I swear I thought this was going to be about dropping food on the floor.
Donât you know thereâs also the 200-hour rule? It takes that long to become twice as good as you were after 100 hours.
Wouldnât it be better if we just acted as if these twerps didnât exist?
Talking about them doesnât usually/really help, yâknow.
Thereâs a â1000 hour ruleâ now, because I say so.
OK, Iâll ask. Whatâs the story with the clock? Did you folks cobble it up for the story, or is someone trying metric time again?
Thereâs a zero hour rule, where if you ignore a skill, youâll never have it. The upside is that you never have to worry about it.
Heh. But if 100 hours is âgood enough for workâ and 10,000 hours is âmasterâ, presumably the progression is nonlinear. And even being a âmasterâ doesnât mean knowing everything. Youâll often hear people regarded as masters say theyâre still learning.
To say itâs linear or non-linear weâd need some way of quantifying mastery, though. Thatâs a bit of a problem.
Iâd love to see a 100 hour learning-the-guitar program. Iâve had guitars now for almost 20 years and I still canât play a single song. I can do a few scales and play some toy songs from a Hal Leonard book, but thatâs about it.
Iâve taken lessons from two different teachers over the years (once a week for a total of around 6 months), I play Rocksmith (and now Rocksmith 2014). I do exercises from a workout book I bought after reading Jasonâs review here.
Iâve invested far more than 100 hours and at this point, Iâve basically given up. I havenât touched my guitar in almost a year. The super frustrating part is that my daughter played Rocksmith for about an hour a day for a week and zoomed past me skill wise. I start to hate the instrument, but then Iâll go out and see an amazing musician play and suddenly want to play again.
People who have worked on something for over 10 000 hours know enough to know they do not know everything.
People who have learnt for 100 hoursâŚI must be really stupid because I cannot think of anything worth knowing at which I was âmore than a beginnerâ after 100 hours. That, or the typical VC has no idea of how difficult things are.
If you practice something really complicated like Aikido 100 hours is nothing. Most people are still really quite bad after a year or two. Even ten thousand hours would not make you an expert. from 2500 to 3000 hours would make you a black belt, but that is not really an expert, just competent enough to teach. Expert level would be something like 20,000 to thirty thousand hours or more simply put, a lifetime.
Iâd count that as success! but YMMV 
The biggest secret to modern business is that mastery or even competence donât really matter. All you need is warm bodies to keep the economic ball rolling. Pretty soon, not even that.
Put another way, the typical VC understands how irrelevant productivity is to the bottom line.
Goethe says in Natur und Kunst*
âIn der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meisterâ
Roughly in English, the master shows himself by overcoming limitations. A real expert can get good photographs out of a pinhole camera, can make an average musical instrument sound good, and can make a piece of art with paper and pencil. I guess in the software version the expert programmer would be able to knock up an HTTP client without using libraries, or hand-coding big SQL queries using a paper schema and no tools.
*The whole thing makes his point, since Goethe shows his mastery as a poet by limiting himself to a strict schema and only 14 lines to make some serious observations. I wonât say âevery German schoolkid knows itâ, but it canât be far off.
Actually, the VC knows that if you understand the tricks, you can get people to invest without looking at the bottom line. Remind me again how much profit Twitter makes? For the perfect VC scheme, other people pour money into a bottomless pit and chunks of it come the way of the VC, like Niagara Falls continuously pouring away water but some of it being diverted for power generation.
And then still get your ass handed to you by a nerd with six-months of BJJ.
The master embraces mistakes and limitations and actively uses them. The wannabe master complains about errors, mistakes and limitations and lets these things block the process of their expression.
For example, painting. A well-versed painter will make mistakes, recognize them and try something else, paint over them, start over, try a new technique, switch things up âŚuntil itâs right. An intermediate painter makes errors and then gets frustrated and lets the errors stop the process.
Sure, a master can get frustrated and might abandon a project and quit. Most masters of anything, whom I know, would only stay frustrated and quit for a while and then pick it up again. They get the bug under their skin and have to finish the project or make it right.
I know this feeling of being âon the hunt.â It will wax and wane, but when the call to hunt has been made, and the inspiration is on full blast, there is no ignoring it.
Oh boy, here we go with this discussion.
Youâre off base.
A good aikidoka would know to remain out of grappling range, and if they did get within grappling range would quickly adjust to be in dominant position. A good BJJ combatant would know that in order to not be thrown, theyâd have to not let the aikidoka get behind them or get out of grappling range. A good karateka would know that in order to beat the aikidoka and the BJJ, theyâd have to strike fast and get out of any grappling or throwing positions, land strategic blows and cause the others to lose their footing. A good Tai Chi-ist would know that the aikidoka is going to try to throw them, the BJJ is going to try a takedown and a chokeout, and the karateka is going to try to land some kicks and punches, so best to avoid all of them, keep his balance and get the hell away.
Iâm standing over here to the side with my .45, with the safety off and if any of you dumbasses come at me, I am blowing your fucking heads off.
Iâve never really âgotâ why people are afraid of those concepts. Iâve always found them fun. I rolled a web server with only fork, socket, and select in⌠2003? Wouldnât use it in production (cause the whole point was to be able to remotely inject code into it). And Iâve figured out non trivial schemas just by reading transaction logs (that is actually easier if you have a pencil and paper).
Them again I canât VB for the life of me and Lisp gives me cold sweats (xslt is bad enough to make me know I donât wanna hop on the lisp train).
And I sit in my underground volcano lair and call 911. (Shaddack is doing the prelim design work)
