People spend hours constantly checking and tweeting and Facebooking. And it's cool to check up on your friends and see what's going on in the world, but it's not cool to spend five hours of your day on the computer looking at the Internet.
At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.
So I did in fact spend two and a half years in the Middlesbrough car park practising skills. But if you spend four or five or six hours a day practising, you get better.
Congressmen spend between five and seven hours a day on the phone, begging for money.
What I think about is what people spend their time on this planet doing. So No.1 is sleep, No.2 is work, and No.3 is sight, sound, and motion video consumption. Basically, four to five hours a day is what Americans spend consuming video.
When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.
Being a professional musician doesn't mean you spend 12 hours a day playing music. It means you spend up to 12 hours a day taking care of business, dealing with litigation, with the various characters who've stolen your interests, or fending off hostile lawsuits from former members of the band.
Kids spend seven hours a day in school, and they have their homework at night. I'm not there to moralize or to teach them right from wrong. We're there to provide something that is really fun, that's a diversion.
I realized I couldn't raise two kids, coach soccer, be on the PTA, teach full time, and do all the administrative bookkeeping. I do need to sleep four or five hours a day.
The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.
I spend around three hours on the track and two hours in the weight room, five or six days a week.
I practiced for at least two hours every day for twenty years, before then I practiced maybe four to five hours a day, and before then 14 hours a day. It was all I had ever done.
The separation of talent and skill is one of the largest misconceptions in modern society. Talent is something you born with, but skill can only be attained through Hours and Hours of hard work perfecting your talent as a craft. Which is why Talent will fail you without skill.
In L.A., I don't really want to go out because traffic sucks so bad. I'm sorry, I'm not going to spend five hours a day in my car, so you have to choose where you live very carefully.
Flatulence peaks twice a day... five hours after lunch and five hours after dinner.
Spending eight to ten hours every single day practicing the instrument, starting from an early age, makes an instrumentalist spend his/her lifetime to hone the skill, and perhaps just as much time is spent to find a job too.