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You may not know that I have a degree in engineering.
A 2:1 in Manufacturing Engineering with Operations Management now you mention it.
To be honest, I’d pretty much forgotten.
It’s been nearly 20 years since I finished it.
And I’ve not used it since.
The occasional memory of it pops into my head though.
I was talking to my step-daughter Izzie the other day.
About how thing get easier with practice.
You know – we start bad at them and practice ourselves through mediocre onto alright and maybe, one day to good or better.
And into my head popped a little ‘rule’ from my course.
A quick google tells me it’s the “learning rate”.
The version I remembers was that every time you double how many of something you have made, the amount of time, effort, money, etc that goes into it drops by 20%.
To 80% of what it was.
Let’s say you make one wooden box.
It take 100 minutes and £100.
With what you’ve learned from making the first one, the second take 80 minutes and £80.
When you’ve double the total number made again to the fourth one, you’re on 80% of that – 64 minutes and £64.
At box eight it’s 51 minutes and £51.
By the time you’ve made 200,000 you’ve dropped under a pound and a minute per box.
You’ve tweaked and refined the process.
Benefited from economise of scale.
Now, those numbers aren’t hard and fast.
It might be 90%.
Maybe 70.
It might slow or speed up as you go along.
But each time you do it you do it slightly better than last time.
And that compounds over time.
To a significant change.
And, you guessed it, it’s exactly the same with our exercise and healthier eating.
We start inefficient at it.
It’s big pain.
By the time we’ve been doing it for a month, it’s definitely considerably easier.
After a year, it’s pretty much automatic.
But…………
We have to go through those first stages.
The £50 to 100 box steps.
Without that, we’ll never get to the sub £1 ones.
Keeping on going when it’s harder then it feels like it should be, is the only way to make it easier over time.
Much love,
Jon ‘B Eng’ Hall
