You join a new firm and immediately think, “Wow, these people are freakin’ geniuses.” And it seems that way because you’ve just entered a different world, a world in which you’re a newborn. You observe these people, what they do, how they think, and you accept it all as your new religion. You use the same lingo, adopt the same mannerisms and start to think the way they think.

Then four, five or six months later, it all slows down. Now, you’re essentially one of ‘them’… and they don’t seem like geniuses anymore. In psych-speak, you’ve hit a learning plateau. You’ve learnt 80% of what there is to learn (at that particular firm) and you’ve realised these geniuses are just like everyone else; they only seemed like geniuses because they knew something unique.

With sports, music, and other discrete skills, smashing through the learning plateau separates the hobbyists from the champions. But entrepreneurship isn’t a discrete skill; it’s a collection of many discrete skills. And from my observations, entrepreneurs are rarely specialists; they become masters of many domains, even if originally they specialised in one. So, what does this mean?

The significance is as follows: The effort to move from 80% to 85% competence for a particular skill, could reasonably get you from 0% to 80% in a new skill. So, especially for an entrepreneur, it can be much more fruitful to string learning curves together (compared to smashing through a plateau). This would suggest you’d learn much more by joining new companies every 6 to 12 months, unless your environment (at the same firm) is constantly changing.

This won’t be a particularly popular view, but technically I think it has merit. Sure the process of becoming an expert is educational in itself, but that last 20% of competency is so easily lost once you change focus (and it requires so much more effort), that for future entrepreneurship, it rarely paves the road to success.