Starcraft term. APM is how many clicks and keystrokes a player gets off per minute, and the top pros run several hundred. Pedro borrowed it for work:
Actions per minute, specially in the AI age, is incredibly important.
400 APM at 60% efficiency beats 100 APM at 90% efficiency all day every day.
If you post more than other people, meet more people, launch more often, create more products, it’s impossible to fail.
Learned this the hard way, and in 3 months of 10x’ing my output we are already reaping more rewards than I ever imagined.
The math in the middle line is the point. 400 at 60% is 240 good actions, 100 at 90% is 90. The sloppy fast player still gets almost three times as much done. And that’s before you count that the fast player gets more feedback, so their efficiency goes up too.
This is the social version of Dan Luu’s velocity argument in more-ambitious-software. There it was “getting faster changes which things are worth doing.” Here it’s posts, meetings, and launches instead of builds, but same shape: the person doing ten tries gets to the one that works, and the person polishing one try never finds out.
The “impossible to fail” bit is overstated, but I think the direction is right. Most of the things I haven’t shipped weren’t blocked on quality. They were blocked on me not pulling the trigger. A long tail of you-can-just-do-things.
Something to watch: 60% efficiency on a tweet is fine, 60% on a prod deploy is not. The claim holds where the cost of a miss is low and the feedback is quick. That’s most of marketing and most side projects, and increasingly most code, now that the models make a retry cheap.