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Hi I'm Robert Johnson. I help founders to grow great businesses. Former Managing Director @Techstars. Cofounder @makersacademy

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6 Steps for Evaluating & Ranking Startup Ideas

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A previous essay on 23 Ways to Generate Startup Ideas is receiving a lot of interest, but I repeatedly see questions on what to do if generating ideas isn’t the problem, but instead prioritization. It’s often difficult to evaluate a variety of potential startup opportunities when, as the idea-generator, you’re a bit too close to stay objective. Like most entrepreneurs, I’ve struggled with this problem and the good news is that there are techniques available to assist in this journey.[1. I can’t recommend LeanLaunchLab and Trello enough for organizing and documenting efforts in ranking and testing ideas.] This essay is meant to be a high-level walkthrough of a quick and painless process for evaluating and ranking the potential of your startup ideas. The following steps are outlined below:

Step 1: Consider Effectuation
Step 2: Consider Circumstance
Step 3: Draft a Business Model Canvas
Step 4: Size the Market
Step 5: Conduct Customer Development
Step 6: Test the Leap of Faith Assumptions

Qualitative: Effectuation, Circumstance & The Business Model Canvas

Before getting into the exact steps of parsing ideas, it’s important to be aware of the mental model of effectuation. (A process of inventorying your existing assets and using them as a baseline for making decisions.) This is often contrary to the technique taken by many entrepreneurs of trying to solve the largest or most interesting problem they identify, by instead trying to solve those problems that that particular entrepreneur is most suited in solving, based on his or her specific skills, geographical location, professional network, capital base, etc. In the context of ranking startup ideas, effectuation is important in gauging the likelihood of being successful in a given startup, regardless of the myriad other considerations such as market potential, competitors, etc.

Hand-in-hand with effectuation is circumstance. Where an entrepreneur is in his or her life and what their aspirations are will greatly influence the ranking of a given set of ideas. For example, someone who is currently making $50k per year in a salaried position that they hate may be jumping for joy at an opportunity to pursue just about any startup idea that would bring a high probability of letting them work for themselves – even if the upside potential isn’t much more than what they were making at their previous position. Along this same vein, Richard Branson is much less likely to view a venture like this as a profitable use of his time. Neither position is necessarily better than the other, their circumstances are simply different.

It can be difficult to try and evaluate the ambiguous shape of a startup idea without using some sort of visualization technique. Hands down the best business model visualization I have found is the Business Model Canvas presented in the book Business Model Generation. It takes about 10-15 minutes to think through the basic outline of a business model using this tool and is phenomenal for displaying and identifying strengths and weaknesses. This is a great way to start your startup idea evaluation.

Quantitative: Market Potential

(Parts of this process are derivative of Steve Blank’s incredible article on “How to Build a Web Startup”)

Now that the qualitative considerations have been taken into account, a more quantitative approach of evaluation is taken. The intended use of these metrics is to add a single element to each idea to provide a more holistic view in order to assist in ranking ideas. Here are the quantitative due-diligence measures used to give a 30,000 foot view of the opportunity:

  • Google Keyword Tool – Search a variety of terms that would be used by someone with the problem that your idea will solve. Be sure to use quotations to search the exact phrase and I’d caution you to ask yourself for each phrase you enter, “Could the person searching this be searching for something other than my product.” For example, if your startup is developing a new innovate peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a search for “good sandwiches” is not relevant because the scope is too large.
  • Size the market – Use Google Insights, Google Trends and Facebook Ads to get a rough idea of the market potential.
  • Determine the market type – Is the market completely new or are you resegmenting an existing market? (Steve Blank wrote a great article about the implications of market types here.)
  • Competitor Search – It’s amazing how often I’ve observed someone talk about their “incredibly innovative idea” only to find the exact thing within five minutes of searching Google. You should feel great if you find out that someone has done what you came up with – it lends credibility to your ability to think creatively. Also, it prevents you from wasting resources if the competitor is already too far ahead. (For tech companies in particular, Crunchbase is a great tool for competitor research.)

Refine the Top Contenders

Using the qualitative and quantitative techniques from above, you’ll get an idea on the high-level potential for your ideas. It’s likely that many of them will turn out to be less than stellar because of various issues such as competition that you didn’t previously know existed or a discovery that the market is too small or in decline. Taking joy in the fact that the ideas you do have left made it past the first elimination round, the next evaluation step is to get real feedback from potential customers.

Every idea is different, but a great (and I’d argue necessary) way of calculating value in an idea is to conduct customer development interviews and test what Eric Ries calls the “leap of faith” assumptions.[2. Those assumptions that, if proved false, invalidate your entire business model.]

Customer development is a technique Steve Blank presented in 4 Steps to the Epiphany that assists entrepreneurs in turning their baseline assumptions into facts. In a matter of five interviews, you can (and likely will) have a vastly different idea about your idea than you did when you started. The customer development process is quite in-depth so instead of doing it injustice by trying to explain the entire thing here, I highly recommend purchasing and reading 4 Steps to the Epiphany and/or googling “Customer Development Interviews” to get an idea about what all it entails.[3. I’ve found oHours to be a great tool for conducting these interviews.]

Simultaneously, while preparing and conducting these interviews, many ideas will lend themselves to methods that can very easily test the value proposition on your intended customer. Paul Graham often says that the thing that kills most startups is that they make dog food that dogs don’t want to eat. Eric Ries and Tim Ferris have documented many times the ease in testing your value proposition through a simple landing page. Going back to our innovative new PB&J startup, if you were to spend an afternoon setting up a landing page that clearly depicts the value proposition of how your sandwich is better than the other sandwiches, and asks people to input their email address to hear more, it’s easy to track some analytics on how interested people are in your solution. If you drive 500 sandwich lovers to that page and only 1 or 2 sign up, that tells you a lot. If 100 sign up, that too is quite telling.[4. Unbounce is great for this sort of quick testing.]

Conclusion

This process is just one way to assist in your efforts in finding that idea. It’s not meant as a step-by-step blueprint, but instead as a way to get you thinking about your startup ideas in a way that will help you in determining which ones deserve further attention and testing.

Just keep in mind, the idea is the easy part…

Follow me on Twitter @startuprob

Why Most Startup Advice is Wrong

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Not all of it, but a good chunk of it sure is. And it’s not that the people providing the advice are doing so with a malicious intent, it’s just often given with ignorance. It doesn’t take long in the startup community to realize that there are completely contradictory opinions on how to do certain things – often between two people who have each had enormously successful exits! Some people rave over the value of obtaining VC funding because of the connections and capital runway extensions it provides, while others vehemently support bootstrapping. Incubators such as YCombinator will rarely accept a solo-founding entrepreneur but Mark Suster has documented his advocation for solo-founding. Sometimes the advice even comes from the same source. I’m a huge fan of Jason Fried, but in his book Rework he gives the following two pieces of advice at different points:

If you’re inspired on Friday, swear off the weekend and dive into the project. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work down in twenty-four hours. Inspiration is a time machine in that way. [1. Section titled “Inspiration is perishable”]

So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don’t act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind. [2. Section titled “Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority]

How does a nascent entrepreneur know what advice to follow? The answer lies in probably one of the only universal truths about startups: You have to think for, and trust, your own ability to reason.

If one entrepreneur found absolutely incredible success by running a deep-pocketed VC-backed SaaS web application, they may tell you that the path to victory is to hire the absolute best engineers on the planet and to invest heavily with an eye on user-acquisition and retention. But how would that advice apply to a bootstrapped, advertising-revenue driven content service such as a new blog? The point is not that one shouldn’t listen to the advice of veteran entrepreneurs, but to keep one’s eyes open when doing so and to never blindly follow a path because a reverent entrepreneur says so.

Many people are looking for that perfect linear equation that gives them the step-by-step checklist to their entrepreneurial windfall (be that an acquisition, IPO or profitable company), but the problem is that that linear equation is nonexistent. Well, that may not be perfectly accurate, it may exist, but nobody knows what it is for your startup. What makes startup entrepreneurship so challenging and exciting is that there’s rarely a clear-cut path from here to there.

Your best bet when accumulating knowledge and tactics is to try and frame the recommendation on the experiences of the source providing the information and to analyze it in terms of where your startup currently is. One of the best ways to do this is to categorize your startup in order to be able to compare it to others. I’ve found the following four categorization techniques exceptionally helpful with analyzing:

  1. The Startup Genome Report – This fascinating report is a must read for any hardcore entrepreneur. Among other things, they help break up startups into four distinct types while providing examples for each and recommendations on strategies.
  2. The Lean Startup – Eric Ries uses a term called “Drivers of Growth” that categorizes a startup based on how it will expand.
  3. Business Model Canvas – While this won’t give you a specific categorization like the two examples above, it will provide you with a 30,000 foot view that, when compared with another startup, will be able to give you the ability to identify stark similarities and differences with little effort.
  4. Revenue Model – As I stated in my example above, how a company drives revenue is crucially important to what areas of your startup require the majority of focus. A monthly subscription model is going to operate significantly different than a transactional-based revenue model.

It’s a great idea to accumulate and analyze the experiences of others, but strive to understand why that advice was given so it will help you put it in perspective.

Follow me on Twitter @startuprob

23 Ways to Generate Startup Ideas

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First off, startup ideas themselves are next to worthless. Paul Graham wrote an incredible essay about the face value of startup ideas that takes an economically analytical approach by stating, “Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.” Execution is the main value inherent in a startup, not the idea itself. Ideas change with the market’s feedback. Pivots happen when opportunities are recognized and executed upon.

With that premise established, ideas still serve a purpose. They provide starting points that act as platforms for future pivots of nascent ideas. The process of idea generation is itself a task with great benefit, regardless of the result. The thought processes and brain power used to invent something where previously there was nothing, are great exercises for one’s brain. These methods and exercises will help to train one’s brain in coming up with creative solutions to the endless queue of near-impossible problems that startups inevitably produce.

Requirements

Before getting started, get yourself a dedicated idea slate. It could be a moleskin notebook, a $0.78 pocket notebook, or even a note on your iPhone. Once you have your idea slate, use it. Whenever you have an idea for a startup, write it down. By not writing ideas down, they will continue to infect every future idea you have. By writing it down, you get it out of your head and it frees up the neurons to focus on the next idea. Write down every idea you have, no matter how bad or implausible you think it is. Ideas have a way of coming full circle and some missing piece of information from your seed idea may present itself six months down the road.

If possible, try to write your ideas as questions instead of assertions.[1. Instead of, “I’m going to build a great photo-sharing app” consider saying “How could I build a great photo-sharing app?”] This accomplishes a couple of things. First, it prevents the immediate response that 99.9% of people have when they hear an entrepreneur say they’re starting a business: “It won’t work.” Instead, a question elicits the audience and yourself to truly think through the intricate details of your idea. It entices your audience to help you think of ways to make it work.

Lastly, don’t ever let yourself use the phrase, “If it was really that good of an idea, someone would have thought of it already.” That statement is bullshit and it cripples the person who believes it. I can’t remember where I read this[2. I think it was from Napoleon Hill’s Think & Grow Rich – free on iBooks.], but “Nothing in the world is being done as good as it can be.” At risk of sounding like a high school guidance counselor, people can be anybody they want if they believe in themselves.

Idea Generation Methods

With the right mindset and forum for saving ideas in hand, test out some of the following methods of idea generation:

1. Watch a random TED talk.
2. Watch a random Mixergy interview.
3. Read Business Model Generation.[3. The ‘Design’ section especially has some incredible exercises on….business model generation.]
4. Flip to a random page in your idea slate and write, “It sucks when…” on the top and then fill it up with everything that annoys you. Many of those annoyances could be turned into products or services.
5. Look through the customer service sections of websites and find out what people are complaining about.
6. Look at the ideas that the YCombinator wants to fund.
7. Ask yourself, “What type of business would you want to run if there was absolutely no chance of failure?”
8. Look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck.
9. Paul Graham once said, “One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we’ll seem backward to future generations.”
10. Ask random people that you meet what the biggest annoyances in their lives and jobs are.[4. I especially enjoy doing this at the hair salon – they must have the same boring conversation with every single client so they’re usually happy to mix things up.]
11. Look for new opportunities out of the new changes that are taking place (Twitter, HackerNews, Quora, Google+, Mixergy, TED , iTunesU are good sources for inspiration).
12. Glance through the different Craigslist categories. It surprisingly might spark an idea for a startup.[5. The “Gigs” section may be especially insightful as many people are immediately looking for solutions.]
13. Ask yourself, “What’s never been done by anyone?”
14. Take something apart and put it back together.
15. Look at where your industries and markets of interest are going.[6. Mark Suster says, “Don’t skate to where the puck is, because it will be gone by the time you get there. Skate to where the puck is going.”]
16. Look at the most commonly searched phrases on Google and Amazon.
17. Stay up to date on your fields of interest as this will continuously spark new ideas.
18. Think of ways to do things that are completely different than how we do them now – don’t worry about how – just figure out how to make them better.
19. Explore the world around you. Change your surroundings. Visit new companies. Take a trip. Experience new things.
20. Watch the Kevin Rose foundation series.
21. Inventory your skills, interests and resources to determine what you’re most qualified to do. (Also, ask others what your skills and interests are – you may be surprised by their responses.)[7. This is similar to a concept known as effectuation that I plan to cover more deeply in the future.]
22. Look through your bank statement to see where your money is going. (Could you be doing any of those tasks better? Cheaper?)
23. Try out some scientifically proven psychological creativity techniques.

I’m sure that I have missed many methods of idea generation, but these are the ones that I have personally found productive.

Follow me on Twitter @startuprob.

UPDATE: This list wouldn’t be complete without The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, it’s incredible for fostering the activities that lead to innovative creativity.

Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act

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Investing in startup companies is always a risk, but hand-in-hand with this risk comes an opportunity for a substantial reward.  Venture capital companies pride themselves on this risk management in order to make money. They loan companies money in return for a fractional ownership, looking to make a handsome profit when the company is sold or goes public with an IPO.  The firm that invested in Facebook will likely get a return of 5,000 times on their investment.  The issue is that unlike the stock market where anyone can play, only the rich are legally allowed to play this game.  We can open up this type of investment to everyone if you assist in supporting the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act (informally known as the “crowdfunding bill”).

Current Legislation

Under current legislation, startup companies’ funding options are limited to friends and family, established investment firms (i.e. venture capitalists), and accredited investors (i.e. angels).  This means that if you want to launch the next great internet sensation and, for one reason or another, you either don’t want, or can’t get, a bank loan, you have to go to one of these sources for funding. Could you tweet out a message to your Twitter followers or post a message on Facebook saying that you’re looking for funding? No. That would be considered illegal “solicitation.”  If a friend of a friend hears about your venture and decides that they want to give you some money, can they? It depends on whether or not they’re an accredited investor.  With the economy in its current state, we should be doing everything we can to support the flow of necessary capital to entrepreneurs.

The Securities Act of 1933 is the source of our current guidelines for startup investments. First off, it prohibits “general solicitation,” requiring that the startup and the investor have a pre-existing relationship.  In addition, it requires that any investors be “accredited,” meaning that they have a net worth of more than one million dollars or two consecutive years of at least $200,000 of annual income.

The purpose behind these restrictions is to protect naive investors. Unfortunately, the legislation is effectively hindering the economy by limiting entrepreneur’s abilities to raise the capital needed to start new businesses. This, in turn, hinders the US economy because we have fewer small businesses creating jobs. And what about those business-savvy individuals with sufficient business knowledge to invest that, for one reason or another, lack the means to qualify as an accredited investor?

We don’t outlaw individuals from going to the casino and risking their life’s savings, why should we outlaw them from taking a risk on a business that could potentially make them a tidy return on investment?  If this bill had passed before Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook and you had given him $10,000 of seed money because you thought it was a good idea, that investment would now be worth $50 million. [1. Based on the same terms that Peter Thiel got when he made the first venture capital investment in Facebook.]

Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act

Luckily, Congress has noticed the err in our current legislation and the House of Representatives passed the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act in November. The House’s bill would raise the restriction of “general solicitation,” thus allowing anyone to broadcast that their startup is seeking funding.  You could post on Twitter, Facebook, or even take out an advertisement in the New York Times declaring that your startup was seeking investors.  In addition, it would allow anyone to invest in these companies, up to the lesser of $10,000 or 10% of one’s income per year.

The Senate is reconciling two different versions of this bill, one is called the “Brown bill” [2. So named because it was introduced by Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.] which has some slight differences to the House bill – the main one being that the maximum investment made would be limited to $1,000.  The second bill is the “Merkley bill” and it limits the amount to the greater of $500 or 1-2% of annual income, depending on income level.

If this bill becomes law, it will be a material step forward for our economy and country.  Many businesses across the country will get access to the crucial capital they require. Communities will come together to assist one another. Jobs will be created. Fortunes will be produced by scrappy businessmen and women who still believe in that increasingly faint whisper called the American dream.

The Problem

The problem with all of this is that the Senate has been “in chambers” on this bill since December with no action. If you agree with the importance of this bill, I humbly ask you to call your senator and urge them to pass this bill quickly and fairly.  (You can find their number HERE) In addition, if you’re so inclined, ask them to reconcile the Senate’s cap-limits a bit closer to the House’s $10,000. Americans don’t need an allowance.

Follow me on Twitter @startuprob.

Identitweet

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The Problem

A couple of months ago in my MBA Communications course, I was required to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test. It was one of those scantron-looking pamphlets that looks exactly like it did when my parents took it 40 years ago.[1. The MBTI was first published in 1962.] The questions are exactly what one would expect from a personality test, I…

After taking the test, everyone in the class scored their responses and I was surprised at how fascinated everyone was with their results.  I admit that I too was quite interested in reading about the intricate details of what this piece of paper thought it knew about me. The professor told us all about the statistical validity of the MBTI and how it’s revolutionized the corporate world – except for one tiny thing: that people tend to answer the questions based on their “ideal selves” instead of who they actually are.

I started to question why in today’s technologically advanced society that we were relying on an individual’s perception of themselves, instead of observing the plethora of actions that are available about them online. With the amount of social media activity and online information available to anyone, I wondered why we couldn’t observe all of that data to make more accurate predictions of personality.

The Experiment

I have a bit of a background in analytics and linguistics and decided I would perform a short experiment.  Knowing that Twitter provides an API that gives anyone near-complete access to everything published on its platform, I thought that it would be a perfect instrument of experimentation.[2. I purposely chose Twitter and asked for volunteers because of the openness of the platform. Everyone knows, or should know, that Twitter is 100% transparent and open. (The library of congress records your tweets.)]

That evening I went home and found a non-proprietary open source personality test that wouldn’t require me to pay a fee every time I had someone fill it out.  Instead of the four MBTI dichotomies, this previously-proven-to-be-valid test determines one’s big five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neutoriticism, and openness. Then I used Zoomerang, an online survey-taking tool, to have a sample of people take the test while also volunteering their Twitter handle. Since I was learning Ruby at the time, I wrote some software using the Twitter Ruby framework to slice and dice the different portions of the Twitter API that I thought might be relevant for determining each of these five personality traits.

I imported the results of the sample’s personality tests using binary dummy variables for the indication of whether they were or were not slanted towards that particular personality trait. Since this open source personality test has already been verified as statistically valid, all I needed to do at that point was to find the combinations of coefficients and independent variables that could consistently and reliably predict the correct trait. I imported the results of the software I wrote into the same spreadsheet as the binary personality data to allow my algorithms to use a baseline of zero as a center-point of personality. (So, for example, if the calculation from the extraversion algorithm turned out to be above zero, that person would be an extravert, if it were below zero, they would be an introvert.) With all of this data in hand, I used some statistical software to run multiple-regression tests to see what independent variables, if any, explained a substantive portion of the variance in the any of the dependent variables (the individual traits).

I played around with political affiliation a little but, since I didn’t actually test this with the surveys, it’s purely conjecture. Using a spectrum of generally perceived political biases such as Fox News being more right-leaning and NPR being left-leaning, I proposed to count the mentions and links of each of this networks in the content of an individual’s tweets.

I baselined an integer at zero and decided that for each URL observed from Fox News, the integer would increment by one. For each tweet that included a URL from NPR, it would decrement by one. Finally, if there were a sufficient number of overall links (I didn’t want to be thrown off by a fluke one-off mention), it’s a crude indicator of political affiliation. I’ve considered tweaking this method to only track those media outlets on the edges (far left and right three?) or even using a moving average to weigh those on the media-bias extremes more than in the middle, but I have yet to return to the experiment.

My base conclusions are far from scientific as my sample size was incredibly small.  In addition, I had no barrier for “level” of personality trait (0.001 would still be returned as an extravert) so if I were to move forward with this research, I would refine the algorithms and expand the level of sufficiency by requiring the calculation to be, for example, above one or below negative one to display a more confident result.  That being said, the crude algorithms do provide some insight into personality through passive observation. (I posted the algorithms at identitweet.com so anybody can view their traits.)

Moving Forward

In addition to personality traits and political affiliation, I believe that the internet provides us a vehicle to determine a great deal of things about people through their actions online.  (By “people,” I’m not simply referring to the parochial actions of determining whether someone is an extravert or not – I think we can determine a great deal about society as a whole.)

There’s a lot of potential in this field of study for behavioral investigation. I find myself wondering if it would be possible to monitor individual’s activity in order to predict psychological ailments such as depression or signs of suicide. Could we identify how fitted someone would be for a particular job? Could we serve advertisements to individuals based on their particular way of perceiving information? In terms of society as a whole, could we monitor sentiment (positive vs negative) of tweets that included the word “Obama” made by all people in California versus all people in Alabama to serve as a real-time political polling device? What about brand sentiment? Based by location? And hour of the day?

It’s fascinating to think about what one could determine, purely by knowing where and when to listen.

Follow me on Twitter @startuprob. Thank you to my lovely wife, Stephanie Johnson, for providing valuable feedback on this essay.

April 2012 Update: Due to the increased efficiency developed in the algorithms, the IdentiTweet site’s validity was falling behind so I took it down. I’m currently working on an alternative use for the technology.

On Persistence

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I’ve often questioned the true power of persistence and its relationship to success. Is it sufficient, necessary, or completely unrelated?

Exploring the Relationship

Sufficiency is an easy test, so I looked for a single instance of an individual who vigilantly persisted without achieving success.  It didn’t take long to find a baseball article that specifically talked about some incredible players who never quite made it, despite their persistence. These are men that spent years with a dogged determination to become professional baseball players, yet never quite made it – hard work alone is not enough.

I think that the reason persistence is so often confused with a sufficient condition of success, is due to a couple of factors. In startup entrepreneurship, since that’s what I know, those individuals who achieve the highest success are usually the people who are able to get to the outer edges of a particular technology or field.  Once one is able to get to those outer edges, they are able to more accurately identify the opportunities available for innovation. However, due to the increasingly quick pace that knowledge is expanding, getting to the edges becomes harder every day.  One of the few surefire ways to get to the edge is through persistence. I contend that anyone who passionately pursues a given topic will eventually find the edges.[1. Combined with a sufficient level of intelligence – but this bar isn’t set very high.]

To test if it’s a necessary condition, is to try and provide even a single instance of the achievement of success, that lacked persistence. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately based upon your moral views of having a good work ethic, there are a plethora of examples that disprove the necessity of persistence.  From criminals being set free because of faulty police-work, to people winning the lottery, it’s clear that persistence is not a prerequisite for success. Success can and does take place without persistence.

I think that a hint to the true relationship dynamic between persistence and success, lies in the method I just used to determine that persistence wasn’t a necessary condition of success. To make an argument stating that persistence is not your favored method of obtaining success because examples exist that disprove its necessity, is analogous to saying that wearing a parachute is not your favored method of gliding to the ground when skydiving, because people have succeeded without it.[2. Flight Sergeant Nicholas Stephen Alkemade survived a fall of 18,000 ft in 1944 without a parachute.]

Despite the inability to label the relationship as necessary or sufficient, brute persistence can be an incredible force. Malcolm Gladwell discusses the 10,000 hour rule in chapter two of Outliers
that provides many examples of great success through repetitive persistence.  It states that to become an expert in a given skill, one needs to practice that skill for roughly 10,000 hours.[3. About 20 hours per week for 10 years.]

So is that the answer? Conclude that brute persistence is powerful, but that it’s still no guarantee to be enough? I wasn’t convinced and decided to dig a little deeper. Through some research, I stumbled upon a concept called deliberate practice.

Deliberate Practice

The idea behind deliberate practice[4. I intend on writing an essay specifically on deliberate practice in the near future.] is to investigate the type of practice one undertakes, instead of how long one takes to practice.[5. An interesting take on DP is provided in chapter eight of Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer.]  For example, a psychological study was conducted that asked a group of violinists how often and what form their practice took. The results of the research showed that the most successful students didn’t practice any more than the not-so-successful students, but instead practiced in a deliberate fashion. Their practice was specifically designed to stretch their abilities. It was methodically calculated to find the edges of what they were capable of, and to push them further.

This is uncomfortable work.  It’s a stark contrast to the way that most people practice.  Most people will “practice” those skills that they’re already good at because it’s easier.  Deliberate practice places a feedback mechanism so that the person practicing can actively monitor how well they’re doing. Most people feel queazy about such monitoring because they’ve now introduced an ability to fail, but this ability to fail could quite possibly be the exact component one needs to take their skill to the next level.

While I don’t have empirical evidence of this, I expect that those baseball players who didn’t quite make the professional league, didn’t fail because they didn’t practice enough, but because of the type of practice they conducted.  Everyone wants to practice the things that they’re already good at because being good at something feels good. The next time you go to the golf course with your friends, watch someone that you know well on the driving range. Are they practicing those skills that you know them to already be good at, or struggling with the ones that they’re poor at?[6. Since most people are poor at it, count how many people practice sand shots – I’m usually surprised to see 1 in 20.]

I suspect that those baseball players that focused on the parts of their game that they were poor at, instead of doing things that they were already good at, performed much better overall in their career.

Perhaps a more accurate depiction of the relationship between success and persistence, is an individual’s ability to identify what areas of focus, and what feedback mechanisms, will yield the highest return.  Their ability to develop and maintain a persistent level of deliberate practice, instead of just continuing to do what they’re already good at, is a more critical indicator of achieving their purpose.

I propose that dedicating a small percentage of one’s time to examining the results of what they’re doing, tracking their progress, instituting new feedback mechanisms, and questioning whether it is the most efficient method of obtaining one’s goal, would greatly increase the efficiency and probability of achieving one’s purpose.

Follow me on Twitter @startuprob.  Thank you to Dr. Kenneth Janson and @exploremqt (Jim Argeropoulos) for giving their valuable feedback on this essay.