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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Yea, the counter to mastery is the realization that you can get to a useful place in most areas with 100 hours or less of effort.

It’s nowhere near enough time to become say a short order cook, but plenty of time to learn to make bacon and eggs for breakfast in whatever specific way you want it.

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Learning when to stop at a satisfactory level is equally hard as learning when to floor it and push against some difficult goal.

I think even 100 honest hours learning something will get you further than you probably need to go, e.g. basic home maintenance stuff that is just 1. find the right youtube video, 2. have the tools, 3. don't be a moron.

god knows that my far beyond satisfactory level of dotfile / config tweaking has probably paid fewer dividends than I'd like to think...

Not being a moron is a skill that is getting harder to find everyday.

Your first sentence stands well on its own. I suspect if you shadowed a short order cook for 2.5x 40 hour work weeks, you would be able to function as a short order cook yourself. The entire point of that job is to prepare food that takes a short time to deliver. This means lots of rote tasks which can be performed rapidly.

Cook doesn’t only cook by the way. The fact that you can remember a recipe doesn’t mean you will be able to easily adapt to the lack of certain ingredients on the market and/or optimise the cost of the finished product.

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