The 100-Hour Rule | Hacker News Reader

The 100-Hour Rule

codingvc.com

202 pointslpolovets85 comments

I get really annoyed by these sound bites claiming certain numbers of hours. The article does have the caveat "while '100' is an easy-to-remember round number, it's just an approximation", but the realities of that caveat make the title very misleading.

The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things:

1. The particular activity

2. The abilities of the person

3. How much competence you consider "basic"

I submit that these three factors have so much variance that it makes any kind of N-hour rule mostly useless. I know people who can pick up a new programming language very quickly, but would take a long time to achieve basic competence in a new physical activity. Conversely, I know people who can pick up new sports very quickly, but it would take them FAR longer than 100 hours to learn to program with decent competency. (Hell, I think it takes far longer than 100 hours for even a naturally talented non-programmer to learn to program.)

Some activities have straight-up MUCH steeper learning curves than other activities. For example, it takes longer to get good at olympic lifting than it does to get good at running. You might even disagree with that particular example, but if you do, that speaks to the third point of varying definitions of "basic".

The bottom line is that there is no substitute for hours of focused effort. Yes, you want to be aware of techniques that can make your effort achieve better results, but you still have to put in the hours. How many hours? I can't possibly say without knowing a lot more about you, the activity, and what level of competence you're shooting for.

(I'm the post's author.)

I fully agree with you: the title is a sound byte and somewhat imprecise. Creating good titles has been an ongoing struggle for me. As an engineer, I want to be precise; as a writer, I want more readers. What I've learned over time is that something like "The 100-hour rule" performs way better than something like "the speed of knowledge acquisition decelerates rapidly."

Hopefully the post's gist is clear: it takes a long time to become a true expert/master, but much less time to surpass everyone who has zero knowledge about a field.

Hi there, thanks for the response. I actually don't mind the title--I've certainly been guilty of trying to increase my audience with a catchy title. I think the main reason I posted my comment was that even after reading your whole post, I still came away with "the 100-hour rule" sticking in my head pretty prominently. I think if I had written the article and chosen that title I would have tried to make people come away with a much stronger feeling about the fallacy of thinking about it in terms of "n hours" and more in terms of just deliberate focused effort.

If it's only about surpassing people with zero knowledge in the field, I'd say it's probably closer to 10 hours with a good teacher. But that's if they're consecutive.

I don't think they always need to be consecutive. I've seen situations where, say you practice deliberately for one hour. You see some noticeable progress, but for maybe the last half of the time your progress slows or levels off. Then, you can go away for awhile (maybe a day or a week) and when you come back you seem to be much better.

Not all activities work like this, but some do. Good teachers, however, pretty much always help. :)

There's nothing particularly magical about "100 hours" and the article indicated that.

It really is just saying that individuals _can_ make significant progress towards competency in a new skill by putting in a MODICUM of time, effort and attention.

> make significant progress towards competency in a new skill by putting in a MODICUM of time, effort and attention.

But even that is not always true. There are some activities where it's hard to see meaningful progress for awhile, but then once you've built up an adequate base you start progressing more rapidly.

These kinds of articles tend to be popular because they make people think that it's easy to learn new things. This is an inspiring idea and if it results in people learning more things then it might even be a beneficial thing to say. But I think it's more beneficial to promote the value of deliberate focused effort (hard work if you will), because some things simply don't come easily.

You're right that some things don't come easy and require hard work.

But how many folks fail to make progress, or check themselves out of even starting an endeavor simply because they've convinced themselves it is "too hard"?

Do we always need yet more reminders one must do "hard work" to accomplish something?

Many times just getting starting on a path is enough of a psychological win to increase motivation and later on achieve mastery.

Very insightful comment, thank you for posting it. Let me put a positive spin on it. While the unconditional variance is so large that the statement is meaningless, if you condition on your 3 factors, I think you can obtain a pretty good predictor.

For example, for the combination 1. activity = running, 2. person = world champion in cycling, 3. competence = sub-3-hour marathon, then you would expect the time to be around 100 hours. Lance Armstrong fits this combination. How long he trained, we can't know for sure, but the first google hit for (a free) marathon training program at the elite level [1] shows 85h total running time.

[1] http://www.yourmarathontrainingplan.com/free-training-progra...

The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things: 1. The particular activity 2. The abilities of the person 3. How much competence you consider "basic"

I think I'd put "environment" in at #3, maybe even #2. Where environment is a wide umbrella including the obvious (time and space to devote to study, quality of study materials and support) to the somewhat less so (your gender, your race, your affluence or lack thereof, the supportive/skeptical attitudes of your family and friends etc).

Environment is subject to limited control by an individual. But young, affluent people have the most control. Environment winds up being largely a matter of luck.

This environmental influence - which so often is matter of luck - is one subtlety that seems to get consistently left out of all these "10,000 hours" and "100 hours" type discussions. Even a clever person can spend 10,000 hours working at something under terrible conditions and have poor results. One doesn't have to be particularly bright to spend 10 hours under ideal circumstances and make real progress.

By leaving this out, we offer unwarranted support to a certain Utopian/libertarian/meritocratic mythos that is so popular in the software/startup field. And I think that's a shame. I think the field will ultimately be better off if it can view itself more clearly.

I had a suspicion there might be some factors I was forgetting. I think this is a really big one so thanks for mentioning it. I recently became more aware of this factor after spending some time with a couple less fortunate kids going into college for computer science. It's amazing how a small amount of well-placed guidance from an experienced mentor can have a dramatic effect. In this case it was three things:

1. Learn vim (or emacs)

2. Use Linux and the command line

3. Use git

One of the guys started this semester. He's already a bright guy and would have been near the top of his class without me, but those three simple things make him look like a magician to his classmates. In the course of getting helping him get set up with Linux I also became aware how much of an advantage my middle class upbringing gave me. Something relatively basic like having a decent laptop can actually be a big obstacle. $1000 is a lot of money to a lot of people. Now I'm sure some people will say that you don't need to spend $1000 to get started with a usable computer. That's true, but there are useful things that you can do with a $1000 computer that the much more affordable computers can't do.

Another anecdote. A few years ago I was in a climbing gym and I tried slacklining. It seemed impossible so I didn't do anything more with it. A few years later someone suggested that it does wonders for your balance so I decided I wanted to learn. Then by luck I happened to run across some people slacklining and over the course of a couple days I was able to spend some time with them practicing. Their guidance got me over an initial hump that seemed insurmountable from the outside.

So yes, "environment" should DEFINITELY be added to my list!

Maybe it becomes a little more agreeable if you flip it around: consider as "basic" whatever level people would reach after 100 hours of quality learning. Should someone with this kind of "basic" level in neurosurgery be allowed to even think of live subjects? Certainly not. But as one of the many possible squishy definitions of "basic", this would not be the worst.

An interesting discussion is the optimal distribution of those hours for different kinds of learning. Between the intensive trial&error of learning software tools and the slow motor skill buildup of learning a musical instrument I could see anything from two 50h weeks to fifty 2h weeks to be the best match.

> Maybe it becomes a little more agreeable if you flip it around: consider as "basic" whatever level people would reach after 100 hours of quality learning.

Yeah, I know what you mean. You certainly could do that. But I think that's less useful. If you use a specific number of hours as the benchmark you lose most of your relationship to useful levels of competence. I think each domain has natural levels of competence that have meaning, and it's probably better to keep the discussion oriented around that.

For a ukelele or guitar player, knowing enough to play the majority of pop songs is probably significant. For a piano or violin player maybe the bar for basic competence is a bit higher. For partner dancing it seems like the level you need to be to safely dance on a crowded public dance floor and make most partners feel comfortable is probably a pretty important level of skill to talk about. These levels are also personal. Maybe one budding pianist is happy with pop songs, but you're not going to be happy until you can play a full piano concerto. Perhaps your goal is just to be able to write a few computer programs, but a company hiring wants people who understand more about what it takes to maintain larger projects over a longer period of time.

When it comes down to how decisions are made in the real world nobody cares about how many hours you've practiced. It's all about what you can do.

I think it's meant as a convenient "rule of thumb" in juxtaposition to the more commonly known "10,000 hour rule" (which also has some controversy[1]). They are just saying you can be pretty good at something with 2 less orders of magnitude than mastery.

1. http://www.fastcodesign.com/3027564/asides/scientists-debunk...

There's also a huge amount of variance with underlying knowledge too. When you know something at a lower level and you want to work at a higher one, it's easier to pick up.

Say you want to teach someone who only knows x86 assembly C vs someone who only knows Python. Both will have their struggles, but the person who knows how a CPU works already will have an easier go at grasping lower level features needed for most software development quickly.

There indeed is a lot of variance and we really cannot generalize. Especially with the 'abilities of the person' which has the highest of the variances.

If you take the article with a bit of salt and step up the generalization ladder, the point is that skill expertise vs time grows exponentially... With the greatest productivity achieved in the initial time spent. Mastering skills on the other hand takes comparatively more time.

> If you take the article with a bit of salt and step up the generalization ladder, the point is that skill expertise vs time grows exponentially

I thought about saying something like this, but after some reflection I don't think it's true. The shape of skill vs time curves is not always exponential.

For instance, take Argentine Tango. It took me 9 months of consistent 10 hours / week practice to even reach a point where I felt comfortable going to the average public social tango event. In fact, in tango it's pretty widely recognized that the learning curve shape is very different for leaders and followers. For followers it typically looks like [1]. But for leaders it's more like [2]. (Time on the x axis, skill on the y axis.) I really think that in general it's probably more like a "multi-hump curve" [3] in the general case. I had a situation recently where I took one lesson with a tango teacher and in one hour he totally revolutionized my dancing. And this isn't me talking, people I dance with regularly said that.

So I don't think the rate of progress at a new activity is always exponential or even fastest at the beginning.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Exponent...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Logistic...

[3] http://mightybyte.net/learning-curve.png

Something I've taken from my Argentine Tango journey is the importance of focusing on fundamentals. Figuring out what those fundamentals were took some time. Some skills definitely do have a slow ramp up period in the beginning.

Great job getting through that initial phase! The first year can be trying particularly for leads.

I did something similar. People started saying I was a natural at tango. No. I put in the time. Lots of it. Every day. Obsessed, constantly aware of the fundamentals on or off the dance floor. Having some basic talent only gets you so far.

Back to the thread.

I have a theory achieving mastery in any area can potentially accelerate mastery in another area. Related or not. The mastering of mastery I guess. Maybe our brains are able to learn more as we learn more. Accelerating the learning process?

I think the author is writing under the assumption that there are diminishing returns as one gets better at a skill, when really the opposite is true. The number of topics you can absorb per unit term obviously increases with your pre-existing competency with the skill.

This is because you can leverage your existing knowledge of the subject by comparing what you already know with what you're trying to learn.

There is no "sweet spot" for learning a new skill. Most skills have a learning curve where competency starts low.

The author is trying to make a generalization based off his perceived sales skill but is probably suffering from a Dunning-Kruger effect. That, or software engineering already taught him a great deal of the requisite jargon required for his particular brand of sales. If the author were to instead move into say, spectrometer sales he would most likely find that his "30% or 40% prospects" would really be 0%.

Not a very well-informed article.

(I'm the author.)

I don't disagree that the amount you learn and how well you understand it might accelerate as you advance along the learning curve. My post was more about the "practical" side of knowledge: often knowing 1% or 5% of what an expert knows gets you 30% or 50% or 80% of the practical benefit. The specific numbers don't matter -- only the order of magnitude difference between time invested and value extracted.

As an extreme hypothetical, consider three sales people, one with 500 hours of experience, one with 5k hours, and one with 50k hours. Each order of magnitude in experience might represent an order of magnitude more knowledge/learnings. Or maybe even more! But I doubt that the person with 50k hours of experience closes 10x more sales than the "5000 hour" salesperson, and 100x more than the "500 hour" sales person. It's probably more like 2x and 1.1x, respectively. (Or maybe 5x and 3x... but nowhere near 100x/10x.)

You're right about my 30% estimate though -- it's just an estimate, and quite possibly a sign of naivete/overconfidence. But I do think knowing some of the basics -- even if the knowledge is just through books and shadowing a few sales calls -- would put me ahead of the average person who never learned anything about sales.

I'll call bullshit on that, with all respect.

Your 500 hour salesperson has been on the job a bit over 12 work weeks.

Your 50000 hour salesperson has been on the job 24 years.

I'll wager that the latter salesperson not only closes more deals but more lucrative ones as well.

In your article, you compare the rank novice with somebody with a 100 hours of experience--this is fine. Extending that logic to comparisons between folks already in the field I don't think works.

The person with 20 years of work experience obviously closes more deals than someone with 3 months of experience.

But I think my original point stands. To put it simply/mathematically: if you are able to close 10% of your sales calls, then no matter how much you learn, you will never be able to improve than stat by more than 10X in practice. There is no way to close more than 100% of your calls. So there are strong diminishing returns in that respect.

I guess diminishing returns depends on how you measure utility or whatever heuristic you want to optimize. If you close 10% calls, but the average salesperson closes 50%, you haven't accomplished much. If the experienced salesperson only closes 60%, but also closes high value deals that no else would have been able to, their value is much higher than 6x your value. There probably isn't a linear relationship between skill and utility. Utility depends on how you compare with others, which probably has a bell shaped curve among enthusiasts/professionals. I'd wager in most cases, utility roughly tracks variance from average. One example is loads of people want to work in entertainment, but the most successful makes loads more money, even if they are only slightly better.

Kind of a tangent, but this is why its always better to work with more reliable people. A person who does good work 50% of the time isn't half as good as someone who does good work always. They are arguably worse than someone who does good work 25% of the time, because now you can't make any assumptions. You have to double check everything they do and you can't trust anything the say. At least with the first quartile peer, you know what you are getting.

My upshot is that utility doesn't scale relative to how good you are compared with the best, its how you stand compared to your competitors, most of which are probably about average.

Bullshit on what? Your argument makes no sense.

He's not arguing that a 50K hour salesperson doesn't close more lucrative and more numerous amounts of deals than the 500 hour salesperson. The point is that you can invest a small(ish) amount of time to learn the basics of skills which will help you avoid critical pitfalls when starting a company - an extremely worthy investment when you consider the diminishing returns of mastery and the fact that you can't be a master of everything.

I think you can both be right, somewhat.

The author supposed the person with 50k hours will be better than the person with 500 hours, but maybe just 5x better not 100x better. And that could be accurate. Put each of them in 1000 identical situations, and the more experienced one will close more deals but not 100x deals, probably.

However, that's not the real world. In the real world, the salesperson with 24 years of experience has contacts and relationships that, to your point, will help them land more lucrative deals. So, yeah, they might not close 100x the number of deals, but they could easily close deals worth 100x to their business.

Or to frame it in software development, if you give the same exact task to a developer with 12 weeks of experience and one with 24 years of experience, the more experienced one probably won't finish it 100x faster. However, if you're giving them the same tasks, that's a gross misuse of skills. The more experienced one might architect the system so that task naturally falls out of the design or knows of an open source tool that can handle it with no custom development or maybe they understand the business well enough to propose a simple tweak to business processes to obviate the need to do the task at all – that is, they might bring 100x value overall.

My point is just that, sure, there are diminishing returns on experience solving the exact same problem, but a person with 500 hours of experience and on with 50k hours of experience shouldn't be working on the exact same problems.

It's kind of like that old question when looking at a résumé: Do they have 10 years of experience or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times?

I think there certainly are cases where the more experienced one will finish 100x faster!

In actual numbers, that means that anything that takes the senior dev, say, 3 hours, must not take the junior developer more than 7.5 weeks.

Junior devs are really, really bad at certain categories of task, and can totally blow that budget of two months.

Sure, the 100x speed difference might not exist when writing a binary search for a sorted array. However, being able to throw up a small shell pipeline or something instead of trying to write a bespoke program is where the difference starts to come out.

I think the author is writing under the assumption that there are diminishing returns as one gets better at a skill, when really the opposite is true.

I didn't get that as the main take-away. Rather, simply, that it's much easier to bootstrap oneself out of a state of utter helplessness in the face of some totally unfamiliar skill area (cooking, music, foreign languages... and yes, even programming) than people commonly think. And into that zone where, while far from an expert, you're at least getting traction, and past that feeling of "I'm just not cut out for this". To a place where one could reasonably say, "Yeah, I could get a lot better at this, if I spent more time on it."

It's an extremely valuable life lesson, I've found. And no, I'm not saying you should go out and hire programmers with 100 hours of self-taught experience. Nor is the article.

There absolutely are diminishing returns in mastering a skill. For example, if you spend a year learning how to play the piano, you might be at a level where you can play some pop songs and impress your friends. To be at the level where you can play some Rachmaninov will probably require an order of magnitude more time (10 years), even though you know all the basics. In the process of mastery from years 1-10, you won't unlock an order of magnitude more songs that you can play as a result. In fact, each year that you march towards mastery, there'll probably be less and less songs that you'll be unlocking as a result. Your returns are diminishing.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't seek to master something (or several things), only that if you are trying to accomplish something which requires mastery of a lot of skills (like starting a company) you should eliminate blind spots by learning a bit about what you don't know. Even reading a book about sales is better than not knowing anything at all about it. Even if you have a sales expert on your team, it helps to empathize and know what they'll be thinking about as you build the product (if you are an engineer). Being an entrepreneur is all about being well-rounded.

But the assumption here is there are many many things to learn. What you are saying is mastery of a skill builds off itself, of course that's true.

But learning something completely new is still going to have a MUCH higher return. And this is more true the MORE uncorrelated the things you are trying to learn.

I agree with the above, but exact number of hours aside, do you think there could be some validity to the article, akin to a Pareto principle?

There's also a different 100 hour rule. 100 hours is enough time for someone to become dangerously competent: just competent enough to complete something, but not competent enough to complete it well.

So much so that there's a book for pilots exactly about that topic, "The Killing Zone".

"This survival guide for new pilots identifies the pitfalls waiting inside the killing zone, the period from 50 to 350 flight hours when they leave their instructors behind and fly as pilot in command for the first time. Although they're privately certified, many of these unseasoned aviators are unaware of the potential accidents that lie ahead while trying to build decision-making skills on their own -- many times falling victim to inexperience."

I've seen exactly the same phenomenon in racing/track day driving. Most of the crashes I've seen happen in that period between when someone has enough skill/experience to go fast, but not enough to recover from bad situations at speed. So a lot of big crashes happen in the intermediate to newly-minted advanced drivers.

I'm definitely going to pick up that book.

It's also just about long enough to become annoyingly cocky about quickly one is picking up a new skill.

Yes, but for some peripheral skills that might help but aren't really "necessary", this rule makes a lot of sense. I mean, spending 100 hours on a skill definitely wont make you an expert, but it'll make you literate in it. Taking the sales example, as a programmer it might teach you how to "sell" yourself to forge a better career. Or say public speaking.

Sort of meshes with a typical college course. At MIT courses are measured in hours of work per week including lectures, recitations, readings and problem sets. A course is typically 9-15 hours with course total of 40-50 recommended per semester. That that would work out to 130 to 210 hours of work per course, roughly the hundred hour rule. I found I really didnt master a course until using the material in another course or future research or teaching the course as a TA.

P.S. The course hours is often a wildly inaccurate estimate. People might have a challenging lab course where put in twice the recommended hours. Or they let assignments pile up until the final weeks, working 100 hour weeks in December or May.

Reminds me of the book "The First 20 Hours" by Josh Kaufman. He gives examples of skills that you can learn fairly well in 20 hours. One of them is programming. I have some issues with the book but overall it's a fun read. Here's a TED talk he gave which lead me to buy the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY

Yes! I came here to post this exact comment.

Charlie Munger said it best: “You may say, ‘My God, this is already getting way too tough.’ But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”

Did he also list what those models are? :)

I wish we would stop repeating the "10,000 hours rule". It was a good soundbite in (at least what I think was) a good book, Outliers, but rigorous analysis of the data doesn't back it up. It's like the "drink 8 glasses of water a day" rule - sounded good until someone realized there actually wasn't evidence to back it up.

See http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not...

So it all comes down to "100 hours of something and you'll know more about it than someone who didn't take 100 hours"

Uh. Okay.

Exactly. That, plus the fact(?) that most people put less than 100 hours into most things.

Not sure why all of this is "new research"? the more time you spend on something, the better you get at it. Yes, if you spend a couple of days on something, you will know more than a beginner and if you spend a couple of years, you might be termed an industry expert.

I think the point is that your expertise doesn't grow linearly with the amount of time you spend. It might take you 10,000 hours to find yourself in the top 5% of the population for a particular skill, but you can maybe get to the top quartile in 100 hours, which is probably good enough.

Awesome. 100 hours of some civil engineering and I will be able to build some small simple bridges.

Are you trying for sarcasm? I'd very much expect that with just a bit of civil engineering study you ought to be able to better design a bridge across a creek than if you did no study, ever. Heck, with the right focus, an hour of study on the topic could well greatly improve your work.

Bridges aren't some sort of dark magic, after all, we've been building them for thousands of years.

After about an hour of studying, I coached my daughter to a dominant performance in a spaghetti bridge building competition.

(The key is gusset plates.)

Although it took quite a few hundred years before we started consistently building them to a good enough standard that they didn't collapse after a few years, or decades.

Something I remind myself of when I see the current state of software engineering.

I'm not talking about a bridge meant to stand for the ages. I did say "creek" after all.

We do all understand that there's everything from bridges across creeks that we can literally step over to bridges across multi-mile spans of lake or ocean, right? 100 hours of civil engineering is only enough to get a sense of how big a problem the latter is, but is probably plenty to learn how to build something down in the single or low-double digit of feet range that will be safe to cross.

I ask this quite seriously because it seems to me a lot of people get rather black-or-white on these sorts of issues, where either we must insist that we know nothing, absolutely nothing, and how dare you claim otherwise in your arrogance, OR we went to school for at least four years and got certified and have a job in the field and their opinions are unimpeachable and perfect on this matter. Probably an artifact of too much "school" and not enough experience in much of anything. In reality there are very few fields where there is no way to gain a modest amount of skill with modest effort; all the ones that leap to mind block you not because of the fundamental impossibility of learning a bit of something, but because of high capital entrance fees.

I actually agree with you, but I can see that it's not very obvious from my snarky comment. I've always been a generalist, and if there's one thing I hope I can teach my children it's that it's possible to learn how to do, make and fix just about anything - probably with less effort invested than they'd expect.

I just think it's interesting how much more concerted effort, even over centuries, it takes us to figure out how to do these things on larger scales.

I built a radio and a bridge in my first 100 hours studying Engineering.

Both fulfilled the required criteria: you could listen to the radio shows on the radio, and you could place the bridge between two tables and stand on it.

100 hours of civil engineering will definitely make you build better structures if you're a Lego enthusiast. It'll help you make more informed choices when you build your own house.

I'm assuming if I removed the snark from your comment, you're trying to say that 100 hours isn't nearly enough for doing anything useful.

He's probably right. If learning curves have decreasing returns, you can get most of the learning in the first section of time.

For instance, you can read an introductory text in Economics, Physics, Biology, and so on, and you'll know quite a bit about each subject: the subtopics, the main themes, open questions, and the relevant names.

Or if you pick up three Economics books, you will know a bit more about some specific ideas (monetary theory, Keynesianism, financial economics, etc...) and nothing about Biology and Physics. But you still won't be anywhere near the level where you can teach economics.

This is why it's easy to sound well rounded but hard to be an authority.

It takes 1 hour of reading internet memes to become functional at writing internet memes.

Does anyone have any recommendations for programs that pop-quiz you periodically until you retain what you've learned?

I've been using vim for a decade and I'm trying to switch to emacs. Retaining muscle memory is only possible if I keep using the bindings I learn. Remembering all of them is difficult, and using a subset will lead to suboptimal results.

Some kind of app that quizzes me seemed like a good path to learning emacs, since after 100 hours I would end up much more effective. Then I realized maybe an app like that might be helpful for anyone investing 100 hours into a variety of things.

The best thing to do is use emacs. I've through switching from vim to emacs. It was difficult for me at first until I ended up removing vim from my computer to force me to learn emacs. I would recommend org-drill[0] to pop-quiz you. Develop your own work flow with org-mode and organize your stuff with it.

[0] - http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html

Thanks very much. That's awesome.

I have a few questions I was hoping to ask an emacs user, and it sounds like your situation was almost identical to mine. Is there an email address I can reach you at? (If not, that's fine! Thank you anyway.)

I've never had more "Oh my, this is awesome" moments with anything than I have with Emacs. I'm Going to check out org-drill.el too. Thanks!

Just concatenate my user name and "@gmail.com" :)

Yes very much to org-drill. It's a huge part of my daily life.

Sounds like spaced-repetition software like Anki, which is mostly used in language learning.

It works well for anything that needs to be committed to memory and can fit into the flashcard format. Especially if you can get into the habit of using something like AnkiDroid whenever you need to kill 10 minutes.

Have you tried spacemacs out for emacs? It uses evil mode for vim key bindings and made the transition to emacs painless for me.

Embrace the suptimal. You can live a pretty good life being suboptimal.

I've been using Emacs for over twenty years, and only know a small percentage of its commands. Every now and then, I realize I'm doing something repetitive, and I use a few minutes to find out what the best way to do it is, and then I've learned a new thing (most recent: M-; , for "comment-Do What I Mean").

There is no reason to wait until you're great before you start using a text editor.

Something like this might be useful: https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/emacs

I'm not sure if you use IntelliJ, but there's a plugin for that called KeyPromoter which is great. Every time you do an action with your mouse, KeyPromoter pops up a dialog that tells you the shortcut key you could've used instead. I wish there was a plugin like that for other tools. (Small caveat: I last used KP about 3 years ago; I'm not sure if it's still working with the latest version of IntelliJ)

That site is incredibly helpful. Thank you very much :)

Usually I try not to leave dupe comments, but in this case the story is off the front page and you might not see it otherwise:

I've been trying to find an emacs user to ask some (admittedly beginner-level) questions. I'm trying to get a certain obscure emacs plugin set up, but I occasionally run into some elisp problems that take a few hours to track down. So I was hoping to find someone to bug with questions.

I'll figure it out one way or another, but a peer would be nice. I was wondering if it would be ok to email you?

No worries either way. Have a great week!

There's also the Emacs stack exchange^1. It's good if you have specific problems (this setting does X, I expected Y, what's up?), but not too much for advice (what do you prefer for task Z?)

[1] http://emacs.stackexchange.com/

I actually don't use emacs -- sorry! I found that site recently when I was trying to memorize terminal commands, and I happened to remember that they had quizzes for emacs and other editors, too.

Depending on why you want to use emacs, you could just use viper or another set of VI bindings. I switched to emacs back in The Day so that I could have an integrated debugger on Linux; I wasn't switching because I thought emacs had a great set of command bindings, so staying in VI mode was perfect.

If you use viper and emacs 22 or later, you'll probably want to add (setq viper-ESC-key "\C-[") to your .emacs file so that ctrl-[ works as ESC.

The CLI quiz(6) program from bsd-games package, preferably with -t option. Should be available on, or for, most POSIX systems.

Duolingo does this to teach you languages.

Sorry to complain, but the idea that it takes some amount of time (between 10 and 10,000 hours according to the article) to achieve competency in something is vague and obvious to the point of silliness.

What a strange article.

Isn't it obvious that somebody with 100 hours of experience will do better than a person with no experience whatsoever?

On the other hand, if he's claiming that 100 hours is enough time to become competent, then I don't agree at all. It's plenty of time to learn and become knowledgeable on a topic, but knowledge alone is useless without the ability to effectively apply it in a useful way, and that only comes from experience. There's just not enough time in 100 hours to get a meaningful amount of experience in a complicated field.

His examples of reading some books on sales is just goofy. Without actually have sold anything his claim that he's now 3-4x more effective than a "newbie" sales person is just a joke. Go sell something, and then come tell us how effective you are.

Forget 100 hours, how about 20? Josh Kaufman already beat them to this topic, and has not only a TEDx talk where he finishes 20 hours on ukelele, but he's also written a book:

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-First-20-Hours-How-to-Lea...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158493-the-first-20-ho...

On this note, if people have more resources related to sales, I'd be happy if they could share..! I think for most technical entrepreneurs, sales is likely one of the challenging areas to master..

Essentially a power law relationship...

  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 into 
  learning and basic competence so that you don't hamstring yourself 
  by making rookie, easily avoidable mistakes. In the long run, you'll 
  want to hire experts;

Wouldn't another viable option be freelancing that task?

While the idea seems sound. The amount of hours should be a variable in this case to be adjusted according to someone's own pace of picking new stuff up.

Ahh, so you completely agree with the article.

    While "100" is an 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 several hundred hours.

I would say that between 10 and "several hundreds" hours the difference is so big to make a "100 hours" rule kind of pointless.

If the bottom line is that the more you practice the better you get (or rephrasing it, if you practice a relatively small amount of hours you will be more competent than an absolute beginner), well, breaking news from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious.

Please note that the article make the required time dependent on the field, whereas GP talks about persons.

True for basic business processes like sales & marketing, but not true for things like making a new kind of car, designing a new kind of medical device, or developing a more accurate natural language processing service, which require a LOT more than 100 hours of prior training and experience.

Otherwise a great essay with great advice.

100 hours? What about 20?

http://first20hours.com/

I think we should strive for more than to be better than most. I would rather be highly competent at something than good enough at many things. But I understand others may prefer the jack of all trades route.

Obviously?

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