Time is important, but being able to assess what good is is incredibly important. I've met plenty of people who thought they were good at something till they me

Time is important, but being able to assess what good is is incredibly important. I've met plenty of people who thought they were good at something till they met someone who was actually great at it, and then had to personally reassess. This goes for sports, hobbies, tech skills, everything. If you're just at home and practicing by yourself, you can get competent, but without a bar to assess yourself against you have no idea if you're expect or just ok. Furthermore, without the bar of "expert" to measure yourself against, it's hard to identify where your weaknesses are, and where to put effort. Tech example - I started using ansible at home to automate things. I'm competent and can build a role for a new service pretty quickly. Am I good? No. Do I know how ok/good/great I am? Not really. It's pretty hard to measure. I know some of the patterns I use are designed for home use, not large scale deployments, but more practice isn't going to get me there. It comes down to coaching, measuring, improving against a known standard, not just 10k hours of repetition. To answer the actual "how to do it ASAP" part - I'd find a known expert who wanted to teach me, then learn from the master. With a great teacher you get the benefit of all their 10K hours of wisdom, provided in digestible chunks and a focused learning plan.