When we are trying to do something new, often the greatest challenge we face is our own fickle attention or desire to quit when it becomes too challenging or boring. Think about the last new skill or hobby you tried to learn and actually stuck with versus the ones you dropped. The problem is that in our modern world of more or less infinite access to knowledge and resources online to learn something, we can often become overwhelmed with choice and find it difficult to stick with one thing. The 100 challenge is a way to combat that problem and improve yourself at the same time.
Instead of picking up something new and giving it a try for a while then dropping it, the 100 challenge states that you should not start something new unless you are willing to commit to doing it 100 times. What the 100 times means can depend upon what you’re trying to do, it may mean drawing for an hour every day for 100 days. Or it may mean going for a 5km run 100 times. The point is that you commit to putting in the work 100 times before giving up and moving on.
The benefits of this challenge are that it makes it easier to focus on what you’re trying to do, knowing that you’ve made this commitment and cannot just drop it when it gets tough should make you more selective about what you start. In addition, doing something 100 times is well past the initial phase of giving it a try, so you are likely to actually progress quite well in the given skill by the time you complete the challenge. Take running, if you commit to a run every morning for 100 days, that is over three months of daily running by the time the challenge is complete. Three months of daily exercise can make a significant difference in our health, which is obviously a good thing.
Taking the time to perform the new skill also allows you to move beyond the early stages of enjoying it and into the next stage where you get to see if it is really for you. If at the end of the challenge you don’t want to continue, then you can drop it knowing that you gave it a good effort and probably improved yourself in that time. If you do decide to keep going then you now know that you enjoy it and have got 100 practices under your belt.
If you were starting a creative project then the 100 practices might be simply producing 100 pieces in whatever medium you’re working. An artist may produce 100 paintings, or a writer 100 stories. In truth that is what I am doing with my write every day challenge. I have committed to at least 100 days of writing, and although I have missed many of them, I am making up for those by writing more on the other days. The end result will not be until I have 100 short essays written, at which point I expect my writing to have improved a lot over my first work. At the very least, I will have a very large volume of writing to draw from with future work, notes and also to use as samples for paid work (hopefully).
There is a study1 on practising creative work where a selection of art students was split into two groups. The first group were told they would be graded on the total amount of sculptures2 that they produced, the more the better. The second group were told that they would only be graded on one single piece that they could work on the whole time. In short, they were testing quantity versus quality. At the end of the project, they found that the students who were in the quantity group had produced higher quality final pieces than the group who spent their whole time perfecting one piece. This experiment showed that by merely doing more of the work we improve our skills faster than if we spend our time meticulously trying to create one perfect thing.
It is this experiment which so nicely demonstrates the power of the 100 challenge. Simply by forcing yourself to do something many many times, even if at the end you don’t want to do it anymore, you will have improved a lot more than you probably thought you could at the start. And that alone is a powerful thing. We all like being good at something, it gives us confidence and joy, so if there is a way to work around our fickle motivation to bring some improvement then that will be good for us no matter what we’re doing; running, painting, solving crosswords or just taking 30 minutes a day to relax. So go try something new. And don’t give up until you’ve really tried it. 100 times.