- Quick Summary
- Debunking The 10,000-Hour Rule
- View Full Mastery Manual
- Watch Class
- Other Resources
- Slides
- Navigate Mental Models On Entrepreneurship
Quick Summary
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.—Thomas Edison
Some models we cover in the Mental Model Club are relatively new even to Eben and I, while others are longtime bedrocks. The 10,000-Experiment Rule is one we’ve been implementing for many years that has become crucial to our success.
The 10,000-Experiment Rule is an idea I coined that was inspired by two sources:
- The 10,000-Hour Rule that many of us are familiar with; and
- The quote above from Thomas Edison, who famously ran tens of thousands of experiments throughout his career.
Debunking The 10,000-Hour Rule
You’ve probably heard of the 10,000-Hour Rule. It comes from Anders Ericsson, a psychologist and researcher who studied top performers across distinct fields such as sports, the arts, and medicine. He found that in certain endeavors such as violin and chess, it often took people 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become known worldwide. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea by coining “The 10,000-Hour Rule” in his bestselling book Outliers.
While the 10,000-Hour Rule can be very powerful, there’s an important caveat that most people miss: The results of the 10,000-hour rule widely differ wildly depending on the domain.
When it comes to professions, in the modern world of business, the underlying rules are constantly changing along with new technologies. The rules of commerce, transportation, engineering, journalism, medicine, and so much more are changing by the day. In fact, the rules of the previous generation might actively hurt you. Spending 10,000 hours on deliberate practice is not going to be the key that gets you ahead in these fields.
What will get you ahead, though, is experimentation.
View Full Mastery Manual
Watch Class
Other Resources
Slides
Navigate Mental Models On Entrepreneurship
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The rookie mistake many business owners make in their marketing is to just promote themself. Instead, you should work on educating your prospects. Once you educate them on how things work in your domain and what it’s like to work with you, they’re more likely to develop trust in you and buy your products or services.
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“Think like a customer” is a simple idea/skill, and it’s also the key skill you need in order to get customers. In order to create a product people want and market it in a way people understand, you first have to understand the customer. This manual will help you understand how.
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How can I get in front of as many eyes as possible and get as many people as I can to know about my work, my projects, and the services or products I offer, all with minimal costs? That’s the challenge this model addresses.
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To communicate effectively within someone in a buying state, we need to understand who our buyers are and what makes them unique and identify their #1 specific psychological-emotional motivator. In other words, we want to identify our specific buyers’ hot buttons.
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In many ways, humans are designed for social conformity. Conforming is easier, and it works 99% of the time. An original thinker, however, knows that social and expert authority is often right, but that it can also be incredibly wrong too. So, the original thinker looks for holes in the consensus view and capitalizes on them. This model shows how you can do it too.
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This model aims to help you get published on top sites in your niche, write articles that go viral, build your business completely off of content (if you want), get people knocking on your door to work with you, and scale the number of people you reach.
As we're moving into this increasingly changed future, in which we seem to be living out Ray Kurzweil’s Law Of Accelerating Returns, we’ve noticed that the opportunity follows certain patterns. In this manual, we discuss six principles of opportunity to help you build a model of how it works and how it evolves through time.
When you have a product or you're buying a product, you can look at it through the metaphor of your hiring the person to do a job for you, and that job could have functional aspects and emotional aspects.
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When it comes to rapidly changing environments, forget the 10,000-Hour Rule. Thomas Edison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and other great innovators follow the 10,000-Experiment Rule, and you can start with it with the help of this manual.
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The offer isn’t the only thing that makes something sell. A lot of times, especially in a smaller company or startup, a lot of what people are buying is not just the product — in many ways, they are buying you. So in this manual, we’re going to talk about selling you.
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Why and how you should be reinventing yourself with the customers, your marketing, and your product.
Customer focus is a series of four models rather than a standalone model, and Total Customer Focus model is one of the cornerstones.