10k hours playing basketball isn't going to make you a professional basketball player, but I would imagine 10k hours painting, writing, or doing many other professional endeavors will certainly help you to earn a livable wage if not excel in your field.

James Altucher had a great spin on it. He says that maybe it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but with only 1000 hours, you can get pretty good. And that only takes a year of fitting it in for 20 hours a week. Even 100 hours of practice at any particular skill will make you better at it than most people, and you can do that in like 2 hours a week for 6 months. If you feel like mastering it after that, go for it, but if you frame it as "I can have a new skill after about 6 months of practice" instead of "I can be a master in 10 years of super hard work", you're a lot more likely to try it.