The 10% Rule

[0fedfae0-35f3-44d0-9]

I just reached a part in my learning when the concept of the “10% Rule” was introduced. It as explained as, if you do something 10% outside of your comfort zone, it’ll ensure you are always learning at the best rate.

In theory, this sounds reaso able but in practise, my questions are:

• How is this measurable? How can I measure my current level in order to apply the 10% extra difficulty?
• What does 10% harder mean? I’m sure this doesn’t apply.to yime spent learning.

[siaronjames]

I’ll tag @aran here, as he’s probably the best one to explain it, but I will offer this -

Obviously what the 10% means is going to apply to every individual differently because no two learners are identical, but it could be things like

• thinking about how often you use the pause button and then making yourself use it 10% less,
• or if you tend to use a dictionary to look up words a lot try using it 10% less and see if you can work out the word from the context instead,
• or (and probably easiest to measure) having a conversation and pushing yourself to increase the time spent using Welsh by 10% (or decrease the amount of English words we all resort to popping in by 10%!).

The thing is not to concern yourself too much about the actual percentage, I see “10% out of your comfort zone” as meaning “make it feel just a little bit uncomfortable or bewildering, but not enough to make you totally disheartened”

[aran]

Siaron’s pretty much said exactly what I would have!

I think you can apply this to anything you want to - you can definitely apply it to length of time spent learning (which is partly how we figured out that 8 or 10 hour days are possible) - but you’ll have natural maximums in terms of time available…

It’s also probably worth noting that the entire SaySomethingin Method is pretty much designed to stay slightly out of reach all the time, so hammering away with any of our courses kind of keeps you in the 10% by definition

[0fedfae0-35f3-44d0-9]

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