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How Repetition Is the Father Of Learning
It takes 10,000 iterations to reach mastery
After the merger of Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company in 1998, they hired the legendary designer Paula Scher to design a new logo for them.
She asked to charge $1.5 million for the logo and they agreed.
In their first meeting, Paula drew what became the iconic Citi logo on a napkin.
As Paula was about to get up and leave the room, someone from the Citi team asked:
“How can it be that it’s done in a second?”
She replied:
“It’s done in a second and 34 years. It’s done in one second and every experience and everything that’s in my head. It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”
Takeaway
The logo poured out of her mind in a few seconds on a napkin because Paula had been filling up her head with design ideas, theories, practices, principles, and everything in between for 34 years straight.
Paula was practicing and applying those ideas repeatedly in her day-to-day work for decades up till that point.
According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours to master a craft.
