What is an adept?

[Dtris]

To be adept is simply to be highly skilled, and so 'an adept' is a person who is the same.
The saying is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something, so maybe adept is like halfway, 5000 hours.

The 10 thousand hours thing has been debunked. Just saying.

Not so much as debunked, but the mistaken idea of it has been debunked and people assume the concept itself has been debunked. The part people miss about the research which the book that popularized the notion is based on, was that it looked at averages. The author used 10k hours because it made good literature. The science was simply that on average, a person who spends 10k hours of focused practice doing something, will become a "master".

The popular notion is that 10k hours doing anything will make you a master of it. The parts missing are the focused practice and the average. Most people over 35-40 have probably spent 10k hours handwriting but they are not calligraphers and sometimes not even legible. That is because they did not have focused practice. Some of the people studied also had way higher or way lower than 10k hours but the focused practice was the key component.

In other words the take away that became popular was, "Do X for 10k hours and you will be a master!"
When it should have been, "Spend several thousands of hours working really intently at something, usually over a minimum of 5 years, and you can become really really good at it."