Most of us will agree that to get better at something, practice is necessary. To become a world-class master at something, however, requires an enormous amount of practice; indeed, journalist Malcom Gladwell in his book “Outliers” proposed the 10,000-hour rule.

In anecdotal examinations of Canada’s top hockey players, businessmen like Bill Gates, and musicians like the Beatles, Gladwell found that the key to their success was a matter of practicing a task for about 10,000 hours.

Translate that to how you might become a top-notch writer. It requires a daily commitment to writing. This doesn’t mean 10,000 hours of talking about writing or thinking about writing or reading good writing (though all of that helps) but 10,000 hours of actual writing.

This daily commitment must continue over a lengthy period of time. If you spent eight hours a day doing nothing but writing, you would need to spend 1250 consecutive days or nearly 3.5 years, to master writing. Four hours a day of writing equals nearly 7 years. If you wrote only an hour a day, you would need 27 years to get to 10,000 hours.

Of course, 10,000 hours is an average. On the down side, you may need more practice time. On the up side, you may require fewer. In addition, you’ve already been writing for some time, so you’ve already started chipping away at the 10,000 hours.

Regardless, the lesson to be taken away here is that if you want to be a top-notch writer, you must commit yourself daily to actually writing. So…what will you write about today?