10,000 Hours to Mastery
Have you heard of the 10,000 hours rule to mastery? Chapter two of Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" does a good job of covering it. Dan Levitin's book "This is Your Brain on Music" also speaks of it in reference to the musical mind. Joshua Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein" covers the subject in reference to skills development for his memory project. K. Anders Ericsson, the leading expert on skills acquisition, coined the phrase and is the source quoted in all of these texts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Ericsson). Fascinating stuff.
P.S., I highly recommend all of those books/audio books.