10 000 hours is about 3.5 years study. No need to take mortgage for university, no need to work for free 'to prove yourself'. Hell you can even babysit while doing it (as I am doing now while learning Scala)
Yeah 10,000 hours is not a lot of time. I got my first computer in 1982. If you ignore all the time I spent as a hobbyist learning BASIC, Assembly, C, etc and only count my professional work time then I am still way over 40,000 hours of focused and methodical practice in IT.
