12 ms·

The 100-Hour Rule

202 points by lpolovets 11y ago

laarc 11y ago
Does anyone have any recommendations for programs that pop-quiz you periodically until you retain what you've learned? I've been using vim for a decade and I'm trying to switch to emacs. Retaining muscle memory is only possible if I keep using the bindings I learn. Remembering all of them is difficult, and using a subset will lead to suboptimal results. Some kind of app that quizzes me seemed like a good path to learning emacs, since after 100 hours I would end up much more effective. Then I realized maybe an app like that might be helpful for anyone investing 100 hours into a variety of things.
- lpolovets 11y ago
  Something like this might be useful: https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/emacs https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/emacs I'm not sure if you use IntelliJ, but there's a plugin for that called KeyPromoter which is great. Every time you do an action with your mouse, KeyPromoter pops up a dialog that tells you the shortcut key you could've used instead. I wish there was a plugin like that for other tools. (Small caveat: I last used KP about 3 years ago; I'm not sure if it's still working with the latest version of IntelliJ)
  - laarc 11y ago
    That site is incredibly helpful. Thank you very much :) Usually I try not to leave dupe comments, but in this case the story is off the front page and you might not see it otherwise: I've been trying to find an emacs user to ask some (admittedly beginner-level) questions. I'm trying to get a certain obscure emacs plugin set up, but I occasionally run into some elisp problems that take a few hours to track down. So I was hoping to find someone to bug with questions. I'll figure it out one way or another, but a peer would be nice. I was wondering if it would be ok to email you? No worries either way. Have a great week!
    - lpolovets 11y ago
      I actually don't use emacs -- sorry! I found that site recently when I was trying to memorize terminal commands, and I happened to remember that they had quizzes for emacs and other editors, too.
    - zck 11y ago
      There's also the Emacs stack exchange^1. It's good if you have specific problems (this setting does X, I expected Y, what's up?), but not too much for advice (what do you prefer for task Z?) [1] http://emacs.stackexchange.com/ http://emacs.stackexchange.com/
- e19293001 11y ago
  The best thing to do is use emacs. I've through switching from vim to emacs. It was difficult for me at first until I ended up removing vim from my computer to force me to learn emacs. I would recommend org-drill[0] to pop-quiz you. Develop your own work flow with org-mode and organize your stuff with it. [0] - http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html
  - laarc 11y ago
    Thanks very much. That's awesome. I have a few questions I was hoping to ask an emacs user, and it sounds like your situation was almost identical to mine. Is there an email address I can reach you at? (If not, that's fine! Thank you anyway.)
    - e19293001 11y ago
      Just concatenate my user name and "@gmail.com" :)
    - escherize 11y ago
      I've never had more "Oh my, this is awesome" moments with anything than I have with Emacs. I'm Going to check out org-drill.el too. Thanks!
  - Ixiaus 11y ago
    Yes very much to org-drill. It's a huge part of my daily life.
- panglott 11y ago
  Sounds like spaced-repetition software like Anki, which is mostly used in language learning.
  - nibnib 11y ago
    It works well for anything that needs to be committed to memory and can fit into the flashcard format. Especially if you can get into the habit of using something like AnkiDroid whenever you need to kill 10 minutes.
- dexen 11y ago
  The CLI quiz(6) program from bsd-games package, preferably with -t option. Should be available on, or for, most POSIX systems.
- mindphaze 11y ago
  Have you tried spacemacs out for emacs? It uses evil mode for vim key bindings and made the transition to emacs painless for me.
- Scarblac 11y ago
  Embrace the suptimal. You can live a pretty good life being suboptimal. I've been using Emacs for over twenty years, and only know a small percentage of its commands. Every now and then, I realize I'm doing something repetitive, and I use a few minutes to find out what the best way to do it is, and then I've learned a new thing (most recent: M-; , for "comment-Do What I Mean"). There is no reason to wait until you're great before you start using a text editor.
- eru 11y ago
  Duolingo does this to teach you languages.
- prewett 11y ago
  Depending on why you want to use emacs, you could just use viper or another set of VI bindings. I switched to emacs back in The Day so that I could have an integrated debugger on Linux; I wasn't switching because I thought emacs had a great set of command bindings, so staying in VI mode was perfect. If you use viper and emacs 22 or later, you'll probably want to add (setq viper-ESC-key "\C-[") to your .emacs file so that ctrl-[ works as ESC.
lordnacho 11y ago
He's probably right. If learning curves have decreasing returns, you can get most of the learning in the first section of time. For instance, you can read an introductory text in Economics, Physics, Biology, and so on, and you'll know quite a bit about each subject: the subtopics, the main themes, open questions, and the relevant names. Or if you pick up three Economics books, you will know a bit more about some specific ideas (monetary theory, Keynesianism, financial economics, etc...) and nothing about Biology and Physics. But you still won't be anywhere near the level where you can teach economics. This is why it's easy to sound well rounded but hard to be an authority.
thedogeye 11y ago
Charlie Munger said it best: “You may say, ‘My God, this is already getting way too tough.’ But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Did he also list what those models are? :)
cs702 11y ago
True for basic business processes like sales & marketing, but not true for things like making a new kind of car, designing a new kind of medical device, or developing a more accurate natural language processing service, which require a LOT more than 100 hours of prior training and experience. Otherwise a great essay with great advice.
mkagenius 11y ago
While the idea seems sound. The amount of hours should be a variable in this case to be adjusted according to someone's own pace of picking new stuff up.
- escherize 11y ago
  Ahh, so you completely agree with the article. While "100" is an easy-to-remember round number, it's just an approximation. Some fields might require ten or twenty hours to achieve a level of medium competence, while other fields might require several hundred hours.
  - joepvd 11y ago
    Please note that the article make the required time dependent on the field, whereas GP talks about persons.
  - Kurtz79 11y ago
    I would say that between 10 and "several hundreds" hours the difference is so big to make a "100 hours" rule kind of pointless. If the bottom line is that the more you practice the better you get (or rephrasing it, if you practice a relatively small amount of hours you will be more competent than an absolute beginner), well, breaking news from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious.
dimdimdim 11y ago
Not sure why all of this is "new research"? the more time you spend on something, the better you get at it. Yes, if you spend a couple of days on something, you will know more than a beginner and if you spend a couple of years, you might be termed an industry expert.
- Cakez0r 11y ago
  I think the point is that your expertise doesn't grow linearly with the amount of time you spend. It might take you 10,000 hours to find yourself in the top 5% of the population for a particular skill, but you can maybe get to the top quartile in 100 hours, which is probably good enough.
RyanZAG 11y ago
There's also a different 100 hour rule. 100 hours is enough time for someone to become dangerously competent: just competent enough to complete something, but not competent enough to complete it well.
- rch 11y ago
  It's also just about long enough to become annoyingly cocky about quickly one is picking up a new skill.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- rwc 11y ago
  So much so that there's a book for pilots exactly about that topic, "The Killing Zone". "This survival guide for new pilots identifies the pitfalls waiting inside the killing zone, the period from 50 to 350 flight hours when they leave their instructors behind and fly as pilot in command for the first time. Although they're privately certified, many of these unseasoned aviators are unaware of the potential accidents that lie ahead while trying to build decision-making skills on their own -- many times falling victim to inexperience."
  - GVIrish 11y ago
    I've seen exactly the same phenomenon in racing/track day driving. Most of the crashes I've seen happen in that period between when someone has enough skill/experience to go fast, but not enough to recover from bad situations at speed. So a lot of big crashes happen in the intermediate to newly-minted advanced drivers. I'm definitely going to pick up that book.
- mkartic3 11y ago
  Yes, but for some peripheral skills that might help but aren't really "necessary", this rule makes a lot of sense. I mean, spending 100 hours on a skill definitely wont make you an expert, but it'll make you literate in it. Taking the sales example, as a programmer it might teach you how to "sell" yourself to forge a better career. Or say public speaking.
kriro 11y ago
Reminds me of the book "The First 20 Hours" by Josh Kaufman. He gives examples of skills that you can learn fairly well in 20 hours. One of them is programming. I have some issues with the book but overall it's a fun read. Here's a TED talk he gave which lead me to buy the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY
- rabidonrails 11y ago
  Yes! I came here to post this exact comment.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
dorfsmay 11y ago
100 hours? What about 20? http://first20hours.com/ http://first20hours.com/
forgotAgain 11y ago
It takes 1 hour of reading internet memes to become functional at writing internet memes.
mightybyte 11y ago
I get really annoyed by these sound bites claiming certain numbers of hours. The article does have the caveat "while '100' is an easy-to-remember round number, it's just an approximation", but the realities of that caveat make the title very misleading. The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things: 1. The particular activity 2. The abilities of the person 3. How much competence you consider "basic" I submit that these three factors have so much variance that it makes any kind of N-hour rule mostly useless. I know people who can pick up a new programming language very quickly, but would take a long time to achieve basic competence in a new physical activity. Conversely, I know people who can pick up new sports very quickly, but it would take them FAR longer than 100 hours to learn to program with decent competency. (Hell, I think it takes far longer than 100 hours for even a naturally talented non-programmer to learn to program.) Some activities have straight-up MUCH steeper learning curves than other activities. For example, it takes longer to get good at olympic lifting than it does to get good at running. You might even disagree with that particular example, but if you do, that speaks to the third point of varying definitions of "basic". The bottom line is that there is no substitute for hours of focused effort. Yes, you want to be aware of techniques that can make your effort achieve better results, but you still have to put in the hours. How many hours? I can't possibly say without knowing a lot more about you, the activity, and what level of competence you're shooting for.
- Lagged2Death 11y ago
  The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things: 1. The particular activity 2. The abilities of the person 3. How much competence you consider "basic" I think I'd put "environment" in at #3, maybe even #2. Where environment is a wide umbrella including the obvious (time and space to devote to study, quality of study materials and support) to the somewhat less so (your gender, your race, your affluence or lack thereof, the supportive/skeptical attitudes of your family and friends etc). Environment is subject to limited control by an individual. But young, affluent people have the most control. Environment winds up being largely a matter of luck. This environmental influence - which so often is matter of luck - is one subtlety that seems to get consistently left out of all these "10,000 hours" and "100 hours" type discussions. Even a clever person can spend 10,000 hours working at something under terrible conditions and have poor results. One doesn't have to be particularly bright to spend 10 hours under ideal circumstances and make real progress. By leaving this out, we offer unwarranted support to a certain Utopian/libertarian/meritocratic mythos that is so popular in the software/startup field. And I think that's a shame. I think the field will ultimately be better off if it can view itself more clearly.
whoiskevin 11y ago
Awesome. 100 hours of some civil engineering and I will be able to build some small simple bridges.
- lordnacho 11y ago
  I built a radio and a bridge in my first 100 hours studying Engineering. Both fulfilled the required criteria: you could listen to the radio shows on the radio, and you could place the bridge between two tables and stand on it.
- jerf 11y ago
  Are you trying for sarcasm? I'd very much expect that with just a bit of civil engineering study you ought to be able to better design a bridge across a creek than if you did no study, ever. Heck, with the right focus, an hour of study on the topic could well greatly improve your work. Bridges aren't some sort of dark magic, after all, we've been building them for thousands of years.
  - oddsignals 11y ago
    Although it took quite a few hundred years before we started consistently building them to a good enough standard that they didn't collapse after a few years, or decades. Something I remind myself of when I see the current state of software engineering.
    - jerf 11y ago
      I'm not talking about a bridge meant to stand for the ages. I did say "creek" after all. We do all understand that there's everything from bridges across creeks that we can literally step over to bridges across multi-mile spans of lake or ocean, right? 100 hours of civil engineering is only enough to get a sense of how big a problem the latter is, but is probably plenty to learn how to build something down in the single or low-double digit of feet range that will be safe to cross. I ask this quite seriously because it seems to me a lot of people get rather black-or-white on these sorts of issues, where either we must insist that we know nothing, absolutely nothing, and how dare you claim otherwise in your arrogance, OR we went to school for at least four years and got certified and have a job in the field and their opinions are unimpeachable and perfect on this matter. Probably an artifact of too much "school" and not enough experience in much of anything. In reality there are very few fields where there is no way to gain a modest amount of skill with modest effort; all the ones that leap to mind block you not because of the fundamental impossibility of learning a bit of something, but because of high capital entrance fees.
whatever_dude 11y ago
So it all comes down to "100 hours of something and you'll know more about it than someone who didn't take 100 hours" Uh. Okay.
- thomasahle 11y ago
  Exactly. That, plus the fact(?) that most people put less than 100 hours into most things.
chasing 11y ago
Sorry to complain, but the idea that it takes some amount of time (between 10 and 10,000 hours according to the article) to achieve competency in something is vague and obvious to the point of silliness.
peter303 11y ago
Sort of meshes with a typical college course. At MIT courses are measured in hours of work per week including lectures, recitations, readings and problem sets. A course is typically 9-15 hours with course total of 40-50 recommended per semester. That that would work out to 130 to 210 hours of work per course, roughly the hundred hour rule. I found I really didnt master a course until using the material in another course or future research or teaching the course as a TA. P.S. The course hours is often a wildly inaccurate estimate. People might have a challenging lab course where put in twice the recommended hours. Or they let assignments pile up until the final weeks, working 100 hour weeks in December or May.
myth_buster 11y ago
Essentially a power law relationship... If your team lacks experience in some of those areas, don't just wing it and hope for the best. Invest a little bit of time into learning and basic competence so that you don't hamstring yourself by making rookie, easily avoidable mistakes. In the long run, you'll want to hire experts; Wouldn't another viable option be freelancing that task?
meow_mix 11y ago
I think the author is writing under the assumption that there are diminishing returns as one gets better at a skill, when really the opposite is true. The number of topics you can absorb per unit term obviously increases with your pre-existing competency with the skill. This is because you can leverage your existing knowledge of the subject by comparing what you already know with what you're trying to learn. There is no "sweet spot" for learning a new skill. Most skills have a learning curve where competency starts low. The author is trying to make a generalization based off his perceived sales skill but is probably suffering from a Dunning-Kruger effect. That, or software engineering already taught him a great deal of the requisite jargon required for his particular brand of sales. If the author were to instead move into say, spectrometer sales he would most likely find that his "30% or 40% prospects" would really be 0%. Not a very well-informed article.
- spectrum1234 11y ago
  But the assumption here is there are many many things to learn. What you are saying is mastery of a skill builds off itself, of course that's true. But learning something completely new is still going to have a MUCH higher return. And this is more true the MORE uncorrelated the things you are trying to learn.
- mechanician 11y ago
  I agree with the above, but exact number of hours aside, do you think there could be some validity to the article, akin to a Pareto principle?
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  I think the author is writing under the assumption that there are diminishing returns as one gets better at a skill, when really the opposite is true. I didn't get that as the main take-away. Rather, simply, that it's much easier to bootstrap oneself out of a state of utter helplessness in the face of some totally unfamiliar skill area (cooking, music, foreign languages... and yes, even programming) than people commonly think. And into that zone where, while far from an expert, you're at least getting traction, and past that feeling of "I'm just not cut out for this". To a place where one could reasonably say, "Yeah, I could get a lot better at this, if I spent more time on it." It's an extremely valuable life lesson, I've found. And no, I'm not saying you should go out and hire programmers with 100 hours of self-taught experience. Nor is the article.
graffitici 11y ago
On this note, if people have more resources related to sales, I'd be happy if they could share..! I think for most technical entrepreneurs, sales is likely one of the challenging areas to master..
adevine 11y ago
I wish we would stop repeating the "10,000 hours rule". It was a good soundbite in (at least what I think was) a good book, Outliers, but rigorous analysis of the data doesn't back it up. It's like the "drink 8 glasses of water a day" rule - sounded good until someone realized there actually wasn't evidence to back it up. See http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not...
spectrum1234 11y ago
Obviously?
jlarocco 11y ago
What a strange article. Isn't it obvious that somebody with 100 hours of experience will do better than a person with no experience whatsoever? On the other hand, if he's claiming that 100 hours is enough time to become competent, then I don't agree at all. It's plenty of time to learn and become knowledgeable on a topic, but knowledge alone is useless without the ability to effectively apply it in a useful way, and that only comes from experience. There's just not enough time in 100 hours to get a meaningful amount of experience in a complicated field. His examples of reading some books on sales is just goofy. Without actually have sold anything his claim that he's now 3-4x more effective than a "newbie" sales person is just a joke. Go sell something, and then come tell us how effective you are.
npsimons 11y ago
Forget 100 hours, how about 20? Josh Kaufman already beat them to this topic, and has not only a TEDx talk where he finishes 20 hours on ukelele, but he's also written a book: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-First-20-Hours-How-to-Learn http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-First-20-Hours-How-to-Lea... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158493-the-first-20-hours https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158493-the-first-20-ho...
joelberman 11y ago
I think we should strive for more than to be better than most. I would rather be highly competent at something than good enough at many things. But I understand others may prefer the jack of all trades route.

202 points by lpolovets 11y ago

laarc 11y ago

Does anyone have any recommendations for programs that pop-quiz you periodically until you retain what you've learned? I've been using vim for a decade and I'm trying to switch to emacs. Retaining muscle memory is only possible if I keep using the bindings I learn. Remembering all of them is difficult, and using a subset will lead to suboptimal results. Some kind of app that quizzes me seemed like a good path to learning emacs, since after 100 hours I would end up much more effective. Then I realized maybe an app like that might be helpful for anyone investing 100 hours into a variety of things.

lpolovets 11y ago
Something like this might be useful: https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/emacs https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/emacs I'm not sure if you use IntelliJ, but there's a plugin for that called KeyPromoter which is great. Every time you do an action with your mouse, KeyPromoter pops up a dialog that tells you the shortcut key you could've used instead. I wish there was a plugin like that for other tools. (Small caveat: I last used KP about 3 years ago; I'm not sure if it's still working with the latest version of IntelliJ)
- laarc 11y ago
  That site is incredibly helpful. Thank you very much :) Usually I try not to leave dupe comments, but in this case the story is off the front page and you might not see it otherwise: I've been trying to find an emacs user to ask some (admittedly beginner-level) questions. I'm trying to get a certain obscure emacs plugin set up, but I occasionally run into some elisp problems that take a few hours to track down. So I was hoping to find someone to bug with questions. I'll figure it out one way or another, but a peer would be nice. I was wondering if it would be ok to email you? No worries either way. Have a great week!
  - lpolovets 11y ago
    I actually don't use emacs -- sorry! I found that site recently when I was trying to memorize terminal commands, and I happened to remember that they had quizzes for emacs and other editors, too.
  - zck 11y ago
    There's also the Emacs stack exchange^1. It's good if you have specific problems (this setting does X, I expected Y, what's up?), but not too much for advice (what do you prefer for task Z?) [1] http://emacs.stackexchange.com/ http://emacs.stackexchange.com/
e19293001 11y ago
The best thing to do is use emacs. I've through switching from vim to emacs. It was difficult for me at first until I ended up removing vim from my computer to force me to learn emacs. I would recommend org-drill[0] to pop-quiz you. Develop your own work flow with org-mode and organize your stuff with it. [0] - http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html
- laarc 11y ago
  Thanks very much. That's awesome. I have a few questions I was hoping to ask an emacs user, and it sounds like your situation was almost identical to mine. Is there an email address I can reach you at? (If not, that's fine! Thank you anyway.)
  - e19293001 11y ago
    Just concatenate my user name and "@gmail.com" :)
  - escherize 11y ago
    I've never had more "Oh my, this is awesome" moments with anything than I have with Emacs. I'm Going to check out org-drill.el too. Thanks!
- Ixiaus 11y ago
  Yes very much to org-drill. It's a huge part of my daily life.
panglott 11y ago
Sounds like spaced-repetition software like Anki, which is mostly used in language learning.
- nibnib 11y ago
  It works well for anything that needs to be committed to memory and can fit into the flashcard format. Especially if you can get into the habit of using something like AnkiDroid whenever you need to kill 10 minutes.
dexen 11y ago
The CLI quiz(6) program from bsd-games package, preferably with -t option. Should be available on, or for, most POSIX systems.
mindphaze 11y ago
Have you tried spacemacs out for emacs? It uses evil mode for vim key bindings and made the transition to emacs painless for me.
Scarblac 11y ago
Embrace the suptimal. You can live a pretty good life being suboptimal. I've been using Emacs for over twenty years, and only know a small percentage of its commands. Every now and then, I realize I'm doing something repetitive, and I use a few minutes to find out what the best way to do it is, and then I've learned a new thing (most recent: M-; , for "comment-Do What I Mean"). There is no reason to wait until you're great before you start using a text editor.
eru 11y ago
Duolingo does this to teach you languages.
prewett 11y ago
Depending on why you want to use emacs, you could just use viper or another set of VI bindings. I switched to emacs back in The Day so that I could have an integrated debugger on Linux; I wasn't switching because I thought emacs had a great set of command bindings, so staying in VI mode was perfect. If you use viper and emacs 22 or later, you'll probably want to add (setq viper-ESC-key "\C-[") to your .emacs file so that ctrl-[ works as ESC.

lordnacho 11y ago

He's probably right. If learning curves have decreasing returns, you can get most of the learning in the first section of time. For instance, you can read an introductory text in Economics, Physics, Biology, and so on, and you'll know quite a bit about each subject: the subtopics, the main themes, open questions, and the relevant names. Or if you pick up three Economics books, you will know a bit more about some specific ideas (monetary theory, Keynesianism, financial economics, etc...) and nothing about Biology and Physics. But you still won't be anywhere near the level where you can teach economics. This is why it's easy to sound well rounded but hard to be an authority.

thedogeye 11y ago

Charlie Munger said it best: “You may say, ‘My God, this is already getting way too tough.’ But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”

enraged_camel 11y ago
Did he also list what those models are? :)

cs702 11y ago

True for basic business processes like sales & marketing, but not true for things like making a new kind of car, designing a new kind of medical device, or developing a more accurate natural language processing service, which require a LOT more than 100 hours of prior training and experience. Otherwise a great essay with great advice.

mkagenius 11y ago

While the idea seems sound. The amount of hours should be a variable in this case to be adjusted according to someone's own pace of picking new stuff up.

escherize 11y ago
Ahh, so you completely agree with the article. While "100" is an easy-to-remember round number, it's just an approximation. Some fields might require ten or twenty hours to achieve a level of medium competence, while other fields might require several hundred hours.
- joepvd 11y ago
  Please note that the article make the required time dependent on the field, whereas GP talks about persons.
- Kurtz79 11y ago
  I would say that between 10 and "several hundreds" hours the difference is so big to make a "100 hours" rule kind of pointless. If the bottom line is that the more you practice the better you get (or rephrasing it, if you practice a relatively small amount of hours you will be more competent than an absolute beginner), well, breaking news from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious.

dimdimdim 11y ago

Not sure why all of this is "new research"? the more time you spend on something, the better you get at it. Yes, if you spend a couple of days on something, you will know more than a beginner and if you spend a couple of years, you might be termed an industry expert.

Cakez0r 11y ago
I think the point is that your expertise doesn't grow linearly with the amount of time you spend. It might take you 10,000 hours to find yourself in the top 5% of the population for a particular skill, but you can maybe get to the top quartile in 100 hours, which is probably good enough.

RyanZAG 11y ago

There's also a different 100 hour rule. 100 hours is enough time for someone to become dangerously competent: just competent enough to complete something, but not competent enough to complete it well.

rch 11y ago
It's also just about long enough to become annoyingly cocky about quickly one is picking up a new skill.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
rwc 11y ago
So much so that there's a book for pilots exactly about that topic, "The Killing Zone". "This survival guide for new pilots identifies the pitfalls waiting inside the killing zone, the period from 50 to 350 flight hours when they leave their instructors behind and fly as pilot in command for the first time. Although they're privately certified, many of these unseasoned aviators are unaware of the potential accidents that lie ahead while trying to build decision-making skills on their own -- many times falling victim to inexperience."
- GVIrish 11y ago
  I've seen exactly the same phenomenon in racing/track day driving. Most of the crashes I've seen happen in that period between when someone has enough skill/experience to go fast, but not enough to recover from bad situations at speed. So a lot of big crashes happen in the intermediate to newly-minted advanced drivers. I'm definitely going to pick up that book.
mkartic3 11y ago
Yes, but for some peripheral skills that might help but aren't really "necessary", this rule makes a lot of sense. I mean, spending 100 hours on a skill definitely wont make you an expert, but it'll make you literate in it. Taking the sales example, as a programmer it might teach you how to "sell" yourself to forge a better career. Or say public speaking.

kriro 11y ago

Reminds me of the book "The First 20 Hours" by Josh Kaufman. He gives examples of skills that you can learn fairly well in 20 hours. One of them is programming. I have some issues with the book but overall it's a fun read. Here's a TED talk he gave which lead me to buy the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY

rabidonrails 11y ago
Yes! I came here to post this exact comment.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

dorfsmay 11y ago

100 hours? What about 20? http://first20hours.com/ http://first20hours.com/

forgotAgain 11y ago

It takes 1 hour of reading internet memes to become functional at writing internet memes.

mightybyte 11y ago

I get really annoyed by these sound bites claiming certain numbers of hours. The article does have the caveat "while '100' is an easy-to-remember round number, it's just an approximation", but the realities of that caveat make the title very misleading. The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things: 1. The particular activity 2. The abilities of the person 3. How much competence you consider "basic" I submit that these three factors have so much variance that it makes any kind of N-hour rule mostly useless. I know people who can pick up a new programming language very quickly, but would take a long time to achieve basic competence in a new physical activity. Conversely, I know people who can pick up new sports very quickly, but it would take them FAR longer than 100 hours to learn to program with decent competency. (Hell, I think it takes far longer than 100 hours for even a naturally talented non-programmer to learn to program.) Some activities have straight-up MUCH steeper learning curves than other activities. For example, it takes longer to get good at olympic lifting than it does to get good at running. You might even disagree with that particular example, but if you do, that speaks to the third point of varying definitions of "basic". The bottom line is that there is no substitute for hours of focused effort. Yes, you want to be aware of techniques that can make your effort achieve better results, but you still have to put in the hours. How many hours? I can't possibly say without knowing a lot more about you, the activity, and what level of competence you're shooting for.

Lagged2Death 11y ago
The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things: 1. The particular activity 2. The abilities of the person 3. How much competence you consider "basic" I think I'd put "environment" in at #3, maybe even #2. Where environment is a wide umbrella including the obvious (time and space to devote to study, quality of study materials and support) to the somewhat less so (your gender, your race, your affluence or lack thereof, the supportive/skeptical attitudes of your family and friends etc). Environment is subject to limited control by an individual. But young, affluent people have the most control. Environment winds up being largely a matter of luck. This environmental influence - which so often is matter of luck - is one subtlety that seems to get consistently left out of all these "10,000 hours" and "100 hours" type discussions. Even a clever person can spend 10,000 hours working at something under terrible conditions and have poor results. One doesn't have to be particularly bright to spend 10 hours under ideal circumstances and make real progress. By leaving this out, we offer unwarranted support to a certain Utopian/libertarian/meritocratic mythos that is so popular in the software/startup field. And I think that's a shame. I think the field will ultimately be better off if it can view itself more clearly.

whoiskevin 11y ago

Awesome. 100 hours of some civil engineering and I will be able to build some small simple bridges.

lordnacho 11y ago
I built a radio and a bridge in my first 100 hours studying Engineering. Both fulfilled the required criteria: you could listen to the radio shows on the radio, and you could place the bridge between two tables and stand on it.
jerf 11y ago
Are you trying for sarcasm? I'd very much expect that with just a bit of civil engineering study you ought to be able to better design a bridge across a creek than if you did no study, ever. Heck, with the right focus, an hour of study on the topic could well greatly improve your work. Bridges aren't some sort of dark magic, after all, we've been building them for thousands of years.
- oddsignals 11y ago
  Although it took quite a few hundred years before we started consistently building them to a good enough standard that they didn't collapse after a few years, or decades. Something I remind myself of when I see the current state of software engineering.
  - jerf 11y ago
    I'm not talking about a bridge meant to stand for the ages. I did say "creek" after all. We do all understand that there's everything from bridges across creeks that we can literally step over to bridges across multi-mile spans of lake or ocean, right? 100 hours of civil engineering is only enough to get a sense of how big a problem the latter is, but is probably plenty to learn how to build something down in the single or low-double digit of feet range that will be safe to cross. I ask this quite seriously because it seems to me a lot of people get rather black-or-white on these sorts of issues, where either we must insist that we know nothing, absolutely nothing, and how dare you claim otherwise in your arrogance, OR we went to school for at least four years and got certified and have a job in the field and their opinions are unimpeachable and perfect on this matter. Probably an artifact of too much "school" and not enough experience in much of anything. In reality there are very few fields where there is no way to gain a modest amount of skill with modest effort; all the ones that leap to mind block you not because of the fundamental impossibility of learning a bit of something, but because of high capital entrance fees.

whatever_dude 11y ago

So it all comes down to "100 hours of something and you'll know more about it than someone who didn't take 100 hours" Uh. Okay.

thomasahle 11y ago
Exactly. That, plus the fact(?) that most people put less than 100 hours into most things.

chasing 11y ago

Sorry to complain, but the idea that it takes some amount of time (between 10 and 10,000 hours according to the article) to achieve competency in something is vague and obvious to the point of silliness.

peter303 11y ago

Sort of meshes with a typical college course. At MIT courses are measured in hours of work per week including lectures, recitations, readings and problem sets. A course is typically 9-15 hours with course total of 40-50 recommended per semester. That that would work out to 130 to 210 hours of work per course, roughly the hundred hour rule. I found I really didnt master a course until using the material in another course or future research or teaching the course as a TA. P.S. The course hours is often a wildly inaccurate estimate. People might have a challenging lab course where put in twice the recommended hours. Or they let assignments pile up until the final weeks, working 100 hour weeks in December or May.

myth_buster 11y ago

Essentially a power law relationship... If your team lacks experience in some of those areas, don't just wing it and hope for the best. Invest a little bit of time into learning and basic competence so that you don't hamstring yourself by making rookie, easily avoidable mistakes. In the long run, you'll want to hire experts; Wouldn't another viable option be freelancing that task?

meow_mix 11y ago

I think the author is writing under the assumption that there are diminishing returns as one gets better at a skill, when really the opposite is true. The number of topics you can absorb per unit term obviously increases with your pre-existing competency with the skill. This is because you can leverage your existing knowledge of the subject by comparing what you already know with what you're trying to learn. There is no "sweet spot" for learning a new skill. Most skills have a learning curve where competency starts low. The author is trying to make a generalization based off his perceived sales skill but is probably suffering from a Dunning-Kruger effect. That, or software engineering already taught him a great deal of the requisite jargon required for his particular brand of sales. If the author were to instead move into say, spectrometer sales he would most likely find that his "30% or 40% prospects" would really be 0%. Not a very well-informed article.

spectrum1234 11y ago
But the assumption here is there are many many things to learn. What you are saying is mastery of a skill builds off itself, of course that's true. But learning something completely new is still going to have a MUCH higher return. And this is more true the MORE uncorrelated the things you are trying to learn.
mechanician 11y ago
I agree with the above, but exact number of hours aside, do you think there could be some validity to the article, akin to a Pareto principle?
kafkaesq 11y ago
I think the author is writing under the assumption that there are diminishing returns as one gets better at a skill, when really the opposite is true. I didn't get that as the main take-away. Rather, simply, that it's much easier to bootstrap oneself out of a state of utter helplessness in the face of some totally unfamiliar skill area (cooking, music, foreign languages... and yes, even programming) than people commonly think. And into that zone where, while far from an expert, you're at least getting traction, and past that feeling of "I'm just not cut out for this". To a place where one could reasonably say, "Yeah, I could get a lot better at this, if I spent more time on it." It's an extremely valuable life lesson, I've found. And no, I'm not saying you should go out and hire programmers with 100 hours of self-taught experience. Nor is the article.

graffitici 11y ago

On this note, if people have more resources related to sales, I'd be happy if they could share..! I think for most technical entrepreneurs, sales is likely one of the challenging areas to master..

adevine 11y ago

I wish we would stop repeating the "10,000 hours rule". It was a good soundbite in (at least what I think was) a good book, Outliers, but rigorous analysis of the data doesn't back it up. It's like the "drink 8 glasses of water a day" rule - sounded good until someone realized there actually wasn't evidence to back it up. See http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not...

spectrum1234 11y ago

Obviously?

jlarocco 11y ago

What a strange article. Isn't it obvious that somebody with 100 hours of experience will do better than a person with no experience whatsoever? On the other hand, if he's claiming that 100 hours is enough time to become competent, then I don't agree at all. It's plenty of time to learn and become knowledgeable on a topic, but knowledge alone is useless without the ability to effectively apply it in a useful way, and that only comes from experience. There's just not enough time in 100 hours to get a meaningful amount of experience in a complicated field. His examples of reading some books on sales is just goofy. Without actually have sold anything his claim that he's now 3-4x more effective than a "newbie" sales person is just a joke. Go sell something, and then come tell us how effective you are.

npsimons 11y ago

Forget 100 hours, how about 20? Josh Kaufman already beat them to this topic, and has not only a TEDx talk where he finishes 20 hours on ukelele, but he's also written a book: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-First-20-Hours-How-to-Learn http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-First-20-Hours-How-to-Lea... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158493-the-first-20-hours https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158493-the-first-20-ho...

joelberman 11y ago

I think we should strive for more than to be better than most. I would rather be highly competent at something than good enough at many things. But I understand others may prefer the jack of all trades route.