You need to put in 1000-hours of hard work on a new project to begin seeing meaningful returns.
Gladwell based his quotable theory on some research, and it wasn't a new idea.
In terms of a thousand hours to viable product, there are just far too many examples of products that have become successful in less time for it to be a theory. eg.
* first version of Facebook was ~2 weeks of code
* chatroulette
* Inviteshare - built in 24 hours and sold to Techcrunch the next day
* First version of Crunchbase we built in 48 hours
* all the 24 hour hackathons that have released products
* you can pull together various bits of open source software with some glue and a stock template and have a product in 24 hours
There are heaps of other examples of products launched with 10-200 hours of work that became hits, I am sure others can suggest more.
While you may have come to this conclusion by looking at your own two examples, it definitely does not apply across a broader spectrum.
Launching a product is only the first step. Seeing meaningful returns is the hard part. I can code up a chatroulette site in a weeks time, but that doesn't mean it'll make money. Actually as far as I know chatroulette still isn't making any money. Unless you're extremely lucky or well connected you won't have 100 paying customers after a week.
It's easy to glue something together from various templates, open source libraries and modules. But apart from a few outliers it takes years to achieve an overnight success.
ye I know, my point was more that he was trying to draw a line between his two experiences that doesn't exist. The counter-point was simply 'well here are some examples of sites that took a lot less than 1000 hours to build and they were successful'. If he said 'profitable', then I would have found other examples, but my comment wasn't support to be about the specific examples anyway
It is crazy to suggest that 1000 hours is some sort of benchmark. It leads to crazy thinking where on one hand it could be 'only 800 hours to go until this is a success' and on the other 'well i have put 2000 hours into this and it is going nowhere, according to what I read on HN I should have given up 999 hours ago'
What matters is being in the right place at the right time.
If you are in exactly the right place at the right time, you can gain huge traction with a 24-hour project.
If you are in a workable place at a workable time, 1000 hours may well be a good benchmark.
If both time and place are working against you, there's no telling how long it might take. You might never get traction. It's just you and your tenacity.
I'm sorry but it should be obvious that while Facebook's success might have involved genius, it certainly didn't unique programming genius. Zuck didn't create a real time flight optimizer, an ultra-fast RISK chip or anything of the sort. He created a decent web app. He was no more a genius programmer than Bill Gates (who also might been both a programmer and a genius FWIW but not a genius programmer).
What he created was a decent web app that began superbly positioned and then expertly skippered it into the true golden market position.
The genius ranged from business to social to UI with programming ability being a distant if important factor.
And that in many ways does contradict the 1000 hour thesis - he could have had experience in building great web apps beforehand. He could not have gotten experience building billion dollar companies before hand - but he did well (however much I might find Facebook unfortunate on various levels).
you've confused "launching a product" with "success".
as many of us here who have built multiple products / services, building it is about 10% of the battle :) not everyone launches under the TechCrunch umbrella - surely you can see that those are extraordinary circumstances.
I hate to dump on someone's effort to motivate others, but this post is a dangerous extrapolation that combines Outliers [1] and the author's personal experience.
It promotes the idea of a magic number, and that hard work and time leads to returns (not true for the majority of startups). It encourages thinking like "Man I'm at the 950 hour mark, I'm almost there!", or even worse, planning one's product milestones around time spent.
One of the main attractions of the 10k hour rule is that there are few external stimuli that can negatively affect your learning/training.
If I decided to invest time in taking up the trumpet, I don't have to worry about competition with other budding trumpeters or whether BrassCrunch or Spitter News have effusive posts on my latest performances. I won't have to determine which percentage of the public 'gets' trumpets and plan how my playing should appeal to them.
With proper practice one hardly ever goes backward -- ability increases monotonically give or take a few plateaus. With startups you often go backward as you try to figure out your product-market fit and so on. Userbase size or revenue would not increase over time the way ability does when it comes to personal improvement.
1. I haven't actually read Outliers but I'm familiar with its thesis. If it's anything like Gladwell's other books, I recommend The Talent Code for better treatment of the subject matter. Norvig's http://norvig.com/21-days.html is also great reading.
I dont think anyone is taking this literally, but coming away with the point that it takes time to develop ideas and not to expect instant success even if you think you're the cat's pajamas.
It promotes the idea of a magic number, and that hard work and time leads to returns (not true for the majority of startups). It encourages thinking like "Man I'm at the 950 hour mark, I'm almost there!", or even worse, planning one's product milestones around time spent.
He did not mean it that literally. He's proposing a rule of thumb.
Do I need to provide example when 1 hour of hard work leads to meaningful returns and 10000 hours leads to nothing to show that this theory incorrect or it is obvious?
Not incorrect, just incomplete. The incompleteness might actually be a misreading of the book. If I remember right (it's been awhile since I read it), Gladwell mentioned this explicitly, just not as a major point the kind of which he drills into the reader's mind: 10,000 hours are necessary, but not sufficient.
Isaac Newton, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie* could not have accomplished what they did without devoting themselves in outmost sincerity to their ideas. The point is that to have a truly lasting impact on improving the world for the better, you need to devote at least 10,000 hours to something great and be smart about how you devote those 10,000 hours.
Galdwell's point, from my reading of his book, is the hypothesis that the vast majority of people don't achieve Greatness because they don't begin to devote that kind of time to one aspiration, not because they are somehow inherently limited in their mental capacity. In other words, the world is full of unmotivated genius, and you're very likely one of them. Study hard, work hard, and strive for the stars, etc., etc. ;)
* having recently met Larry Page for the first time during an internal Q&A session, I can assure you his intelligence is quite limited by human capacity, as well. Yes, he's a lot better at answering sensitive and badly phrased questions (my own) candidly and to-the-point than anyone I've known, but he's also had more experience with it than anyone I've known, also. However, he didn't seem inherently talented in any way than the smarter of my professors (I was once told by one who knew him that neither was Einstein).
In essence, there are two points we sometimes lose in overly simplified metaphors:
1) there are a lot of really intelligent people changing the world for the better that aren't famous. A lot of the time, they don't want to be famous because it would get into the way of their work.
2) there is a big difference between famous people who publicize themselves as an a means to an end (their ideas), while others publicize themselves out of ego. We're all prone to the latter (at least I am), and should make a conscious effort to "unit test" that behavior every once in awhile.
Gladwell mentions people that accomplished outstanding results after spending 10k hours. But it is not correct way to show that theory is correct. To support his claim he need to show that most people that accomplished outstanding results after 10k hours of work. But it is not true. There are people that accomplished good results after 100 hours, 1000 hours and 10000 hours for sure.
You missed the point. It's not about building a product but getting to MVP. "Customer Development", listening to your potential customers/users, making sthg people want, nailing it takes time. The 10kh rule (or here I guess 1k rule) is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
So the rule now is "you need at least 1khours to make customer development"? is it impossible to perform "customer development" in less then 1khours? I've not finished reading Steve's book but I don't remember anything about this limit.
No you are correct neither did I see Steve Blank saying there is one. For the 10kh rule to achieve sthg outstanding (write a masterpiece, be a prodigious musician etc.) it seems like it is pretty accurate. For business as always there is no rules ;) but to keep in mind that if you work 50h per week for 5months doing customer development, I would not be surprised that we are not far off. See the example of AirBnB: they said 1000 days in their StartupSchool talk that's way more and they seem pretty bright to me.
Both the original "10,000 hour rule" and this rule run afoul of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox unless you rephrase the statement to something along the lines of "we have found that most people either succeed at X and continue doing it for the rest of their lives regularly or give up, and that of the people who give up, 95% of them give up before doing X for 10,000 hours"
I believe the question is, "what is the mean and standard deviation of the time investment at the point when a sustained positive feedback loop is achieved?"
This 10 000 hour rule (or let's see with this 1k h rule) is liberating: you do not have to be a genius to start. Again that does not mean you will be a genius but no genius got to be one without 10000 hours. Herbert Simon talked about the 10 years rule.
The point is to focus on the fact that it will take time (and thus, effort) to give your project a chance. In other words, don't set unrealistic goals - e.g. "I'm going to build, launch and get my first 1,000 customer in two weeks" - because you're more likely to abandon the project instead of grinding it out as you should.
There is a big difference in efficiency across people and startup teams, in terms of what they might achieve in <X> amount of time. A solo founder with no experience as an entrepreneur, little technical prowess, and few useful connections would generally take longer to be successful.
For example, look at YC companies' varying degrees of progress at demo day. They usually have at least two founders -- if they are working 80 hours/week, they would roughly be putting in 1,000 hours per founder after 3 months.
Grammar nitpick: All of the uses of "1000-hours" in the article are incorrectly hyphenated. You should write "a 1000-hour project" but not "1000-hours of work."
The comments are largely very, very accurate. This does not compute as does Gladwell's formula. However, this can again, reductionally, be broken down to another cool cliche: work hard, and beat out the dip.
sorry but this is total BS.
I know projects that have been instant hits with 100 hours of work (some cheapo iphone apps for example).
Then again if want to make a decent social game or a technology related product, 1000 hours will get you nowhere.
Spread over a years timeframe, which it usually takes to get a decent product to market from start to finish, thats about 3 hours a day.. Even if you leave out weekends and stuff, its still nothing.
It's funny. In flying we use 1,000 hour as the passing point from flying small airplanes to joining your first airline and technically start "the career".
So I think I agree with the camp that believes in putting the time first and only then being able to judge results.
Before you fly those first 1,000 hours you haven't learned a thing, and after you flew them you discover again every 1,000 a bunch of new things.
I wonder if this rule translates into other domains as well? That is, does a violinist become noticeable after 1 000 hours, but only a true master after 10 000 hours?
Also, we should never forget that these X hours rules are speaking to X hours of deliberately stretching practice/work. They don't mean, try randomly for X hours and you'll automatically become awesome/successful.
Assuming that "meaningful" return means profitable, some companies will be able to get a return in < 1000 hours. Some it might > 1000 hours. It's going to depend on the market, your customers, the problem you're trying to solve, and your work ethic.
I think a "while" is a better measurement than 10k or 1k. It takes a while for things to click whether it's a skill, a product or business. And the while is usually longer than we predict.
Gladwell based his quotable theory on some research, and it wasn't a new idea.
In terms of a thousand hours to viable product, there are just far too many examples of products that have become successful in less time for it to be a theory. eg.
* first version of Facebook was ~2 weeks of code
* chatroulette
* Inviteshare - built in 24 hours and sold to Techcrunch the next day
* First version of Crunchbase we built in 48 hours
* all the 24 hour hackathons that have released products
* you can pull together various bits of open source software with some glue and a stock template and have a product in 24 hours
There are heaps of other examples of products launched with 10-200 hours of work that became hits, I am sure others can suggest more.
While you may have come to this conclusion by looking at your own two examples, it definitely does not apply across a broader spectrum.