10,000 hours. That's how long it takes for one to become expert or even extraordinary at a pursuit like the violin, basketball or chess, according to the thesis that author Malcolm Gladwell lays out in his book "Outliers." He examines the study, incubation and immersion pursued by the Beatles, Bill Gates and physicist J Robert Oppenheimer as examples of people who had this opportunity and blossomed as a result... I crunched some numbers and determined that if you listen to four hours of right wing talk radio a day and watch four hours of right wing cable "news" each evening, then – not counting weekends and major holidays - you will log 2504 hours of time on those activities over the course of one year. Within four years, you will have put in enough time listening to Rush-Sean-Bill-Dan-Tucker-Laura to equal the relentless day-and-night playing the Beatles did at strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany from 1960 to 1962 - playing that honed their skills into pop music brilliance. We are now dealing with the consequences of the apprenticeship of 40,000,000(?) people into right wing radio and TV that has occurred at a hyper-intense level. I really wish those Tea-Partiers-to-Trumpists would have been studying underwater photography or the clarinet or how to write a sonnet instead.
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