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As the great Allen Iverson said: “We talkin' about practice.”
Like Iverson, we sometimes forget the value of sheer repetition.
Mastery in any craft looks effortless. But that effortlessness — a Steph Curry game winning 3pt shot or a CEO handling a crisis — is extremely effortful.
What separates the exceptional from the good isn't talent alone — it's the deliberate accumulation of experience through practice. As an investor, you quickly realize that the founders and operators who consistently outperform are those who maximize their "reps."
Michael Jordan is famously one of the hardest-working people ever. He was maniacal about practice, saying:
I practice as if I’m playing the game, so when the moment comes in the game, it’s not new to me…when you get to that moment, you don’t have to think. Instinctively, things happen. Work ethic eliminates fear, so if you put forth the work then what are you fearing?
The best have "pre-practiced" their current situation through previous startups, side projects, or related industry experience. They've accumulated reps that make their execution look effortless, even when solving extraordinarily difficult problems.
Seek out reps
When you do something for the first time, you’ll be bad. You’ll make mistakes and think “that was obvious, how did I miss that?” but it happens. When we’re learning, we don’t know what we don’t know.
That's why you should always seek more reps.
When I started at Bain, my first project lasted three months. I learned a ton, but by the end, I was dying to move on to my next client.
Why? I wanted a blank slate to apply my learnings and avoid the same mistakes.
My peers with six or twelve month projects with the same client didn’t have that luxury. They had to wait 2-4 times as long to get that chance!
I then deliberately moved into Bain’s Private Equity Group, where projects were just two to four weeks. Instead of one client in a three-month cycle, I had 3-6. I upped my iterations by 3-6x!
It was a learning accelerator.
But maximizing your reps isn't just about finding opportunities. It's also about having the courage to be a beginner again.
Don’t be afraid to suck
Keep a high bar, but don’t be afraid to suck.
If you don’t look back on yourself six months or a year ago and feel embarrassed, you’re not moving fast enough. Learning happens through mistakes. As long as you don’t repeat them, you’ll keep moving forward.
Every mistake is earned insight. So don’t be afraid to make them.
Once you've embraced a growth mindset, the next challenge is finding an environment that accelerates rather than impedes your progress.
Find the right environment
A company’s velocity is rarely determined by individual talent alone. It is determined by the collective momentum of the team.
Find those environments and stick with them. Sarah Guo said in a recent post:
Pace is infectious. Fast people energize each other and develop shared intuition about priorities. I've watched small teams ship quickly, get user feedback, incorporate it rapidly, and build momentum that seemed almost unstoppable. Group norms are strong, and team oriented folks never want to be the bottleneck. Slow people frustrate fast people.
Slow people frustrate fast people, and fast people often frustrate slow people. If you’re in an environment full of slow people and try to work fast, you’ll face organ rejection.
When you combine the right mindset with the right environment, something special happens.
He (or she) who gets more reps will win
Reps compound.
The more work you put in, the more you learn. That work and learning compound over time.
Mathematician Richard Hamming said it best1:
What Bode was saying was this: ‘Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.’ Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity—it is very much like compound interest[…]Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
The true power of reps is revealed not in days or weeks, but in years and decades.
Play longer games
The effects of compounding are more powerful the longer the duration. If you have a longer time horizon than your competition, you’ll almost assuredly win.
Short-term thinking leads to short-term results. Grit your teeth and get those extra reps. They pay off in the long run.
The founders who think in decade-long time horizons make different decisions than those optimizing for the next funding round. They invest in hard technical problems others avoid. They make short-term sacrifices for long-term advantages.
Your competitive advantage isn't just getting more reps for reps sake—it's staying in the game long enough for those reps to compound.