The rule of one hundred hours
The popular meme with the “10,000-hour rule” asserts that it is precisely that much time needed to master any skill of any kind. This rule has several consequences:
Since it takes so much time — three hours a day for ten years — one person can become a master in a very limited number of areas.
Since time is one for all, it is impossible to speed up the process of mastering. If you have mastered something new, and your competitor has not mastered it, you have a serious advantage.
The task of mastering a field of activity looks complicated, so 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 begin them.
When working on a startup, it is very important to learn a lot of different things. A member of a startup should 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 if you need to perfectly master all the necessary areas, but their development takes too much time?
I want to offer a "100 hour rule":
For most disciplines, one hundred hours of active study is enough to begin to understand them much better than a beginner.
For example:
An example with sales, I felt for myself. Before I became a venture capital investor, I was a programmer for ten years. I have never intersected with sales and did not know anything about it. When I started investing, I found out that most companies had bottlenecks in sales, marketing, and search for new users, not technology. As a result, I engaged in self-study in the field of sales and related fields. I read books, for example Traction , attended conferences like SalesConf . I spent on this 50-100 hours. And as a result, even if I cannot be compared with an experienced seller, I learned much more about sales than people who do not deal with them know. For example, now I know that most programs need to be priced based on their value to the user, and not the cost of development. What is better to talk about the benefits than about the possibilities. And the most important thing in sales is to listen to the desires of users , and not tell them about what you have. A professional seller would make deals with 80% of potential buyers, a newbie would probably be about 10%. I think that I would give 30-40% in this case. Far from the expert, but also far from the beginner. A good return on investment a couple of weeks in training.
Several observations with regards to the "rule of one hundred hours":
Returning to startups: make a list of things in which your company should achieve success (sales, programming, development of interfaces, 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. Spend a little time in it to gain basic knowledge and confidence, so as not to put obstacles to yourself, making the 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 gaining knowledge so that you can fill in the existing gaps in the project.
Since it takes so much time — three hours a day for ten years — one person can become a master in a very limited number of areas.
Since time is one for all, it is impossible to speed up the process of mastering. If you have mastered something new, and your competitor has not mastered it, you have a serious advantage.
The task of mastering a field of activity looks complicated, so 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 begin them.
When working on a startup, it is very important to learn a lot of different things. A member of a startup should 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 if you need to perfectly master all the necessary areas, but their development takes too much time?
I want to offer a "100 hour rule":
For most disciplines, one hundred hours of active study is enough to begin to understand them much better than a beginner.
For example:
- In cooking, chefs need to learn over the years, but a hundred hours of cooking, lessons, lessons and practice will make you a chef, superior to most of your acquaintances.
- In programming, you need to spend years on becoming a strong programmer, but studying a pair 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 experienced sellers, you can learn enough to avoid typical dangerous salesman's mistakes.
An example with sales, I felt for myself. Before I became a venture capital investor, I was a programmer for ten years. I have never intersected with sales and did not know anything about it. When I started investing, I found out that most companies had bottlenecks in sales, marketing, and search for new users, not technology. As a result, I engaged in self-study in the field of sales and related fields. I read books, for example Traction , attended conferences like SalesConf . I spent on this 50-100 hours. And as a result, even if I cannot be compared with an experienced seller, I learned much more about sales than people who do not deal with them know. For example, now I know that most programs need to be priced based on their value to the user, and not the cost of development. What is better to talk about the benefits than about the possibilities. And the most important thing in sales is to listen to the desires of users , and not tell them about what you have. A professional seller would make deals with 80% of potential buyers, a newbie would probably be about 10%. I think that I would give 30-40% in this case. Far from the expert, but also far from the beginner. A good return on investment a couple of weeks in training.
Several observations with regards to the "rule of one hundred hours":
- 100, although it is a round number, is approximate. In some areas, 10–20 hours will be sufficient to achieve average competence, 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 rule of 10,000 hours is based on absolute knowledge - it takes so long to learn absolutely everything about an area. The rule of one hundred hours, by contrast, is based on relative knowledge. 95% of people do not know anything about most areas of knowledge, so it is very easy to move from the category of naive 95% to 96%. The main and longest part of the journey lies just between 96% and 99.9%.
- Just as in the case of the rule of 10,000 hours, it is necessary to study actively and carefully. You are not just looking through a book or mindlessly repeating the movements of any technique - you read and train precisely in order to learn and improve your skills.
Returning to startups: make a list of things in which your company should achieve success (sales, programming, development of interfaces, 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. Spend a little time in it to gain basic knowledge and confidence, so as not to put obstacles to yourself, making the 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 gaining knowledge so that you can fill in the existing gaps in the project.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/297196/
All Articles