Why skills and experience aren’t enough to get results
What do you do when years of experience and proven skills are not enough?
The rain has been unrelenting in Sydney lately. Days and days of belting rain like I’ve never seen. My young son’s soccer season was supposed to start a few weeks ago and it looks like this Saturday, for the third week in a row, will be a washout.
It’s frustrating because there’s nothing you can do about it. But at least our home is dry. Not too far away, whole towns have been flooded and homes destroyed.
It reminds me that nature is big and brutal. And we humans, with our busy schedules and our clever ideas, are no match for the power and scale of the elements.
Day after day of continuous, pounding, unstoppable rain has drenched the earth and flooded the streets and still, it keeps pouring.
And not to trivialise these events, because the destruction is real, but when you look at what’s happened, it’s the sheer volume of water that has made the impact. It’s not like a bushfire that consumes everything in its path. And it’s not like an earthquake that tears the earth apart in one powerful moment.
This rain demonstrates the impact of a massive, continuous volume of effort.
With my own writing, I’m still working on building up the volume and consistency. I know I have some good skills and experience to share, but that alone is not enough to make an impact.
It’s frustrating because I just want to grow and expand and extend my reach, but the truth is there is no shortcut and you’ve really got to deliver volume. Which is what I’m trying to do, in amongst looking after my family and doing work for clients and all the other stuff that goes on in life.
So here I wanted to share a cool concept I learned from Alex Hermozi which helps explain why skills and experience are simply not enough and what you need to do to amplify them so you can grow bigger, faster, and better.
The missing element is volume
Just do more.
Yes, skills and quality matter. But you will not get quality until you’ve put in enough work.
Likewise, it doesn’t matter so much how many years you’ve been doing it. What matters is how much work you got done in those years.
As Alex Hormozi put it:
VOLUME x SKILL x TIME = THROUGHPUT
In other words, it’s the combination of these three elements, multiplied, that leads to growth. And the big insight here is that most people underestimate the importance of volume.
It’s just not enough to have skills and experience.
Whatever you’re doing, start doing more of it
Increase your VOLUME. You need to do the thing enough times to get a spread of results. To see the range of outcomes, variations and possibilities.
Malcolm Gladwell said you need to put in 10,000 hours. Apparently, for the Beatles, it was the 10,000+ hours they spent on stage, doing small gigs in Germany that set them apart from the rest of the bands at the time.
Yes, they were skilled musicians, but the sheer volume of hours they put in, multiplied their results.
Obviously the more you do, the better you get. And the better you get, the more you want to do. So they both feed each other.
Volume builds muscle memory and instinct and taste
If you ask a regular person to pick the five best bananas from the fruit shop display, they’ll probably shrug and pick five random bananas.
But if you ask a banana farmer they might instantly tell you the whole table is worthless.
Why? Because they look at thousands of bananas every single day. They know what good looks like. The best they ever saw was seven years ago. That was a bumper crop. These bananas do not compare.
How do they know?
They have the volume. They’ve seen more bananas this week than most humans ever will in their lifetime.
With volume comes pattern recognition and nuance.
To a novice, every banana looks the same: yellow.
But an expert sees more: shape, texture, colour, firmness, etc. Because they’ve seen more.
Until you’ve done enough volume, every banana looks the same.
As you increase volume, you multiply your skills. Even if your skill level is high to begin with, a low volume of experience means a low multiplier of those skills.
This would be true of any university graduate. They have all the skills and knowledge, but very limited experience (volume) actually applying those skills.
1 x 10 = 10
2 x 10 = 20
6 x 10 = 60
For any given skill set, more volume will multiply the results.
After volume, it’s consistency over time
The final piece is TIME.
More work, at a high level, is good.
But more work at a high level, sustained over a long period of time leads to mastery.
This is because the volume of work and the increasing skills compound over time.
The longer you keep it up, the more they compound.
In this way, the three elements, volume, skill and time feed each other.
That part’s probably pretty obvious. It makes sense that the longer you do something, the better results you’d get.
One thing to multiply your results
We all work hard to build up our skills. And hopefully, after some time, we would all see a good return on that effort.
This is pretty obvious and it’s what most of us are striving to achieve.
Which is why I thought this insight from Alex was so valuable.
Everyone has skills and everyone has experience. But it’s that extra piece, VOLUME, that takes things to another level.
VOLUME x SKILL x TIME = THROUGHPUT
By simply increasing your output over time, you maximise the value of your skills and maximise the outcome too.
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