The Law Of 100

Why the 10,000 hour rule is no longer relevant.

Most of us associate the 10,000-hour rule with Malcolm Gladwell, who talked about it extensively in his book Outliers.

The 10,000 rule basically states that if we work at something for 10,000 hours, we become an expert.

Outliers was based on research from two incredible scientists, Anders Ericsson and Bill Chase.

They started their work when they began a study as PhD students in 1976.

Now bear with me here.

Their study was actually based on a previous experiment carried out in 1929, where two students tried to memorise random digits when shown them at a rate of one per second.

They decided to replicate this experiment, and what they discovered, was that after 100 attempts, a random undergraduate became the best in the world at memorising random digits.

Over their careers, they went on to run many experiments and Ericsson wrote over 100 papers on deliberate practice.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized this research with his book.

I have never been a big fan of 10,000 hours. The only thing I have spent 10,000 hours on is playing Overwatch.

But remember when I said above that they discovered that a random student became the best in the world at memorising random numbers, after just 100 attempts?

They also discovered on numerous occasions, that 100 goes at anything made you the best at that skill.

Ok, maybe not as simple as that. If you have 100 strokes at golf you are not going to be Tiger Woods, that is too broad. It’s about choosing a very specific skill, and spending deliberate time, and practising it over, and over again.

Let’s turn this back to golf. Instead of 100 strokes, you spend 100 hours on a putting green, you would absolutely be up there with the best.

If you write a blog, then you write 100 posts, if you are a YouTuber, then you create a 100 videos.

The key thing is repetition.

You need to be consistent and get good at doing the same thing over, and over again… a 100 times in fact.

I recently had a customer contact me and say ‘Dan, I have tried Renegade Email and I can’t get customers to buy anything’.

I said ‘Send me 30 random emails from the last 6 months and I will take a look and see if I can help’.

Embarrassed they said ‘I have only sent 18’.

Renegade Email is about writing one email a day.

I have been helping people online for nearly 20 years now, and the number one reason I see people fail is because they stop doing the work.

While they are excited about the project, doing the research, designing the site, exploring social media, etc. they can put in an almost infinite amount of hours.

When it comes to comes to actually doing the cold, hard, slog of what it is that will make their business tick, suddenly life gets in the way.

I, myself, am 100% guilty of this. I do it all the time. I think it is the natural fear of failure that causes our brains to make excuses.

Or maybe it is the realisation that all our focus must now be on one thing to get it to work, and we can now no longer go off on a tangent, I don’t know.

I do know, that we are all terrible at consistently doing the same thing 100 times without giving up.

I have no great answer for you here. There are lots of books on building habits, there are great apps to help you tick off your daily habits, I think this is an individual struggle.

But remember, almost no great content content creator made it big overnight, and if you want to make this work you have to commit to doing it 100 times before you give up, or just don’t start it in the first place.

I saw this great infographic this morning from the makers of SketchWow (my favourite tool for creating diagrams), which made me write this post.

If you like this article then please hit the like and share below. It really motivates me to keep on posting.