If you believe the premise and results of the '10000 hours to expert' research cited by Gladwell's "Outliers", then the obvious conclusion is that time invested is highly correlated with learning.
"Failing fast" and "10,000 hours to expert" are two entirely different kinds of learning. "Failing fast" is a lean startup idea where you are trying to learn, as quickly as possible, whether you have a viable product. You do the least you can do to determine this. After you have learned this one thing, if you find that no one is interested in your product, you are done. Move on to the next idea.
"10,000 hours to expert" is a different idea. Here, the idea is that to become an expert in a specific skill, you have to put in 10,000 hours of 'deliberate' practice.
These are two different kinds of learning. The '10,000' hours approach is not the kind of learning you need or want to do to determine the validity of one business idea. In this case, time invested is not necessarily correlated with learning.
10000 hours are needed to become a master or expert at something. An expert or master is in the top 1% of people who know that skill. But with learning something, anyone could reach the top 10% within 6 months. Dedicate to learning something for 6 months and you reach the top 10%. It doesn't take much time to go from nothing to a decent skill level. It does, however, take a lot of time to go from a decent level to a mastery level.
I'd rather learn from the experience of someone who became an absolute master. Because the lessons of absolute mastery apply across fields.
Who cares about the top 10%? The top 10% isn't worth wasting your time on. Especially if it means you spend 6 months each on 20 different areas and become top 10% in 20 areas.
Much better to find 1 or 2 areas you absolutely love and become top 1%.
Top 1% - Going to the Olympics.
Top 10% - Impress your friends.
While I mostly agree with you there are plenty of times where it's worth it to be in the top 10% (or upper quadrant) but not the top 1%. These are things that are important to be good at but not worth the time to be excellent at. To say it's a waste of time to be in the top 10% is nonsense.
Take driving for example. When I started driving I enrolled in a driving course for several months. Now it's debatable that this course put me in the top 10% but it probably helped to put me above average. I have no ambition to be a race-car or stunt car driver so this is a great trade-off. I believe I'm a safer driver because of it.
Negotiating would be another example. It would make a lot of sense for a lot of people to take a negotiating course or read and practice it for a few months to get good at it in order to be able to negotiate their salary. The payoff of just a few months work could result in tens of thousands of dollars over your whole career. It wouldn't really be beneficial to spend 5-10 years getting your negotiating skills to the top 1% unless you wanted to actually do that for work.
Also the 10,000 hours really depends on if you are actually progressing or not. I think it's pretty debatable whether merely 10,000 hours of driving would put you in the top 1%. It's like the old joke that some people with 20 years of experience actually have one year of experience repeated 20 times.
Yes, you can't be great at everything but I think it's more valuable to great at one thing and good at a lot of things rather than just great at one or two things and mediocre at everything else.
Basically my point is, strive to be in the top 1% for what you want to earn money at or do with your life and then be in the top 10% for other things that either help you with that or benefit you in some way.
