20, not 10,000, hours

 

https://x.com/ihtesham2005/status/2045135116452999311

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

A new father became so terrified of never learning anything again that he accidentally dismantled the biggest lie in education. His name is Josh Kaufman, and he wasn't a neuroscientist or a professor. He was an author working from home, running a business with his wife, with a newborn daughter who had just obliterated any concept of free time he thought he had. Around week 8 of sleep deprivation, he had the thought every parent has. I am never going to learn anything new ever again. And because he was the kind of person who responds to panic with research, he went to the library and started reading everything he could find about how humans acquire skills. He read book after book, study after study. Every single one said the same thing. 10,000 hours. He had a full-body reaction to that number. 10,000 hours is a full-time job for five years. He didn't have five years. He didn't have five hours. He had a newborn and a business and a wife who was also building a business in the same house. So he kept digging. And here is where it gets interesting. The 10,000 hour rule came from a researcher named K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. What Ericsson actually studied was professional athletes, world-class musicians, chess grandmasters people at the absolute tip of ultra-competitive, ultra-high-performing fields. His finding was that the people at the very top of those narrow fields had put in around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. That is all the finding said. Then Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers in 2007, and the message went through a game of telephone that destroyed its meaning entirely. It takes 10,000 hours to reach the top of an ultra-competitive field became it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert, which became it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something, which became it takes 10,000 hours to learn something. That last statement is completely false. And the actual research had been showing something different the entire time. When cognitive psychologists study skill acquisition, they measure a graph that looks identical across every domain they have ever tested. At the start, performance is terrible. With a small amount of practice, it improves rapidly. Then it plateaus, and subsequent gains become much harder and slower to achieve. The steep part of that curve the jump from knowing nothing to being reasonably good happens much faster than anyone tells you. Not 10,000 hours. Not 1,000 hours. 20 hours. Kaufman tested this himself. He had always wanted to learn ukulele. He picked one up, put 20 hours of focused deliberate practice into it, and stood on a TEDx stage playing a medley of recognizable pop songs in front of a live audience. The crowd went wild. He then told them that performance was his 20th hour. But 20 hours is not just a number. There is a method inside it. The first step is to deconstruct the skill. Most things we think of as single skills are actually bundles of dozens of smaller skills. You do not need all of them. You need the ones that get you to your specific goal the fastest. In music, this means most songs use four or five chords. Learn those first. Ignore the rest until they matter. The second step is to learn just enough to self-correct. Get three to five resources books, courses, videos but do not use them as a reason to delay practice. The point of learning is not to master theory first. It is to get good enough at noticing your own mistakes that you can adjust as you go. The third step is to remove barriers to practice. Not through willpower. Through structure. If the instrument is in the case in the closet, you will not play it. If your phone is in the room, you will not focus. Kaufman was brutal about this. The environment does the work that discipline cannot sustain. The fourth step is the one that actually makes the system work. Pre-commit to 20 hours before you start. Here is why this matters. Every skill has what he called a frustration barrier. The early part of learning anything is genuinely terrible. You are incompetent and you know it. That feeling is so uncomfortable that most people quit before they ever cross to the other side of the curve. By pre-committing to 20 hours, you are making a contract with yourself to push through the frustration long enough to arrive at the part where things start clicking. The barrier to learning something new is never intellectual. It is emotional. We are afraid of feeling stupid. That fear costs most people everything they could have learned. Kaufman figured this out while holding a baby and running out of time, which is the most human possible condition for having a breakthrough. Most people are waiting for the perfect season to start. He just started. 20 hours is 45 minutes a day for a month. That is it. That is the price of going from knowing nothing to being genuinely capable at almost anything you can name. The 10,000 hour rule was never about learning. It was about becoming the best in the world. You probably do not need to be the best in the world. You just need to start.

_____

Success and capitalization rate

 

https://x.com/jaynitx/status/2045118633073156098?s=20

Jaynit

@jaynitx

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years. Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered: Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures. Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing. He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success: The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren. He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above. His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics. He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades. The results split into three groups. The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives. And the bottom group? By any measure, failures. The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic. It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families. Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity. There's a concept called "capitalization rate." It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing? In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college. If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else. Here's something stranger. Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team: January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th... 11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March. This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too. Why? The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st. When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated. So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games. We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest. Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best. Self-fulfilling prophecy. The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero. We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar. Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college. 11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity. Now here's the part about math. Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing. Some people say it's genetic. It's not. It's attitudinal. When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it. When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't. Here's the proof. The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes. It's so long most kids don't finish it. A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed. Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance. The correlation was 0.98. In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high. If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time. If they can do it, they're good at math. Why do Asian cultures have this attitude? Gladwell's theory: rice farming. His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays. A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year. Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work. There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry." His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry." If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup. When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly. Now consider distance running. In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day. In the United States, that number is probably 5,000. Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%. Kenya's is probably 95%. The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention. Here's the most fascinating finding. 30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability. Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email. This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability. How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood? You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead. 80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs. By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership. Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle. They say it's the reason they succeeded. A disadvantage that became an advantage. Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand: When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability. We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become. We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table. We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair. The capitalization argument is liberating. It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation. It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out. If we choose to pay attention. This 60 minute Microsoft talk will teach you more about success than every self-help book you've ever read combined.

Mr. Beast on youtuube psychology

 

https://x.com/jaynitx/status/2043657422750040184

Jaynit

@jaynitx

MrBeast: "If you knew what I knew, you could get 10 million subscribers in six months" "Your videos suck. You think your videos are good, but they suck. They just do. And the sooner you learn how to make good, great videos that people actually want to watch, the sooner you'll get views." MrBeast shares his early reality: "When I was 14, I thought my videos were the best in the world. They weren't, they were terrible. To be successful, you kind of have to have a little bit of that ego where you think your content's great. But also, if you have sub-1,000 subscribers, there's a good probability your videos just suck. They just do." He explains what to do about it: "You need to make hundreds of videos. Improve something every time. And just get to the point where they don't suck. When you make good content, you'll blow up. It's not the algorithm. It's not anything. Most people who are in my position just made terrible videos, and that's okay. Because you've got to make a bunch of videos and improve over time to be great." MrBeast uses an analogy: "You don't just pick up a baseball and become an MLB-level athlete within a year. It takes many, many, many years. YouTube's kind of the same way." On analysis paralysis: "A lot of people get analysis paralysis. They'll sit there and plan their first video for three months. If you have zero videos on your channel, your first video is not gonna get views. Period. Your first 10 are not gonna get views. I can very confidently say that. So stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end. Just get to work and start uploading." He gives the formula: "All you need to do is make 100 videos and improve something every time. Do that, and then on your 101st video, we'll start talking. Maybe you can get some views. But your first 100 are gonna suck." How to improve something each time: "The second video: put more effort into the script. The third one: learn a new editing trick. The fourth one: figure out a way to have better inflections in your voice. The fifth one: study a new thumbnail tip and implement it. The sixth one: figure out a new title. There's infinite ways. The coloring, the frame rate, the editing, the filming, the production, the jokes, the pacing, every little thing can be improved. There's literally no such thing as a perfect video." On the algorithm: "What YouTube wants is for people to click on a video and watch it. That's what it is at its core. By studying the algorithm, you'll learn that you're more studying human psychology. What do humans want to watch?" MrBeast shares a simple reframe: "Anytime you say the word 'algorithm,' just replace it with 'audience' and it works perfectly. 'The algorithm didn't like that video?' No, the audience didn't like that video. Literally, that's it. If people are clicking and watching, it gets promoted more. The algorithm just reflects what the people want." On titles: "Short, simple, and just so freaking interesting that you have to click. If someone reads it, are they like, do they have to watch it? Is it just so intrinsically interesting that it's gonna haunt them if they don't click?" He adds nuance: "Keep it below 50 characters. Above 50 characters, on certain devices it goes dot, dot, dot, and that's the worst thing because then people don't even know what they're clicking on." MrBeast shares the extremity principle: "The more extreme the opinion, typically the higher the click-through rate. 'Fiji water sucks', that'd do fine. But 'Fiji water is the worst water I've ever drank in my life', way more extreme, would do way better. But then you have to deliver. The more extreme you are, the more extreme you have to be in the video." On the first 5 seconds: "Before you film a video, what is the thumbnail? What is the title? Then what's the first 5 seconds? Then what's the first 30 seconds?" He explains why autoplay changed everything: "On YouTube now, videos automatically play. So many people don't even see the thumbnail because it autoplays so quickly. The thumbnail is irrelevant for them. I have to visually convince you to click on the video in the first 5 seconds. Before, the hook was important because you had to convince people to watch. Now you have to convince people to click and watch at the same time, with the first 5 seconds." On matching expectations: "Your title and thumbnail set expectations. At the very beginning of the video, to minimize drop-off, you want to assure them that those expectations are being met. If you click on a video called 'Tether is a scam' and at the very beginning, he starts talking about literally anything else, you're like, 'Oh, this is BS. This isn't what I clicked on.' But if at the very start you go, 'Tether is a scam and I'm gonna teach you why,' then it's like, okay, you match the expectations. Then you want to exceed them." He emphasizes the importance: "The thing people undervalue the most is literally the first 10 seconds of the video. That 15% difference in viewership between losing 35% of viewers in the first 30 seconds versus losing 20%, that really does make the difference between 2 million views and 10 million views. You just had a more strategic intro that hooked them." On removing dull moments: "You basically want to remove every dull moment. Find the 10 most critical people you know, make them watch the video, and just roast it. If I talk to a camera for 10 seconds without a cut, a lot of people will get bored. Having a B-cam and C-cam three seconds in, cutting to a different angle, now it's more interesting even though it's essentially the same thing." On keeping viewers watching: "Give them why they clicked. Tell them why they should watch. Then just stick on topic. That right there isn't even super complex, but I would already put you in the upper echelon of YouTube. A lot of people drag it out. It's like, 'I'm going to eat $100 ice cream, but first...' and then it's them birthday shopping for their mom. That's not why I came here." On quality over quantity: "It's much easier to get 5 million views on one video than 50,000 views on 100 videos. A lot of small YouTubers just post videos that aren't bad but aren't great, and none of them ever pop off, so they never get an audience. It might be better to upload half or a third or even a fifth of the videos, but make the videos you upload so freaking good that the algorithm has to promote it." He warns against the consistency trap: "When you set a consistent schedule and you're constantly having to upload videos that aren't as good as you'd like because you gotta hit 'Oh, this Monday I said I'd upload', that's a dangerous trap. The viewers notice the quality isn't as good and it makes them less likely to watch. I think it hurts your longevity." On the real metric that matters: "A big thing that everyone underestimates, what was your experience with your last video? If people loved the last video of yours that they watched, they're more likely to watch your next one. When people watch your video, you don't want them to go, 'Okay, that was good, but that's enough of you for the day.' What you want is them to go, 'Holy crap, that was crazy! Oh my god, what's that?' and they watch 10 videos. That's how you get high view counts. People watch 10 videos, not one." On thumbnails: "You want it to be simple. When they're scrolling, you want them to instantly understand what you're conveying and feel some type of emotion. Make it so interesting, or spike their curiosity so much, that if they don't click it, they'll wonder before they go to bed what happened?" He gives an example: "If you uploaded 'I rode a skateboard with 1,000 other people on it', and people are falling off the side, it's about to go off a big ramp if you don't click that, you're gonna be so curious. Later in the day, when you're daydreaming, you'll think, 'What happened to those 1,000 people on that skateboard?' That's the mindset you should have when making thumbnails." On knowledge being the only barrier: "It's all knowledge. It really is. I could start a new channel tomorrow without using my face or my voice, without ever promoting it, and in six months have 20 million subscribers. I just could. It's purely knowledge. If you knew what I knew, you could get 10 million subscribers no matter where you are right now within six months." He addresses the skeptics: "90% of the people watching don't agree with that. Everyone has excuses. 'Nah, YouTube just doesn't work like that, Jimmy.' But I mentor a lot of people. I see it all the time. It is possible. It is simply knowledge. The second you accept that it is knowledge and you start your journey of learning figuring out what makes a good video, what does my audience want, how can I elevate and then you take that knowledge and just assume 'I will never understand what the perfect video is' and every single day be devoted to learning and improving as much as possible there you go." On money not being the barrier: "There are tons of viral ideas that don't require money. It does not require money to go viral. One of my most-viewed videos was spending 24 hours in a desert, we just grabbed a tent and some stuff and went to the desert. It got 60-70 million views. People say, 'I could be MrBeast if I had money.' A, I didn't start off with money; I was poor, I had no money. It took me seven years just to buy a camera saving up from YouTube. And B, some of our most-viewed videos literally anyone can do." On why no one will outwork him: "No one's ever gonna do what I do better than me. It's just not humanly possible. I reinvest every penny I make. I work every hour I'm awake. I devote every atom in my brain to solving this. I hire the best people on the planet. I've been doing this for 14 years. And I think in decades, not years. I'm gonna be doing this for another 20-30 years. If I thought someone was doing better than me, I'd just start sleeping less so I could work even more." But he doesn't recommend it: "I don't have a life. I don't have work-life balance. My personality, my soul, my being is making the best videos possible. That is why I exist on this planet. And I don't recommend it. You should have work-life balance. You should not devote your entire life to this one thing. I have a mental breakdown every other week because I push myself so hard. I don't recommend it." The only question that matters: "Subscribers don't matter. Views don't matter. I mean, they do. But everything you want as a creator comes from making the best videos possible and thumbnails. The video part's the hard part. Ask: 'How can I make my videos better?' Do that every single day for years. And then you'll probably get views."