And I would say you are overcomplicating things.
First off, who in their right mind would spend 10,000 hours, or even two hundred hours, in pursuit of something they didn't enjoy on some deep and fundamental level?
As the original piece said (emphasis mine),
The original author is saying you must have persistence to move forward -- but you need passion (love, desire and fascination) too.
Your hypothetical picture of someone who wakes up to discover he has spent 10,000 hours trying to master something "meaningless" (to him) thus strikes me as a straw man.
Who takes that long to discover what they like and don't like? Do you need to drink a thousand beers before deciding if you like the brand?
Mastery is not a journey with zero feedback points in which the moment you set foot on the road, you cannot self-assess until you have crossed some vast desert.
Instead it is a journey with a nearly constant array of feedback points -- one in which you can gauge your passion (or lack thereof) on a very regular basis.
Take trading, poker, and writing for example -- three things I happen to know a small something about. All three of these are very, very hard roads. But the people who love these crafts, and set out for mastery because they love them, do not mind that the road is hard. When they get ground down or beaten to a pulp -- as happens at times -- the fire is like an unquenchable pilot light. It always stays on, and always stokes back into a strong rich flame.
As for your counter suggestion to "spend the effort at the beginning, working out the true purpose of your intended goals"... meh.
To a certain degree this advice is obvious. One does not set off to be a beekeeper in Borneo or some such thing without making a few sensible calculations first. Few individuals say "Yes, I will spend 10,000 hours on this without thinking about the pursuit critically at all! Huzzah!" And then actually do so.
In other words, the type of person likely to spend 10,000 hours on a "complete mistake" is also the type of person to be so scatterbrained they would be hard-pressed to marshal their focus for that length of time on anything -- hence the straw man.
And to the degree your advice is not obvious, I would counter it is potentially dangerous -- cautious to a fault. There is a balance between looking and leaping. To "work everything out beforehand" is to overly engage in a fear-driven sense of risk control, which carries dangers all its own. Just think of the kids who grew up to be doctors or laywers or surgeons or what have you because they were set on such and such a path from an extremely young age, never stopping to examine whether the passion was there, before they had a chance to test and experiment and DISCOVER if it was there, a process that is sometimes made possible only by doing.
Sometimes, one must test. One must sample. One must try.
As Andre Gide has said, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
That means that any great journey requires certain risks, and to a certain degree an attitude of adventuresome risk taking in the first place. (Mastery of a worthy craft would certainly count as an adventure -- one that all too few have taken.)
But at the same time, there is no pressing need to be an ass about a questionable pursuit, if the initial feedback points are not confirming. Spending 10,000 hours on a fruitless / passionless endeavor would be equivalent to sailing halfway around the world, having discovered you had no taste for sailing way back on the ninth or tenth day.
There is such a thing, in other words, as incremental commitment scaling with a passion awareness overlay -- do I like this? do I love this? is it worth the pain to keep going? -- and in fact this is what's applied on almost all roads to greatness. The "should I carry on" question comes up again and again, repeatedly and in many forms, and the indubitable full-throated answer comes back "YES."
Again I find the original piece wise because, in its own way, it pointed out this very thing (by closing with a highlight of the vital need for a discipline / passion combo, as the two are like individual halves of a pair of scissors).
p.s. And because it spurred this back and forth...
