Can I Become a Great Dancer in 4 Years?

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Brice_Ashta]Brice Ashta
We all have goals. Reaching those goals often comes with a price: an investment of time. How much time, however, is a mystery. Many new dancers - especially those aspiring to become professionals, to dance Swan Lake, to open studios - crave the knowledge of how long it will take to achieve greatness.
Unfortunately, nobody can tell you without a crystal ball. Fortunately, there are some guidelines in place for making an estimate.
10,000 Hours
According to Malcom Gladwell's famous essay, "Outliers," it takes 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to become an expert or master.
This theory has been popularized in recent years because of a movement toward believing-then-achieving motivational speaking. Society wants to believe that passionate work is enough to make anybody successful at something, regardless of what talents and skills they were gifted with at birth.
Many subscribe to this theory. If you were to practice for an average of two hours per day, then it would take approximately fourteen years to become an expert in your chosen field.
Applying this to dance is easy. Simply practice every day and you'll become an expert dancer. Unfortunately, this isn't the whole and there are more details to be satisfied first.
Facets of Knowledge
By many catalogs, every dance has a number of facets. I will discuss belly dance, because that is what I know most about.
Belly dance has an incredible number of different topics and subjects when you think in depth about expertise. Granted, movement vocabulary is fairly limited, but other requirements for true mastery are musicality, safety, rhythms, props, professionalism and business sense, and costuming.
Is Four Years Enough?
I have no doubt in my mind that a person can become a very talented and great dancer in four years, in the sense of movement. However, things like raw emotional expression, business knowledge, networks and contacts, and even a sense of movement from an internal perspective - the ability to correct posture and execution while being over ten feet away from the student - takes much longer.
If you are looking to become a dancer, I encourage you to start with a teacher. Dedicated practice will make perfect. Four years, however, is a slightly short time for expertise and mastery. Begin your 10,000 hours today and you will soon come to see successes. Four years is more than enough time for greatness - but not mastery.
Brice Ashta is a [http://briceashta.com/]belly dance instructor in Denver, Colorado. He also maintains a blog about belly dance and small business on his website.
Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Can-I-Become-a-Great-Dancer-in-4-Years?&id=6625470] Can I Become a Great Dancer in 4 Years?