Work has a simple deal. Input hours. Output work. Simple, right?
Not so fast. Working as a product manager in tech taught me one rule. Output doesn't matter. Outcome does. Let me explain.
Output is what you make. Outcome is the impact. What the business gets because of your work. Usually a number on a dashboard.
A young baker starts at 4 a.m. It's his first week. By the time he opens the door, the shelves are full. 200 baguettes. Flour up to his elbows.
Then a storm hits. The streets go empty. Nobody walks in.
The output is huge. The outcome is zero. In business, that's a problem. Someone is paying for all that work. They don't pay for full shelves. They pay for bread that sells. That's the rule.
It's a good rule at work. The problem is I took it everywhere. Before starting anything, I'd ask: what's the outcome? If the answer was small, I didn't start.
That's where the rule breaks.
When you're learning something new, output comes first. There's no way around it. Your first article gets four views. Two of them are you. The other two are your mom. By the company rule, that's a failure. No readers. No likes. No outcome.
But something did change. You wrote a little faster. You caught a mistake you'd have missed last week. The next one came easier. That's an outcome too. It happened inside you. The one out there comes later.
That's why learning anything feels so boring. A sport, an instrument, a skill. You're waiting for the outcome out there, and it's slow.
So here's a better rule. Josh Kaufman wrote a whole book on this. His number: about twenty hours of focused practice to go from knowing nothing to decent. Not great. Decent. Those twenty hours are pure output. The outcome can wait until they're done.
Go back to the baker. Nobody walked in today. But his last baguette came out better than his first.
The shop stayed empty. The baker got better.