Poker players understand this implicitly. They refer to marginal but cumulatively significant errors as "leaks" and good players invest enormous effort in identifying and plugging their leaks. While at the highest level poker requires some very sophisticated skills, the journey from novice to competent professional is mainly one of diligently plugging leaks.
Poker is unusual in being so strongly a game of incomplete information. A top professional may only have a few percent advantage over a complete novice, so skill is rarely evident in the short term. Identifying leaks is painstaking in poker because even in hindsight you are rarely sure of the right way to play a hand. Even over a long session at the tables, a player can do everything right but lose, or play terribly but walk away with bulging pockets.
I think that poker theory has a great deal of relevance to entrepreneurs. The mental fortitude required to invest money in an uncertain outcome based on partial knowledge is an overwhelmingly important skill in both.
But isn't this also a statement that the skill of a poker player and the skill of a programmer are utterly different.
Two skill types:
A. Doing something fairly simple perfectly, plugging even the smallest mistakes.
B. Doing something that is very, very difficult as well as you can - ie, doing it at all. Doing your best to simplify situations that have a potential to become even more complex while still managing great complexity and accepting that you will make mistakes (and guarding against and finding those mistakes).
Notice, the difference between a very good programmer and very bad programmer is absolutely not a few percentage points. Poke and music are each more like skill A whereas programming is more like skill B (though these classifications are of course quite rough).
It seems like if we aren't distinguishing the skill type here, we will wind-up just tossing out vague cliches. "Don't mistakes, dude".
Poker is unusual in being so strongly a game of incomplete information. A top professional may only have a few percent advantage over a complete novice, so skill is rarely evident in the short term. Identifying leaks is painstaking in poker because even in hindsight you are rarely sure of the right way to play a hand. Even over a long session at the tables, a player can do everything right but lose, or play terribly but walk away with bulging pockets.
I think that poker theory has a great deal of relevance to entrepreneurs. The mental fortitude required to invest money in an uncertain outcome based on partial knowledge is an overwhelmingly important skill in both.