moments of epiphany

I recently read the book Art & Fear, and here's an extract from it:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they had produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded by quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

it is interesting to combine the story with the book Genius explained, which I also read some time ago, where Michael Howe explains how most of the people we perceive as geniuses, simply worked long and hard and persistently, and in many cases happened to be at the right place at the right time. that brings us to quite an interesting conclusion about anything we want to do in this world and be successful at - work hard, work long, practice, practice, practice, learn, and then do some more. if we expect ourselves or others to be experts at day 1, we clearly won't be, and will want to give up because we're not where we want to be.

if you do a search for 10000 hours to become an expert, you will see what the general trend seems to be... are we willing to spend the time and effort to get there or do we just expect to be there automatically?