10,000 Iterations
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
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10,000 Iterations
You’ve likely heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a world-class expert in your field of choice. This idea was originally shared by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
Although the 10,000 hours theory makes sense, people tend to miss the real point of it. The amount of time you put in counts less than the quality of each hour of work you put in. What you do during those hours is what truly matters.
Iterations Over Hours
When it comes to mastering the craft of entrepreneurship, I’ve found that 10,000 iterations is a better measure of progress than 10,000 hours.
Thomas Edison iterated over 10,000 prototypes of various inventions—and holds a record 1,093 patents under his name. Those patents include the phonograph, the electric lightbulb, and the storage battery.
James Dyson iterated over 5,000 prototypes before launching his first bagless vacuum cleaner. The Wright brothers’ first airplane, James Dewar’s Thermos flask, Graham Bell’s telephone, and Edwin Land’s instant camera each required over 1,000 iterations before gaining mass appeal.
Most iterations do not produce genuine breakthroughs. They provide subtle and marginal improvements. Still, those small changes compound as you spend time learning your field of choice, guided by a trial-and-error process, pushing the boundary of your expertise, year after year.
Craftsmanship Is Inefficient
Some aspects of your life can and should be approached with maximal efficiency, like managing email. But when it comes to developing your craft, efficiency is not the way to go. There are no shortcuts.
Real craftsmanship requires the inefficiency of iterations. Craftsmanship is inefficient because there are no paved routes to get to the very top in terms of quality and excellence—just like you can’t just drive your car up Mount Everest.
Craftsmanship, by definition, cannot be mass-produced. You have to earn your craft. This is the case for mastering any field, whether you are a Swiss watchmaker, an Olympic athlete, or an entrepreneur.
In other words, you can’t just clock in your 10,000 hours as efficiently as possible and passively expect greatness. This is not math. You can’t compensate for sloppy work by doing more of it. Deliberate and tedious practice is what actually helps you improve.
Paradoxically, you get better faster by relishing the hard and boring work while others are looking for shortcuts. Very few people have the mindset to keep doing just one thing, fully dedicated to their craft, for 10 years or more.
Patience will always be in short supply. But with enough time, even the smallest of improvements stack up to tangible breakthroughs. As a craftsman, as a maker, doing the inefficient work is what sets you up for what isn’t attainable today.
“What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.”
— Naval Ravikant
Focus Compounds
For those driven by craftsmanship, the privilege to work on meaningful and creative challenges, with trusted friends inspiring/pushing each other is entrepreneurship’s greatest reward. Once you know your direction, and who to go with, then it all comes down to focus—applying time, effort, and deep care toward reaching your dream.
People are much better at thinking linearly than thinking exponentially (calculus, a branch of mathematics covering exponentials, happens to be the high school subject with the highest failure rate). Consistent focus is an advantage hidden in plain sight.
It is immensely challenging to focus on just one thing and stick to it for years while the world around you is screaming for your attention. Most people quit too soon because they get discouraged or bored; they change their priorities midcourse, mistakenly thinking their approach is not working. But all they had to do was keep focused long enough to let the compounding work.
Getting results always seems to take longer than imagined. But that’s not a reason to stop.
“The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
— Charlie Munger
The Tale of the Clever Girl and the Greedy Raja
In a small Indian village, a clever young girl found herself facing a greedy raja during a time of famine. The raja was hoarding all the city’s rice reserves, unwilling to help his people.
As a way to save the people around her, the young girl asked the raja for just one grain of rice, doubled each day, for 30 days. The raja agreed without hesitation.
As the days passed, the raja began to realize what he’d gotten into. By the end of the month, the exponential growth of the rice amounted to 77 tons, emptying his reserves.
The wise girl understood the power of compounding and ensured that the people received the food they needed.
This tale shows how difficult it is for the human mind to grasp the sheer power of exponential forces, and just how powerful a daily streak can become with enough time. Consistent focus is the magic ingredient of - a compounding force.
The Five-Hour Rule
An uninterrupted daily streak is all it takes for compounding to take off, assuming you persist long enough to get results. Getting the benefits of consistency is about making the time, usually three to five hours, to focus on the hardest and most creative part of your job—and to prioritize it every day.
Productivity researcher Anders Ericsson found that the top performers in various fields seem to max out at three to five hours of creative work daily. For example, he notes that many established authors “tend to write only 4 hours per day, leaving the rest of the day for rest and recuperation.” He also found that the top violinists at a prestigious music college practiced, on average, 3.5 hours per day.
Meaningful creative work is tiring. Because of the intense concentration needed for creative work, I usually run out of mental fuel before I run out of time. When you’re doing something challenging, it is better to manage your energy than your time.
Feeling tired, unmotivated, or distracted is also part of the course. Expect it. Plan for it.
Five hours leaves room for distractions to come up during the rest of your day, because whether important or trivial, some random things will undoubtedly demand your attention. Give yourself a buffer, a dedicated time to be less effective. Block out those five hours, then leave the remainder of your day for whatever else that comes up.
You can’t do five hours? No problem—start small and work your way up. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less suggests, block out two hours to work on a single goal. Use this time to work on your most important priority for the day, the month, the year. If needed, start with as little as 15 minutes. Just start blocking time and aim to expand. Just. Start.
In the context of entrepreneurship, five hours of creative work can look like coding, designing a new product, talking to customers, or researching your market for insights.
Internal meetings are generally useless for creative work, but they can help organize teams to work better. In general, I find that meetings do not have the same creative output as asynchronous, hands-on tasks. There are always exceptions of course, but usually deep creativity aligns with solitude and clarity of mind.
Many creative masters have embraced their own version of the five-hour rule. Stephen King writes around five hours per day, as does J. K. Rowling. Jerry Seinfeld too. Arnold Schwarzenegger trained as a bodybuilder for five hours per day, and later trained to become an actor for five hours per day. Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Graham, Winston Churchill—the list goes on.
“Intense concentration…can bring out resources in people that they didn’t know they had.”
— Edwin Land
Consistency and Trusting Your Process
Believing in your creative process is a key ingredient for consistency and focus. The initial period, when you start putting in effort but have yet to see any results, is going to test your resolve. That is true especially when you’re creating something never done before.
Although you never know how new things will turn out, consistency inevitably speaks for itself. Sticking with the process is what makes you creative. The more you believe this statement is true, that your success is unavoidable and solely a matter of time provided you focus consistently well, the more likely you are to stick to your goals.
Trust the creative process and it will guide you.
Also, choosing consistent focus over hard grind also means you can relax for the same result. You’re going to do and feel a lot better when you enjoy the journey instead of straining so much.
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
— Bruce Lee
Happy Sunday ✌🏼🎄
This is a truly insightful piece. "Those small changes compound as you spend time learning your field of choice" is such a profound way to lok at progress, especially in any complex system. How do you personally decide when an iteration has been "enough" to move to the next stage?