Compressing ten years into six months

The other day I ran across a line from Peter Thiel saying that if you have a plan for where you'd like to be in ten years, ask yourself if you could get there in six months.

I don't think he's simply saying see if you can do everything 20 times faster. If you estimate something will take ten days, it probably will take more than half a day. We're better at estimating things on the scale of days than on the scale of years.

If you expect to finish a project in ten days, you're probably going to go about it the way you've approached similar projects before. There's not a lot of time for other options. But there are a lot of ways to go about a decade-long project.

Since Thiel is well known for being skeptical of college education, I imagine one of the things he had in mind was starting a company in six months rather than going to college, getting an entry level job, then leaving to start your company.

As I wrote in an earlier post, some things can't be done slowly.

Some projects can only be done so slowly. If you send up a rocket at half of escape velocity, it's not going to take twice as long to get where you want it to go. It's going to take infinitely longer.

Some projects have to be done quickly if they are going to be done at all. Software projects are usually like this. If a software project is expected to take two years, I bet it'll take five, if it's not cancelled before then. You have to deliver software faster than the requirements change. Of course this isn't unique to software. To be successful, you have to deliver any project before your motivation or your opportunity go away.