My favorite maths book is "little rudin" - Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Walter Rudin - you can just spend hours reading the same page over and over ...
As I'm only half a hacker and hate learning arbitrary stuff, I use nano.
I think the next leap forward with text-editors is when we get some sort of interface with our eyes, or more importantly, our brain and the computer. There was an link on HN a few weeks or so ago showing they could distinguish letters from brain patterns. Surely this will make learning those vim/emacs commands obsolete. I will just bide my time.
I like the 10,000 hours concept as a motivating factor. It shows that practice pays off. Even the most gifted people still need to put in those hours to get to that high level of achievement. So rather than see it as "I need to put in X hours this year to succeed", I see it as an exaltation of hard work.