Overnight Success: It takes years

[jetpacklife]

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001207.html

Great article. Many hugely successful sites took years to take hold. Start now, even if you have that crazy idea.


Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.

There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. The Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.

[sub8hr]

This reminds me of a "guru" I once listened to in an info product. He said he spent 7 years acquiring his skills before he entered that particular market as a business opportunity. Then once entering the market he was hailed by others as an overnight success, to which he thought, "okay right, a 7 year overnight success."

[Jomba]

this reminds me even more of a newspaper article. It was written as a result of researching this phenomenon called "talent".

It stated that there really is no such thing as talent. A persons talent for something mostly depends on the amounth of time he or she had put in this skill.


I've experienced this with music production. In the beginning I started out with fruityloops. The productions where let's say, awefull. But after continuously improving the sounds, the mix, the melodies it did get a lot better. To the fact that I have released a few tracks. The only thing that hasn't really changed was the fact that a sort of mental picture of certain succes in my head that showed up when I made something that sounded good.

These days some people say I'm good, but about eight years ago, I had next to no rithmic feeling. So yes I do believe you need a lot of time to become good, if not, great at something. But yes you can speed up this proces, simply by surrounding yourself with people who are at least better than you in this thing you'd like to learn.

[clanshrapnel]

I think this fails to highlight that sub-skills between certain skills can be transferred amongst each other.

For example, a trained pianist will not have nearly the same learning curve going to violin as say someone who is a trained baseball player.

That said, I don't think the 7-10 years is as long as it may sound. Unless your hobby is sitting on a couch, you're almost certainly developing skills. I suppose this is one of the many reasons TFerriss suggests staying active--you never know when they may come in handy in some form or another.

[sub8hr]

Well, there's becoming world class at something, and then there's becoming much better than average. If you want to be world class, sure, it may take you a decade. Becoming much better than average can happen in a matter of weeks to months depending on the skill set you are trying to acquire. This is where the 80/20 comes in. Achieving the first 80% of the results can happen very quickly, but it takes a lot longer to get the remaining 20% of the results after you hit the point of diminishing returns.

My take on "talent" is that when given roughly the same conditions and task to accomplish, a person with talent will achieve results quicker and to a higher degree relative to other people given the same amount of effort. Some people will just rapidly excel, and others will make little to no progress no matter how hard they try.

Running coaches would tell you there are 4 kinds of runners. Those with talent who train hard, those without talent who train hard, those with talent who don't train hard, and those without talent who don't train hard. The interesting comparison is those without talent who train hard and those with talent that don't. The sad, unfair fact of the world is that those with talent who only put in only modest effort will often outperform those without talent who put in a lot of effort.

[kamakiri]

It is not so much the # of years as the # of hours spent in practice. If you have the opportunity to practice a certain skill 4 hours a day, be it language, martial arts, or dancing, you are going to get very good very fast.

If you are a 'normal human', as in not Tim Ferris, you are going to get very bored of that type of training. In a job, for example, it takes about 4 years to work 10,000 hours. Most people learn to do what they need to do to get by in far fewer hours, then just coast along. Others, who actually set the goals of being good at something give up after 5,000 hours.

At 5,000 hours 1 hour of practice 5 days a week will take you almost 20 years. How many people do you know who wanted to learn the guitar, but didn't spend close to that long practicing and gave it up because they weren't good?

This is a recent blog post by Seth Godin on the topic, I don't agree with some of his earlier points (not quoted), but this is pretty good.

Here's my take on it:
You win when you become the best in the world, however 'best' and 'world' are defined by your market. In many mature markets, it takes 10,000 hours of preparation to win because most people give up after 5,000 hours. That's the only magic thing about 10k... it's a hard number to reach, so most people bail.


Yo Yo Ma isn't perfect... he's just better than everyone else. He pushed through the Dip that others chose not to. I'm guessing that there are endeavors (like being CEO of a Fortune 500 company or partner at a big law firm) where the rewards are so huge that the number is closer to 20,000 hours or more to get through the Dip.


But, ready for this? The Dip is much closer in niche areas, new areas, unexplored areas. You can get through the Dip in an online network or with a new kind of music because being seen as the best in that area is easier (at least for now). You can get through the Dip as a real estate broker in a new, growing town a lot quicker than someone in midtown Manhattan. The competition is thinner and probably less motivated.



Yes, it matters where and when you were born. It matters that you get lucky. And it matters most of all that you saw the Dip, realized how far away it was and chose to push through it.

[Sven]

Nice start to a topic Jet!

I do think that talent is part of the equasion. The best example I know is two dutch ice skaters Falco Zandstra en Rintje Ritsma.

They both came to the championship scene at the same time. Falco had talent. Everybody wondered how someone that skinny could skate so fast. Rintje had gotten where he was trough a lot of training.

The both won a few championships.

But the most interesting bit to me is this:

Falco was gone after a few years. Rintje stayed at the top for something like 15 years!

I think that Falco's natural ability did not make him strong enough for long time competition at the top where Rintje had trained to get there, giving him much more resiliance to overcome obstacles.

Talent helps but there realy is no substitute for experience and practice.