Bezos: Business ideas are like baseball, except you get 1000 runs for a home run
Jeff Bezos had an interesting quote I read a few months back.
“We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs,” Bezos wrote.
“The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”
That statement really made an impression on me, not because of any possible business contexts per se, but simply for how true it is across a wide number of fields.
Getting better at my day job
10 years ago when I was trying to get better at software development I had a similar experience. I was a bit of a crazy person. I wanted to work at it 100 hours a week. When I got home from work I’d eat something, sleep for 30 minutes and then be up at all hours of the night practicing.
I’d practice hard algorithms, I’d practice simple HTML/CSS/Javascript challenges that I created, just so that I could get faster. It worked too because I’d start on a hard challenge, with complex database queries…