HyperFocus 🎯

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

Pinned again

[John Rush @johnrushx]

I'm risking being unfollowed or disliked for saying the following, but I really wanna help, so I'll still proceed:

90% of founders who have never had a successful product think their problem is marketing.
But that's not the case.

If the product is good, you don't need much marketing. You bring 100 users (very few fail to do this) using non-scalable random methods, and they fall in love with the product, bring their friends, and share it on social media.

The next users brought by them do the same; they bring their friends and share it on social media.

Ofc, there are cases, where one may drive users to "bad" products just by having strong marketing skills and distribution. But these days, I rarely see it work in SaaS. It may work in enterprise software but not in SMB SaaS.

I have launched average products myself, and despite my marketing and distribution, they failed. Every single time. Not even one exception,

So, if you have built multiple SaaS products in the past and one of them succeeded. I advise you to read my following essay with an open mind, turn off the defense and the "I failed because I did little marketing" and try to apply it. Maybe I'm wrong, but at least you'll try something new and see if it works or not.

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@femalenatured funny i do that with people when networking

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@YOHAMI @KmaFr_ Love Island USA https://t.co/JYdcMG5Hlc

[Jason Applebaum @Jason______A]

Such a false statement…. Work 24/7 on your own business to make 100k with an insane amount of risk in going to zero or work 9-5 on someone else’s business to make 250k with almost no risk of going to zero

Always choosing 9-5 for 250k

[Farza 🇵🇰🇺🇸 @FarzaTV]

Watch me control my computer with just my voice. This is the future of operating systems.

No hands.

GPT-Realtime 2.0 is very, very underrated.

Demo:

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@YOHAMI what about pattern recreation

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@YOHAMI yo

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@YOHAMI okay okay thx!

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@YOHAMI okay I see, for me only 2 women helped me see things i didn't see - and i wasn't even in a relationship with them - so yeah not all mirrors then

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@YOHAMI oh that's it? why people make it sound like it's some mystical powerful stuff that only women get

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@YOHAMI you scaled your knowledge, great!

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it.

Chess works that way. Most things do not.

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read.

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different.

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore.

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them.

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career.

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.

Match quality matters more than head start.

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose.

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath.

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was.

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in.

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@FrenchOG3 True! A former manager & coo was shocked when i said I quit - saying it's coming from nowhere and that the company had big plans and goals etc- I said "im a professional so I do my job regardless". But i decided to pursue other opportunities more aligned with what I want.

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@FrenchOG3 masterclass- well written

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@FrenchOG3 That too, it happens with guys too - Im noticing I can't be friends long term with people with low self esteem - like if everytime I cheer them up they can't assume the win and be cool, they always default to talking like victims/losers - it brings the energy down

[Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!) @visakanv]

A thing my ex-boss got me to meditate on (not literally, but I think about it a lot) is that product-market fit heals and forgives almost everything. The highest order bit is almost the only thing that matters by a long shot, to a dramatic and unintuitive degree

[HyperFocus 🎯 @hyp3rfocus]

@FrenchOG3 im too lazy to entertain a broad that turned me off OR that wants to change me - she needs to be exceptional for me to consider the ROI of following up / sticking around - either way there are more interesting things to do like dancing with strangers

[Goldie @dezgoldie]

This is the only advice you’ll ever need. Gas pedal.