Have you put in your hours?

Passing Checkpoint Bravo

I’ve done a few cool things in my life.

Sometimes I like to think about how I managed to do these cool things and how I might get to do more cools things in the future.

This practice keeps me grounded in the nuts and bolts of execution and reminds me how my “successes” always seem to stem from the same simple recipes, repeated.

If you’re new here, it’s important to realize I am ambitious, egotistical, and have an extremely high internal locus of control.

Accordingly, I tend to repeat the same hat trick of mistakes:

1. I overestimate how quickly I’ll get good at Things

2. I get impatient when success is slow

3. I treat failures of 1 and 2 as personal character flaws

So what’s a prideful polymath to do?

The answer is almost always the same:

Ask myself a question.

Have you put in your hours?

When I’m frustrated with any pre-successful-result, I try to ask myself if I’ve really put in enough hours to expect anything better than a middling outcome.

I don’t mean the pop-sci, arbitrary 10,000 hours.

I mean the

“Cameron, you’re competent and eventually solve most of your problems and sure AI now let’s you be insta mid, but did you really put in enough deliberate time to honestly look in the mirror and say ‘Yea, I have a pretty good handle on this space?’”

type hours.

If I haven’t, then I have two choices:

A. Put in more hours

B. Accept I won’t be good at the Thing

Either way, I need to stop complaining and keep moving.

The exact number of hours varies, but any master of anything understands that the gap between a pedestrian and professional is good repetitions.

And good repetitions come from logging a big ol’ chunk of hours.

How many hours is enough tho?

Sometimes it really does take 10,000 hours to git gud.

Sometimes it takes a lot less than that.

But odds are, it’ll probably take more than the leisurely 3 hours you put in last Sunday morning.

You’ll never truly feel done with a domain, especially if you’re climbing the slope of enlightenment, but I use two Proficiency Checkpoints to help gauge if I can trust my own judgment about a new Thing.

Checkpoint Alpha: Thoughtfully Dangerous

This is where you start to see the edges of the map. You can go to an event about the Thing and have a pretty good time. You recognize most of the words and can follow a few interesting discussions and maybe you even understand some of the inside jokes.

You’re definitely still learning and fumbling around, but you’re a clumsy explorer with context.

This makes you thoughtfully dangerous.

You’re past CP Alpha if:

• You’ve encountered most of the core concepts in a space (even if you can't always explain them cleanly)

• You know enough to ask relevant questions and avoid the more obvious pitfalls beginners struggle with

• You’ve gone down a few rabbit holes far enough to figure out where experts disagree

• You’ve created at least one small, working thing/experiment/project in the space

• You’ve started forming your own mental models instead of just borrowing others'

• You can usually sniff out bad advice or shallow thinking about the Thing, although your batting average here may not be that great yet

Most people pass CP Alpha with ~1–2 hours of exploration per day over about 30 days or if they spend a focused week deep diving on the Thing.

If you’re well practiced at picking up new things, you’ll definitely hit CP Alpha faster than this. If you’re unsure, look at the bullets and gauge yourself honestly. It’s extremely useful to know your rough competency rates in any domain.

The best part about CP Alpha is that when you pass it, it means you’re usually now aware enough to pick useful projects to work on.

You’re certainly not an authority and you don’t really understand the nuances of the space yet (every new Thing has nuances you’re missing I promise you), but by this point you should be able to identify the big buckets of

“oh this is an underexplored area that might have interesting or challenging or lucrative problems to solve”.

Don’t kid yourself though,

it’s still overwhelmingly unlikely you’ll be able to identify solutions that are effective, practical, and durable to the major problems surrounding the new Thing.

Eager beavers and 22-year-olds will be tempted, but

Please don’t raise VC money at Checkpoint Alpha.

Checkpoint Bravo: Dangerously Thoughtful

You’re no longer playing defense, Big Dog.

You know what the n00b questions are. You can answer most of them. If you’re internet inclined, you might’ve spent a few too many 2am’s arguing about the Thing in some niche Discord. If you’re not internet inclined, you have definitely developed a set of monk mode isolationist, strong opinions about the Thing.

The Thing is now a full blown special interest of yours and if somebody let’s you there’s a good chance you’ll wax poetic about it at a party until they politely start inching (side note: what idiom do europeans use instead of inching? centimetering?) further and further away while smiling and mumbling quietly about finding the restroom only to vanish into the crowd.

You’re past CP Bravo if:

• You can hold a 60+ minute nuanced conversation with someone else fluent in the Thing

• You’ve made at least one non-obvious connection or insight in your mind that you’re pretty sure nobody else has written about before

• You’ve internalized the “rules” of a space, but have also started to break or bend them intentionally

• You’ve shipped multiple, non-toy projects in the space

• Your instincts can feel when something’s off about the Thing, even if you can’t say why

• You’re contributing in a way that others in the space respect or take seriously

• You can explain complex ideas to a newcomer without overcomplicating or oversimplifying it too badly

Passing CP Bravo takes about a year or so of consistent, deep tinkering (as in binge working on the Thing every other weekend) or 3-6 months of full immersion with consistent feedback loops.

CP Bravo is not for the faint of heart or frail of spirit.

Most people will never pass your Thing’s Checkpoint Bravo because it’s quite honestly a pain to do so. You have to sacrifice time, energy, and not get brain-hijacked by the infinite internet candy store to get there. Plus you’ve got to stay focused long enough to learn all the Thing’s things the hard way.

I’d even go as far to say that people literally working a day job in the Thing may not pass Checkpoint Bravo for years because it takes a lot more effort than just clocking in to get a check.

To be honest, CP Bravo can be a lonely place.

There’s only a small pool of other folks that will relate to your Thing the way that you do (and many of them have other Things to juggle too besides your Thing!).

But CP Bravo’s reward is that you’re now Dangerously Thoughtful.

This means you can now reliably trust your judgment on the Thing.

You’ll still get stuff wrong, but at a rate much lower than most.

If you’re clever and are right alot in general, then I’d wager your judgment will be on par with the average lifer or “expert” with most scenarios related to the Thing.

That’s really powerful.

You should now feel fully empowered to follow the rabbit holes to which your intuition guides.

There are far fewer clever and driven and effective people working on any given important problem than you’d expect.

This is not an exact science.

But.

Any further expertise beyond “Dangerously Thoughtful” probably puts you squarely in the top 20% of that field (yes really… the upper crust is way less competent than you want them to be outside of a few outlier spaces).

Anything between “Dangerously Thoughtful” and “Thoughtfully Dangerous” is just “Thoughtfully Thoughtful”.

This means you now know enough to know how much you don’t know, but you might know something now that nobody knows because you also know Things other than just the new Thing you now know. No way to know really.

(lmao sorry)

And anything short of “Thoughtfully Dangerous” means you’re not really qualified to judge your own Thing-related abilities. If you disagree, you’re probably deluding yourself about the depth of your understanding.

Note that this doesn’t mean you can’t do really good work in the Thing!

Beginners can absolutely stumble across important insights, but being pre-Thoughtfully-Dangerous means you’ll work without grasping the bigger context.

That means more simple mistakes, more frustration, and slower going until you get a few (or many) more reps in.

Anyway,

The cool things are almost always downstream of being “Thoughtfully Dangerous” and “Dangerously Thoughtful”

And both of those are downstream of a lot of deliberate time and practice.

So next time you’re frustrated with your progress, just ask yourself…

Have you put in your hours?