December 11, 2015 at 01:02Rule of one hundred hours
- Transfer
A popular meme with a “rule of 10,000 hours” claims that it takes so much time to master any kind of skill. This rule has several consequences:
Since it takes so long, three hours a day for ten years, one person can become a master in a very limited number of areas.
Since the time is the same for everyone, the process of development cannot be accelerated. If you have mastered something new, but your competitor has not mastered, you have a serious advantage.
The task of mastering any area of activity looks complicated, therefore people often give up. For every virtuoso violinist, there are a huge number of people who quit classes after several lessons, or even did not start them.
When working on a startup, it is very important to learn many different things. A startup member must understand programming, interface development, product strategy, sales, marketing, and hiring staff. Failure in one of these disciplines can mean failure of the entire company. For example, if you do not hire a good team, then the startup will not have the resources to implement its plans, regardless of the quality of the plans themselves. Or the product may turn out to be useful, but not very user friendly or beautiful - in this case it is usually difficult for him to break through to the top.
What to do if you need to master all the necessary areas to perfection, but their development takes too much time?
I want to suggest a “100 hours rule”:
For most disciplines, a hundred hours of active study is enough to begin to understand them much better than a beginner.
For example:
An example of sales I felt on myself. Before I became a venture investor, I was a programmer for ten years. I never crossed paths with sales and knew nothing about it. When I started investing, I found out that most companies had bottlenecks in sales, marketing and finding new users, not technology. As a result, I took up self-training in sales and related fields. I read books like Traction , attended conferences like SalesConf . I spent on it 50-100 hours. And as a result, even if I can not be compared with an experienced seller, I learned much more about sales than people who are not involved in them know. For example, now I know that most programs need to set a price dependingfrom their value to the user, not the cost of development. What is better to talk about benefits than opportunities. And what’s most important in sales is to listen to the wishes of users , and not to tell them what you have. A professional seller would make deals with 80% of potential buyers, a novice - probably about 10%. I think that I would give out 30-40% in this case. Far from an expert, but also far from a beginner. A good return on investment for a couple of weeks in training.
A few observations regarding the "rule of a hundred hours":
Returning to startups: make a list of things in which your company should succeed (sales, programming, interface development, knowledge in a certain area, etc.). If you do not have enough experience in any of these areas, do not dismiss it, hoping for the best. Invest in it a little time to gain basic knowledge and confidence, so as not to put obstacles on your own, making typical mistakes of beginners. In the future, you will need to hire experts. But in the current situation, you need to invest enough time in obtaining knowledge so that you can fill them with existing gaps in the project.
Since it takes so long, three hours a day for ten years, one person can become a master in a very limited number of areas.
Since the time is the same for everyone, the process of development cannot be accelerated. If you have mastered something new, but your competitor has not mastered, you have a serious advantage.
The task of mastering any area of activity looks complicated, therefore people often give up. For every virtuoso violinist, there are a huge number of people who quit classes after several lessons, or even did not start them.
When working on a startup, it is very important to learn many different things. A startup member must understand programming, interface development, product strategy, sales, marketing, and hiring staff. Failure in one of these disciplines can mean failure of the entire company. For example, if you do not hire a good team, then the startup will not have the resources to implement its plans, regardless of the quality of the plans themselves. Or the product may turn out to be useful, but not very user friendly or beautiful - in this case it is usually difficult for him to break through to the top.
What to do if you need to master all the necessary areas to perfection, but their development takes too much time?
I want to suggest a “100 hours rule”:
For most disciplines, a hundred hours of active study is enough to begin to understand them much better than a beginner.
For example:
- Chef needs to learn how to cook for years, but a hundred hours of cooking, lessons, classes and practice will make you a chef that is superior to most of your friends.
- In programming, you need to spend years becoming a strong programmer, but studying a couple of courses with Codecademy or Udacity will make you a programmer who can create many fairly simple applications.
- To become an excellent seller, you need to spend several years, but after reading a few key books and following the experienced sellers, you can learn enough to avoid the typical dangerous mistakes of the seller.
An example of sales I felt on myself. Before I became a venture investor, I was a programmer for ten years. I never crossed paths with sales and knew nothing about it. When I started investing, I found out that most companies had bottlenecks in sales, marketing and finding new users, not technology. As a result, I took up self-training in sales and related fields. I read books like Traction , attended conferences like SalesConf . I spent on it 50-100 hours. And as a result, even if I can not be compared with an experienced seller, I learned much more about sales than people who are not involved in them know. For example, now I know that most programs need to set a price dependingfrom their value to the user, not the cost of development. What is better to talk about benefits than opportunities. And what’s most important in sales is to listen to the wishes of users , and not to tell them what you have. A professional seller would make deals with 80% of potential buyers, a novice - probably about 10%. I think that I would give out 30-40% in this case. Far from an expert, but also far from a beginner. A good return on investment for a couple of weeks in training.
A few observations regarding the "rule of a hundred hours":
- 100, although this is a round number, is approximate. In some areas, 10-20 hours will be enough to achieve average competency, while for others it may take several hundred hours. But in any case, much less than the 10,000 hours needed to achieve mastery.
- The 10,000-hour rule is based on absolute knowledge - it takes so long to learn absolutely everything about the area. The rule of a hundred hours, by contrast, is based on relative knowledge. 95% of people do not know anything about most areas of knowledge, so it’s very easy to switch from the naive 95% to the 96%. The main and longest part of the path lies just in the interval from 96% to 99.9%
- Just as in the case of the rule of 10,000 hours, one must study actively and carefully. You are not just browsing a book or thoughtlessly repeating the movements of any technique - you read and train just to learn and improve your skills.
Returning to startups: make a list of things in which your company should succeed (sales, programming, interface development, knowledge in a certain area, etc.). If you do not have enough experience in any of these areas, do not dismiss it, hoping for the best. Invest in it a little time to gain basic knowledge and confidence, so as not to put obstacles on your own, making typical mistakes of beginners. In the future, you will need to hire experts. But in the current situation, you need to invest enough time in obtaining knowledge so that you can fill them with existing gaps in the project.