The Rule of 100 Hours: How to quickly become competent in any skill

I think we’ve all heard the saying that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in a field of knowledge or a skill. For anyone working in a profession, that translates to anywhere between roughly 5 and 10 years of work experience when accounting for time inefficiencies of a job.

But I think it’s safe to say that there is a lot of ground that resides in the space between being completely inexperienced and being an expert, and when we set our ambitions high with the intention of accomplishing major life goals, the no-mans-land between novice and expert is where a lot of hopes, dreams, and ambitions die.

As humans we have a tendency to overestimate what we can achieve in the short term, while grossly underestimating what we can achieve in the long term through consistency and the compounding effects of our efforts.

When we begin something new and challenging, we are quickly humbled by the reality of the struggle that lies before us, and in short order we reevaluate our decision to try something new and we give up. How many times in your life have you ever tried to start a business, or a weight loss journey, maybe tried to learn a new skill like a foreign language? How many times did you quit?

Leveraging Human Nature to Our Advantage

The human brain is wired to pursue quick and easily attainable wins. This makes perfect sense considering that for most of our existence instant gratification was more often about survival than it was about living the good life. Focusing on the “here” and “now” is ingrained in our primal brain just as it is for all other animals. Acting on impulse was how we avoided hunger and danger.

Humans do have a unique ability to suppress impulses and urges to pursue longer term goals, but it requires extreme focus and high-order thinking.

But what if we can use our propensity for instant gratification, or quick wins, to our advantage? What if we can find a way to make substantial progress in certain areas of life, like developing a new skill or attaining more knowledge, by tapping into our inclinations to attain quick and easy success? Perhaps we will not become among the top tier 1% of experts in that particular area, but by shrinking the scale of our ambitions we can leverage our human nature to make significant progress.

The Rule of 100 Hours

This is where the rule of 100 hours comes into play. This rule states that by committing to 100 hours of deliberate focus, a person can become competent enough in a field of knowledge or skill to create a tangible impact on their life. Or another way of saying it, is that 100 hours of dedicated focus will place a person in the top 5% of the population when it comes to being competent in that particular skill.

The law of diminishing returns dictates that the first 100 hours of competency development will be where the most gains are to be made. This means that while we may not have the time, energy, or desire to put in the 10,000 hours of work to become a 1% expert who has perfected their craft, putting in a considerably shorter amount of time can still get us mostly there in a meaningful way.

The key to the 100 hour rule, is “deliberate focus.”

What do I mean by this?

The Breakdown

Aimlessly doing something by and of itself will not produce the results we are looking for. Instead we must strategically select a subset of small and incrementally achievable skills that we must acquire to see the desired results. Let’s call these subsets “micro-components.”

As mentioned before, we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term, oftentimes leading to disappointment and quitting once we fail catastrophically in our initial attempts. By breaking large aspirations into micro-components, we effectively lower the bar, and reduce the scope of our efforts into manageable objectives that we actually can achieve in the short term.

It’s important to understand that not all micro-components are equal. Some small skills will carry more weight than other skills, so when we break a large aspiration down into its sub parts, we want to strategically select the minority of sub-skills which produce the majority of results. In other words, which small handful of micro-components will yield the results needed to separate you from the pack and place you into the upper 5% of a particular category?

To identify these competency micro-components, one must perform an assessment (quantitative if possible, but if not, then qualitative) to determine which components of a broader skill are of the highest value and possessed by the fewest amount of people. Once this is done, the Rule of 100 Hours can be applied.

Below is generally how the Rule of 100 Hours works…

1. Break down new skill into smallest micro-components

2. Identify the few of those micro-components that will yield the greatest return on time invested

3. Dedicate 100 hours of focus to mastering each of those small micro-components

4. Combine micro-components together to achieve 80% skill competency

The power of focusing on these incrementally small micro-components is that we align the skill development process with our natural inclination to strive for quick and easy victories. By focusing on the small, and not the large, we can set ourselves down a path of attainable wins which seem insignificant by themselves, but when compounded together produce exponential results which 95% of the population cannot replicate.

The psychology behind this is that success, no matter how big or small, triggers our reward centers to produce dopamine, which is a hormone and neurotransmitter than makes us want more of that success, and motivates us to continue forward. Rather than pursuing that one massive hit of dopamine by attempting to accomplish something extraordinary, we instead benefit from smaller more measured dopamine spikes that are just enough to keep us motivated.

Now that we are clear on setting small, easily attainable goals which are individually insignificant, let’s discuss a practical method that we can use to reliably pursue said goals…

20-Minutes to Change Your Life

Research suggests that the average adult’s optimal attention span is about 20 minutes. This is about how long most of us can spend on a task in an undistracted state. Of course we are not limited to only 20 minutes of focus, as it is also possible to enter into a flow state where hours of concentrated focus can seem to pass by in minutes. However, for the sake of this article I am going to assume that most people are both distracted with life and crunched for time. So in my estimation, a 20 minute time window is a much more practical time block that people can work with to fit into their daily schedules.

In sticking with the Rule of 100, dedicating a mere 20 minutes of focused practice per day will result in a total of 100 hours in less than a year. I personally like to focus on training 3 micro-skills at once where I can dedicate 20 minutes to each, totaling 1-hour of focused practice each day. You can do more or less than 3 micro-skills at a time depending on how much time you have to dedicate to it. However, given that the average American spends two hours a day watching TV and six hours a day on their phones, I find that 20 minutes here and there to practice 3 or so skills each day is very feasible.

By limiting myself to 20 minutes for each micro-component, I prevent myself from losing interest due to the monotony of staying on the same aspect for extended periods of time, and instead I introduce variety into my skill development program which plays to the favor of my challenged attention span.

By breaking down our biggest goals and aspirations into their smallest parts, identifying the most important of those small parts, and committing 20 minutes per day to each of those small parts, we shrink the scale of our efforts into something that is much more easily attainable while continuing to strive for large aspirations. We hack the system of life by leveraging our shortened attention spans and desire for instant gratification in a way that leads to long term success.

Time to Level Up

My question for you is, what is something that you’ve always wanted to learn or become good at? Perhaps there’s a skill that you could learn which you know will make you excel in your job, become a better salesperson, a better public speaker, a faster reader. Or perhaps there's something completely new and different that you want to pursue like learning how to code or play a musical instrument, but felt intimidated by the time commitment and the sheer amount of work it'll take to achieve it.

I challenge you to dedicate a minimum of 20 minutes every day to practicing something, and stick to it for a year. I guarantee that by the end of it you will have advanced enough to possess a skill set, or base of knowledge, that the overwhelming majority of the global population will never achieve in their lifetimes.

I personally have committed to learning Portuguese. Over the past couple of years I’ve been aimlessly learning new words and phrases but I’ve not had much structure behind my learning. More recently I’ve committed to spending 20 minutes per day studying through a structured online course to learn new phrases, another 20 minutes reviewing flashcards to improve my vocabulary, and an additional 20 minutes each day listening to Portuguese language music and TV to improve my active listening skills.

This is my version of breaking down the challenge of learning a new language into smaller components; new phrases, vocabulary, and listening. Over the course of a year I will have completed 100 hours of each for a total of 300 hours of learning time. I’m sure this is not the quickest path to fluency but if the Rule of 100 hours holds true, I will at least have more competency than 95% of non-native speakers who have attempted to learn the language as an adult.

Whatever you do, I'd like to remind you that time is of the essence and our time on earth is limited. Many people go to their graves never having even attempted to reach their full potential. This does not have to be the case for you, especially since you now have the Rule of 100 Hours on your side.

It's time to level up by strategically tapping into our own nature and leveraging it to our advantage.