#6 Iterations Matter More Than Repetitions
The Amplified Impact Podcast
July 19th, 2023
We’re diving into lesson number six from my mind-blowing weekend with the internet’s top creators.
Now, we’ve all heard the saying that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at something…but that might not be the whole story.
According to the brilliant Naval, it’s not about the hours; it’s about the iterations.
It’s all about the quality of those repetitions, not just mindlessly going through the motions.
Let’s take my writing journey as an example. When I decided to become a science fiction author, I knew I had to put in the work.
So I set a goal to write 3,000 words every single day for a year…that’s a million words in total.
But here’s the kicker…I didn’t just write and write and write.
I also reflected, sought feedback, and iterated on my writing.
And guess what? It worked.
Within a year and a half, I had published my first book.
Now, let’s talk about the creators I met at the event. People like Ed from Film Booth and Charlie Hooper from Charisma on Command.
These guys are testing and iterating like crazy.
They run hundreds and thousands of split tests, collecting data, and making incremental improvements.
They’re obsessed with iterations and refining their content to be the best it can be.
So…if you want to reach the pinnacle of your craft, you need to embrace the power of iterations.
Be obsessed with getting better with each iteration and unleash the power of intentional improvement.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Whoever can iterate fastest typically gets to the solution fastest.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
Oh, what’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the pod. We’re continuing our series of lessons learned from a weekend spent with some of the internet absolute top creators. Backstory again, if you are just tuning in for the first time and you’ve missed the previous five episodes, I was invited out to a weekend with a bunch of other awesome, amazing internet creators for a weekend of just talking shop, comparing notes, and fellowship. And so I’m taking those lessons that I learned from that event and I’m bringing it to you guys. And we are on lesson number six today, so highly recommend you go back, you listen to the previous episodes. But number six, iterations matter more than repetitions. And this is something that I was reminded of from Naval. This is something that he said a while ago, which is that it’s not about 10,000 hours, it’s about 10,000 iterations.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:55]:
So the idea behind that quote is you’re probably familiar with the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of something, right? 10,000 hours of practice, or at least that’s what Malcolm Gladwell claimed in one of his books. And it became kind of like this commonly held piece of wisdom. Now, that is not necessarily an accurate truism. It’s not 10,000 hours for everything or everyone. There’s exceptions to all these rules, but it’s a good benchmark to say like a lot of time and effort is required to get really damn good at something, like become masterful at it. And I remember when I started writing science fiction and fantasy, I wanted to become a science fiction author. I looked up what is the equivalent of 10,000 hours for a writer, because I realized that 10,000 hours isn’t a good proxy for writing because I could spend 10,000 hours but only have written twelve words, right? So it became clear to me that some level of quantity was required within that, like some level of output. And what I found was consistently people would talk about how you need to write a million shitty words before you start to discover the words inside of you that are worth actually sharing, and you figure out your voice and how to construct your thoughts in compelling, interesting ways, right? And so with that knowledge, I was like, I want to get through that period as quickly as possible, that million words.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:16]:
And so I sat down with the goal that I was going to write 3000 words every single day for the next year, which worked out to roughly about a million words. And interestingly, my first book was published a year and a half into my journey. So six months later, that would have been about 1.5 million words. At that point, I was starting to get to the good words and it corresponded with my first book, so there was some truth in that idea. Now, one of the things Naval talks about here is that it’s not about 10,000 hours. It’s about 10,000 iterations. And something that I was doing during that writing period was not just recycling like just writing, I was writing and then reflecting and getting feedback and then trying to iterate and trying to improve and rewrite sections and say okay, how do I take this sentence and rewrite it in this voice or that voice? How do I do this in a more dramatic way, a more comedic way? And so it’s constantly iterating in an intentional way not just going through the motions and putting words on the page and in business and life and creation the interesting thing is that whoever can iterate fastest typically gets to the solution fastest. And so the goal that we need to optimize for is how do we get through as many iterations as quickly as possible.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:29]:
And I was reminded of this at this creator event talking to these guys like Ed from Film Booth. Yes, he studies YouTube channels like thumbnails and titles and all of these things at an obsessive level and one of the things that I realized from guys like him and Charlie Hooper who runs what is it? Charisma on command, it’s like a channel with 6 million subs is that these guys are testing every little thing. They’re testing their title and different words, different structures, different capitalization, different periods, grammatic flourishes they’re testing everything inside the thumbnail from the color of this to if they do a close up shot of a woman’s head, does that get more clicks? Or if it includes cleavage, or a guy if he’s in a suit and he’s smiling or he’s not smiling, which one gets more clicks? And so they’re constantly testing and iterating on everything and they have hundreds and thousands of AB split tests running at any given moment. I found that absolutely fascinating to the degree. And they’re not just doing it on the new stuff, but they’re doing it on their entire backlog of videos and content. And they have hundreds, if not thousands of videos that they’ve published over the years. And so there’s just so much data that they’re collecting and they’re constantly iterating, and then they’re taking the lessons that they learn from this one split test and then are applying it to the whole thing, and they’re getting incremental improvements 0.1% better each and every single time, which compounds in a very quick, meaningful way that I think we often take for granted. And so if you want to be the best at what you’re doing in your business, you have to be obsessed with the iterations and the testing of every little variable.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:15]:
This goes back to one of the other lessons that I shared is that the best are obsessed. They’re obsessed with every little detail and doing it to the best of their ability every single time. Never phoning it in, never going through the motions and this was just another example of this is that iterations matter more than repetitions. So I hope this brings you a little bit of value. As always. Thank you so much for being here. I’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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