"Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours is directionally correct, but it’s not exactly correct. It implies that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you get mastery. Let’s put aside whether 10,000 is the right number or not.
It’s not just hours put in—it’s iterations.
How many learning loops do you have that drive the learning curve?
What is an iteration? An iteration is when you do something and then you look at the result; you test the result somehow—ideally against a free market, nature, or physics. Then you ask, “Did this work or not? What part of this experiment worked or not?”
And then based on that, you make a new creative guess on how to improve that thing, and you do it again.
The number of times you can do that rotation, that iteration, the faster you’re going to learn. That’s the curve you want to be on.
Great people will distill insights from every iteration.
So it’s not as simple as finding one secret. Yes, every company makes a secret bet. They have a theory as to how the world is going to work out that other people don’t necessarily have en masse, or it’s not conventional wisdom yet.
But along the way, they’re going to discover thousands of insights, and each one will build upon the last, and that’s all going to be driven by the number of iterations they can do."
