The 100-hour Rule

A recently popularized meme is the 10,000-hour Rule, which describes the amount of time required to achieve mastery of a F Ield. This rule has several implications:

1. since the required time commitment is- -Three hours per day for a decade! --a person can is only master a few things in their lifetime.
2. because time moves at the same speed for everyone, You can ' t accelerate the acquisition of mastery. If you ' ve mastered something (e.g. sales or programming or product management) and your competition have not, that ' s a huge Competitive advantage.
3. the Commitment for Mastery Ople become intimidated and give up early--or never even begin. For every violin virtuoso, there is many more people this quit after a few lessons, or who never picked up a violin in th E first place.

This poses a dilemma:few founding teams has mastered each of the five or ten areas critical to their success, but it tak Es a long time to achieve this mastery.

To address this dilemma, I-d like to propose the 100-hour Rule:

For most disciplines, it is only takes one hundred hours of active learning to become much more competent than a absolute be Ginner.

For example:

• coding:it takes years of study and practice to Become a strong software engineer, but going through a couple of codecademy or Udacity courses would make you a good enough Programmer for a lot of basic applications.

The sales example is something I ' ve experienced personally. Before becoming a VC, I was a software engineer for ten years. I never interacted with the sales side of a business and didn ' t know the first thing about it. Once I moved to the investing side, I quickly learned so the bottlenecks for most companies were sales/marketing/custome R acquisition, and not technology. As a result, I ' ve tried to educate myself in sales and related fields. I ' ve read books Like traction and Gone to conferences like salesconf  (notes). I ' ve probably invested or hours into learning sales. What ' s the result? While I ' d still pale compared to any experienced salesperson, I ' ve picked up enough to know more than many non-salespeople . I now know the software products should be priced based on value and not cost, that's it's better To talk AB Out benefits instead of features, and which the most important part of sales islistening to what customers want instead of Telling THem. If An expert salesperson can turn 80% of prospects to sales while a newbie can only close 10%, I ' d probably is at 30% or 40% right now. Far from what the expert can does, but to the more effective than the newbie. That's a great ROI for 1-2 weeks of full-time learning.

A Few observations about the 100-hour Rule:

• While "A" is a 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 SE Veral hundred hours. Either, that's much less than the hours required for full mastery.
• The 10,000-hour Rule is based on absolute knowledge – it takes about that long to learn a field inside and out. In contrast, the 100-hour Rule was based on relative knowledge. Since 95+% of people don ' t know anything about more fields, it takes very little time-to-jump from "the naive 95% "To the 96th percentile. The long part of the journey are moving from the 96th percentile to the 99.9th.
• As with the Hour Rule, learning have to be active and deliberate. That's, you ' re not just skimming a book or mindlessly practicing the motions of some technique, you ' re reading and PRACTI Cing with the deliberate goal of learning and improvement.

To tie all of these observations back to building companies, make a list of the areas where your company'll has to Exce L in order to succeed (sales, engineering, UI design, knowledge of a specific domain, and so on). 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 to learning and basic competence so this you don ' t hamstring yourself by making rookie, Easi Ly avoidable mistakes. In the long run, you'll want to hire experts; In the short run, invest enough time to learning so and can adequately fill any critical gaps.

The 100-hour Rule