• It is often found that practising hinders progress and that real, authentic and individualistic mastery emerges when one gives up formal practising and gets completely natural and experimental.
• The 10,000 hours of practice formula, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Outliers, has the stamp of ambition and goal-seeking.
• Our inner amateur turns the teaching upside down, and instead of ambition, injects fearlessness, spontaneity, aliveness and commitment to the activity.

In the state of flow, our attention is on a limited perceptual field which gets our full attention and investment, not bothered about the score, we are fully into the action and awareness of the activity, doing what we love.