Recently, I have come across many discussion of hacking a certain process or system – achieving significant results in unconventional, often more efficient, ways. One of the observations about the hacker mentality that I particularly like is that “innovation” means not accepting the current norm. I like it because it seems that in the academic community, the term innovation is currently over-used, often without a clear idea of what it actually means.
The hacker approaches to problems, such as learning new skills, are often based on the Pareto principle, often referred to the 80/20 rule, which has been discussed by many authors (e.g. Tim Ferriss in his hugely popular “The 4-Hour Workweek
“). The idea is that 20% of work produces 80% of the results, so in principle, one can become fairly proficient, or al least well above average, in a certain activity (e.g. speaking a foreign language, painting, taking photos, playing a musical instrument, etc.) in a relatively short amount of time.
The idea of hacking the life-long learning is appealing, but I cannot help but think that something is missing if the “hacker mentality” is taken at face value. I just saw a documentary about top sushi chefs in Japan called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” and I think there is no shortcut to the level of excellence comparable to that, which requires an apprentice chef to work on less important tasks for ten years before he is allowed to cook rice. It seems that the 99-th percentile is infinitely far from the Pareto’s 80-th, and the price for this part of the journey is very high, but perhaps, you do get what you pay for.
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