Are We There Yet?

Daily Wisdom #54 (12/15/2024)

Author

Ramsey Shaffer
December 15, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes

I am trying to figure out where I want to be in life, how to get there, and how long that’ll take. And it feels like a decent starting point would be compiling a list of durations it takes to complete various important things. So here it is.

Before I begin, a few disclaimers:

First, I am 27. I have a decent idea of how long some things take (writing a blog, learning some guitar, etc.). But for many longer-horizon things I have no clue yet (becoming world-class at something, living a complete life). I’m still too young to’ve experienced most of the very long things. And other things are too long for any human to fully experience. So I’ve done some cursory research along side my first-hand accounts to fill in the longer, second-hand blanks.

Second, I did not put much scientific rigor into this. Like, at all. Some of it is first-hand (sample size of 1), and some of it’s pulled together from various online sources (shoutout perplexity.ai). Maybe some day I will come back and add more detail. But for now, think of this more like your grandma’s cookbook than NASA launch instructions.

And finally: it seems important to note there are different types of time here. I realized this after the fact. Some things can be done in a straight-shot of chronological hours (ex: reading a book), others need time to breath and digest in-between dedicated sessions (ex: getting in shape). It’ll help to keep that in mind.

Now, without further ado, here’s how long it’ll probably take you to do some of life’s greatest things:

How Long it Takes

To make someone’s day: <5 min — perhaps a cliché start, but meaningful. What makes someone’s day? A random act of kindness does. Things like writing a thank you letter, giving an old friend a call to catch up, buying your S.O. flowers. And it can be even simpler. It only takes a second to give a compliment or smile at someone on the street (bonus points for strangers; humans are inherently good).

To get through a proper morning routine: ~30min — for me at least… the most crucial step is avoiding the snooze button (setting realistic alarms is an art). From there its about 10-15min to shower, brush teeth, wear pants. Another 5 min to jot down a journal entry and some to-do’s, and another 10-15min to make some breakfast and read a few things to get acquainted with the day. Any less and I start to feel underprepared, any more and it becomes puttering. A morning routine is objectively worth planning it into your day if you can. And if you have the luxury, bonus points if you can throw in some exercise or a nice walk outside (that’s more like 60min total)

To run a half-marathon: ~2 hours — A half marathon is 12.5 miles, and 2 hours feels like a pretty good time based on my experience. That’s like 9-10min per mile. Of course this doesn’t include the time it takes to train for a 2 hour half-marathon; that’s more like ~3 months of running a few times per week (building up to 10+ miles per week) if you don’t want to feel like you’re dying when you actually run the race. My favorite resource for this is Hanson’s Half-Marathon Method. Good running shoes are must (I’m a fan of Hokas). [1]

To read a good book: ~7.5 hours — assuming the average book worth reading is about 250 pages (~70K words), and the reading comprehension speed for an average person is about 300wpm, that adds up to about 7.5 hours. My book-readin’ time is typically the 30min before bed, plus the occasional coffee shop read if I’m feeling real zealous. That adds up to about 2 bedside books per month, or roughly 20-30 books per year, which compounds into quite a bit of knowledge and entertainment (and much more rewarding than spending that time watching ~television~).

To write a real good blog post: ~8 hours — I’ve written close to 200 total newsletter/blog posts up to this point. A standard blog post is anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 words (2,500 is ideal, this one is 3,100). Depending on your research appetite, how much you have pre-outlined going in, and your editing rigor, it can be done in a single day if you want. For me it’s usually 1-3 solid sessions. All in all, ~8 hours seems like the right fit for ~2,500 words. It can range from 20 min for a short, straightforward post, to closer to 12 hours for more dedicated, new-territory work. Anything more than 20 and you’re just stalling.

To learn to fly a plane:  ~40 hours — according to the FAA, 40 logged flight hours is the minimum it takes to become a private pilot (included in 6-12 months of training). And according to Reddit, it can take as little as 20 hours to become proficient enough to fly a plane, but truly learning the aircraft can take months or years. I haven’t done this personally, but intend to whenever I’ve got the spare time and change for lessons. Could I land a plane right now if you threw me into the pilot’s seat, untrained? I think maybe. [2]

To get to the moon: ~72 hours — okay I lied in the intro, this one actually is more like NASA launch codes. This isn’t quite first-hand experience, though some people I know think I’m a bit looney (ayo!). The Apollo 8 mission took 2 days, 21 hours, and 8 minutes to reach the moon, while Apollo 17 took 3 days, 14 hours, and 41 minutes. This of course depends on the speed of the craft and the chosen route. Also depends if you mean landing on the moon or just passing by. Also depends if you want to include the time it takes to develop the collective human knowledge and technology required to get there in the first place — that would be more like tens of thousands of years. [3]

To ship a meaningful product or website feature: ~6 weeks — this is another personal experience one. For a software website, building something truly impactful takes anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. The typical agile sprint cycle is 2-weeks, but it seems that’s never long enough to build something cool. Anything longer than about 6 weeks and it becomes hard to see the end from the beginning, and after that you end up spending your time making small tweaks and revisions to the core impactful pieces (The 80/20 principle applies). This was partially inspired by Basecamp’s Shape Up framework. [4]

To make a habit automatic: ~2 months — this math is a combination of first-hand and cursory research. The old adage says it takes roughly 3 weeks for a habit to ‘stick’ (2-4 weeks depending), but with any habit there’s typically a long tail of solidifying it into automaticity. I think this generally goes for both forming new habits and breaking old ones. Can take years for some things — it took me ~6 years of vaping and many quitting attempts to finally cut it out completely. About 3 weeks to not feel physical withdrawals, a couple months to not mentally consider it. Atomic Habits from James Clear outlines the gold-standard procedure for conquering habit formation. [5]

To get in physical shape: about 3-4 months — found this out first-hand a few times in my life after getting thoroughly out-of-shape. This year I started going to the gym again 4x/week (after about a year of inconsistent fitness). I started recording considerable improvements to my strength after about 6 weeks. After about 12 weeks my fitness friends could notice. Roughly 12-16 weeks at 4 hourly sessions of moderate weight training = 50-70 hours. Getting ‘jacked’ is probably more like 6-8 months, and varies considerably based on your starting ‘shape’ plus things like intensity, food, exercise, sleep, etc.

To create a new person:  ~9.5 months — or so I’ve been told. It’s rather crazy to me that you can form an entirely new person in less time than the next few items…

To learn a musical instrument: ~12 months — this is a deceiving question. I know enough to claim I can play a couple instruments, guitar, drums, some piano. You never really ~learn~ an instrument because there’s always more to learn. If by learn you mean picking up a few easy songs, I’d say that takes a few days, maybe 10 hours. To me learning probably means understanding the core concepts enough to scrape by playing most songs someone might suggest at a party, then a year of the type of on-and-off training you get by leaving a guitar in your room and playing it when you’re bored. Talking ‘mastery’ then the canned answer is more like 10,000 hours if you subscribe to Malcolm Gladwell’s work; that equates to 10-15 years of more-than-part-time focus.

To feel at home in a new place: ~18 months — pretty subjective… but after shuffling around a bit, moving into/out of many apartments, it seems it takes between 1-2 years to really feel like somewhere is your ~home~. That’s how long it takes to explore and try enough new places and restaurants to know all the best ones (and all the worst ones), to know your way around without needing your Maps app all the time, and to understand the ebb and flow of traffic. That’s how long it takes to find and become friends with new people and feel good spending most of your time with them. And importantly, it’s feels like how long it takes to stop feeling ‘at home’ when you visit the places previously known as home.

To fall irreversibly in love: ~3 years — and my measuring stick here is whether getting married feels 100% obvious or not. This is more from personal experience than anything, but according to Reddit & Brides magazine (my go-to sources for pretty much anything authoritative!) ~70% of marriages are preceded by a relationship lasting longer than 2 years, with the average pre-marriage relationship somewhere between 3-5 years. For me and my wife, we were together for ~6 years before getting married, spending the first few years in completely different cities, moving in together the last year. After 3 I knew she was the one. I could even speculate that it takes ~20hrs/week x 3 years = ~5,000 hours to get deeply, irreversibly in love. For some it my take less — I have a few hopeless romantic friends who do it weekly. [6]

To build a sellable company: ~5 years — this is a bit harder to calculate. But based on my experience and watching friends do it, anywhere from 3-10 years for your first company seems valid. Depending on the business, it probably takes 1-3 years of iteration to find a product-market fit and a viable business model, another few years of growth to achieve profits worth paying attention to, and maybe even a few extra years on top of that if you don’t get it right the first few iterations. There are many caveats here — the time period, business model, industry, and experience/expertise and network of the founder(s) are all variables in this function. Also depends on what you consider sellable; a distressed sale is easier to accomplish earlier, and big giant sale is harder. Building something that could foreseeably be sold and something that you are actually willing to sell are different things. It also feels like it becomes faster the further into the future we get.

To create a lifelong friendship: ~10 years — this one’s an inbetweener; quantity and quality of time both play a role. There are also different degrees of lifelong friendship; at the lower end are friends you could run into after years being apart and have a wonderful, warm conversation with. On the highest end are childhood friends who stick around into adulthood and beyond — people you can go years apart with and pick back up like you never left. For a 1:1 relationship to truly survive to old-age, it seems that a decade of friendship is really the minimum. After that it’s a different relationship; no conversation topic is forbidden, inside jokes are the best. A decent test of friendship might be whether either person can say something truly insulting to the other without it ruining the relationship.

To become a word-class expert:  10-15 years — this is a rough estimate based on a few sources that claim to have done a lot more resource on the subject than I. First is the famous airport-kiosk book ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell (referenced earlier), which calculates that mastery takes ~10,000 hours.. Second, according to a study in Harvard Business Review, it seems even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years of intense training before they win international competitions. As for me. I am still a few thousand hours short of mastering anything yet. Maybe someday building business or designing products or writing good stuff or playing the drums — I’d venture you need to be at least 30 or 40yo to get there for most people unless you grow up a child prodigy. [7][8]

To live a complete life: maybe 50 years — perhaps controversial. By the books, the average life expectancy in the US is around 78 years (and counting). But I’d argue it doesn’t really take as long to accomplish enough to call your life ‘complete’ — most people aren’t necessarily conquering the world and sewing wild oats past their ‘middle ages’ — the last 20-30 years for an many are spent pacing around an old folks home. Some people live truly amazing, impactful lives and die by the age of 27 (take Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix), and others live amazing lives into their 90s. Others like Sam Altman argue that life is perceivably halfway done by the age of 24. Of course there are still things later that make life meaningful — things like watching your progeny/legacy live on after your prime years. My dad passed away at 46 and he lived one helluva life, and that weighs into my calculations quite a bit. [9]

To see a full technological revolution: 40-70 years — Again, a bit outside of my full first-hand experience. Basing this mainly on research around how long it takes for a major new technology/idea to become widely adopted (which varies significantly and seems to compound). According to a study from ScienceDirect, the average time needed for a technology to achieve ubiquity. My favorite source here is a piece from MIT Press, which say each wave of technological innovation lasts ~40 to 70 years, fundamentally overthrowing the old order in a few decades, with impacts eventually reaching everywhere in society. Van Neistat has a fascinating video about the cadence of revolutions in general, worth a watch. [10][11]

To develop AGI: ~250 years — This one is still up in the air… But judging by speculation about AGI, it seems decently likely that society could achieve general artificial intelligence by the end of this century (if you subscribe to the idea of AGI being ‘achievable’ in the first place). The first ‘computers’ were invented somewhere between 1830 and 1870 by a magnificent fellow named Charles Babbage. I’ll use 1850 as our anchor here. If Elon Musk is right about the universe being a big simulation, I’d be curious how long the other simulations have taken to get to there, and how long it takes in the next iteration… [12]

To build Rome: ~870 years — this one was easy. The city-state of Rome was founded in the 9th century BC, and the Roman Empire reached its peak of expansion in the 2nd century AD, under Emperor Trajan, who died in 117 AD. On the other hand, it took only a day for Rome to fall (476 AD, when the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustus, was deposed by the Germanic king Odoace — plus a few hundred years of slow decline between 117 AD and then). Generally any advanced civilization seems to last a mere ~250 years. The USA is a few years away from its 250-mark, and compare that to the oldest recorded lifespan of 126, it’s really not that long. Spooky. [13]

To get to the next solar system: ~76,000 years — The time it takes to travel to the nearest solar system (Alpha Centauri) is estimated to be over 76,000 years at the speed of humanity’s fastest spacecraft. Which is pretty bonkers. I included it because it highlights just how vast space and time truly are. Keeps me humble. For comparison, modern human brains evolved roughly 100,000 years ago according to a research paper in Science Advances. [14]

Takeaways

If there’s an important takeaway here, I guess it should be perspective.

Life is the mere culmination of thousands of little moments strung together. How you choose to spend each of those little moments has a compounding affect on the rest of them.

What’s most beautiful to me is how short some of life’s more meaningful tasks truly are in the grand scheme. And how quickly you can accomplish things that will leave a lasting impact on the rest of your life.

Compared directly against some of life’s bigger things, the log scale of it all becomes really apparent. Many things appear to naturally cluster into the buckets of hours, months, and decades.

Somethings can be accomplished straight through, others require coming back to the well after time away. It can take an entire lifetime to build a legacy, and a single moment to destroy it.

So with 26 years complete, how will I spend the next 26?

Sources