Want to Achieve Excellence with Your Online Conversions? Follow the “Ten Thousand Hour Rule”
Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, in his latest book ‘Outliers: The Story Of Success’, writes that there is no such thing as “instant,” “overnight” success or a “lucky” break. (Read an extract of Gladwell’s book here)
Truly successful people, Gladwell says, are not necessarily so because they are the smartest, strongest, or wealthiest, although these things can enter the picture somewhere along the way.
Real winners are more often than not the “happy victims of fortuitous circumstance.” Born in the right place at the right time, and provided with the exact correct recipe of 1. Opportunity and 2. Persistence, anyone who is merely smart enough can break through that invisible barrier and truly excel.
But – and this is crucial for us – with everything else being equal, once you have enough ability, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another and creates true ‘outliers’ is how hard he or she works.
That’s it: hard, hard work.
According to Gladwell’s research findings, excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
OK, so how does this relate to achieving excellence with your online conversions?
The way I see it, it’s all about an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement by constantly running web page experiments. For online marketers, “ten thousand hours” is about 40 hours a week over 5 years for one person or over 2.5 years for two. That’s how you achieve excellence.
Improving your conversion rate is not a one-time-wonder web design or re-design and it’s not a one-time experiment either but a coordinated effort to develop a culture of improvement within a company.
(At WiderFunnel we call this the Kaizen Method)
December 15th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Well, according to people who attended Gladwell’s $550 conference here in Montreal last week, it all came down to “Practice makes perfect”. Some participants thought they didn’t need to shed that kind of money to know that…
December 15th, 2008 at 9:46 am
We could all save a lot of money if we’d just listen to our Moms, hey Jacques?
December 25th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
The 10,000 hour rule or the idea of continuous improvement/testing gives you a sense of what one needs to invest in testing/conversion optimization if they want to get serious about it. Even if done in house 10,000 hours is a substantial commitment of resources ($).
This fact may scare away a number of people who want to get into testing.
The investment may be large, but when done properly the payoff should far exceed the costs.
December 25th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
John, you are so right: doing anything well takes time and commitment.
With regards to CRO, companies have a choice to either commit to continuous improvement internally or outsource the services to experts. Both options have pro’s and con’s as well as costs associated but, if “time is money” then outsourcing delivers better results faster that going alone.
January 12th, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Jian Ghomeshi interviewed Paul McCartney on The Q a while ago and asked him about this. Paul had read Gladwell's 10,000 rule as he applied it to the Beatles and responded politely: "Well Jian, I can can tell you there were a lot of bands doing the same hours as us in Hamburg, and you sure haven't heard of them!" But I get what you're saying: in this age of ADD Twitter Marketers, it's worth staying the course a while to get something out of it.
January 12th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Today's "shiny object" is always tempting, e.g., why test landing pages when you can "invest" time on Twitter and Facebook?
Thanks for stopping by, Bryan. Always good to hear from you.