The first ninety percent arrives cheap, almost embarrassingly so — like compound interest paid out early, before the principal has done any real work.
Ten percent of the clock buys ninety percent of the result. Engineers call the place where the curve bends the knee: the point past which every additional unit of quality costs exponentially more than it returns.
Perfection is not a destination but a tax bracket almost no one can afford to enter.
The remaining ten percent — the part that actually resembles mastery — eats the other ninety percent of the time, like a piano tuner chasing a beat frequency only he can hear, turning the pin a hair's width past where the ear stops complaining.
Most of what we call diligence is just refusing to notice that the string is already, for all practical purposes, in tune.