 hours. So how do you build it up?
Side projects, personal learning, pushing your employer to embrace new ideas and technologies. That is how. If the project you are working on is stagnating, look for how it could be moved forward to the benefit of your employer and push for them to do it. It will benefit you from a skills and proficiency perspective, and benefit them where they like it, in their wallet.
But for side projects and personal learning, the problem is often one of motivation, drive and time. How do you drive yourself to put the time in? You have just worked a 40 hour week for the man, where is the motivation to put in more time on top of this? Yes if you put in the hard yards you will see a payback eventually, but 10,000 hours is a long time, and we are simple beasts, we want dividends now. Something perceivable and measurable. That is where the motivation aspect comes in. That is the motivation.
You need some sort of short term perceivable and measurable metric of your progress and success. Look for what it is in programming that you find most rewarding. It could be a wider question than that, what do you find rewarding in life? Personally I like the feeling of seeing a task completed. The sense of satisfaction that something I set out to do happened and I succeeded in completing it. I love hiking, and specifically hiking up mountains, and the greatest sense of achievement in this is to get to the summit. But reaching a high summit can be a hard slog. It might only take 5 hours rather than 10,000, but physically I still feel that fatigue in reaching my final goal en route. What I do is to set intermediate goals along the way. The next 3 miles, the next false summit, where I want to be before 11am. Anything to give me a sense that I am doing well and on track for my final goal, the little pile of stones that marks the top.
For side projects this short term goal setting is easy (although the side project itself should probably be one of your short term goals, but breaking this down further is a good idea) try to work in an Agile manner within the project. It might be a personal project, with a team of 1, but breaking the development down into short iterations, with a goal of delivering a functioning system at the end of each iteration is a very valid approach still.
If you do this, and your psyche works anything like mine, then at the end of each iteration you will feel a sense of achievement and that will help you to motivate yourself for your next iteration. You will surprise yourself by how easy it becomes to motivate yourself to complete the tasks of the iteration, because you will want that sense of achievement at the end of the iteration, and quickly the side project will take shape and maybe start to deliver on that base motivation, hard cash! The great side benefit is that you will push yourself towards that 10,000 hours mark, which is a notional mark to indicate you are becoming a much better developer.
Motivation is important, its not just about turning the wheel, but you must find your own motivation by setting achievable milestones and rewarding yourself in some way that helps to keep you focused on the next step, the next step and eventually the big prize.
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