The 40−30−30 Rule

The 40−30−30 rule is really an argu­ment that when you pre­pare for any­thing in life, only 40% of the prepa­ra­tion is phys­i­cal – the rest is men­tal. Thirty per­cent of prepa­ra­tion is tech­ni­cal skill and expe­ri­ence, and the sec­ond thirty per­cent is the will­ing­ness to take risks.

There is some­thing really pro­found here. If you think about it, most of life adheres to this 40−30−30 Rule.

You’ll find the reflec­tion of Trent Hamm of the Sim­ple Dol­lar on this below.

This “rule” comes up again and again in all dif­fer­ent areas of life. Here are sev­eral exam­ples from my own life where I’ve seen it:

When I’m play­ing a game I’ve played a lot of times before, I have an intu­ition as to what move to make next, built from years and years of expe­ri­ence (the 30% that comes from tech­ni­cal skill and expe­ri­ence). How­ever, I also find that it’s very easy to just keep using the same strat­egy over and over again because I’ve some­how come to the con­clu­sion that it’s the best one. So, if I com­bine that tech­ni­cal skill and expe­ri­ence with a risky new strat­egy I’ve devised (the other 30%), I might lose – but I might also devise a way of play­ing that’s even better.

With invest­ing, I have a good under­stand­ing of my own risk tol­er­ance, an under­stand­ing built up over a long period of time (the 30% that comes from expe­ri­ence). Howver, I also know that if I don’t push against my risk tol­er­ance a bit and look at new invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties from time to time (the other 30%, risk), I’ll likely miss out on great opportunities.

I also see it in my career, both now and when I worked for a large orga­ni­za­tion. I would often have a well-worn daily rou­tine that worked and got the things done that I needed to get done (the 30% that comes from expe­ri­ence), but if I really want to excel, I some­times have to step out­side the box a lit­tle (the risk-based 30%).

The 40÷30÷30 rule really does pro­vide a great frame­work for suc­cess, no mat­ter what you do.

Do some­thing worth­while (the first 40%) means that you’re will­ing to get up off the couch and do some­thing. Maybe it’s get­ting ahead in a career. Maybe it’s get­ting into a new hobby. Maybe it’s sim­ply get­ting a grip on your invest­ments. 40% of the jour­ney is sim­ply trying.

Keep at it (the next 30%) is sim­ply encour­age­ment to not let a new ini­tia­tive slide, because the more you work at it, the eas­ier it becomes. Even more impor­tant, the more you work at it, the more the basic skills that make up the task begin to become nat­ural to you.

Take risks (the final 30%) sim­ply means to not do things the same way every sin­gle time. When you’ve become skilled at some­thing, it’s easy to become wed­ded to the same rou­tine. Never stop look­ing at what you do and try­ing out alter­nate paths. Not only does this grow your skills (mak­ing your basic rou­tine even bet­ter), it also helps you to uncover new ways of doing things.

Great… so how do you do this? How can you apply the 40÷30÷30 rule in your life? The best first step is to fig­ure out the area of your life where you want to improve. Do you want to get out of debt? Do you want to improve your skill at a musi­cal instru­ment? Do you want to get a pro­mo­tion at work? Do you want to become a writer?

Once you’ve fig­ured out what you want to do, research it a bit. Fig­ure out what things you’ll need to do to accom­plish that goal.

After that, start prac­tic­ing and build­ing skills. The best way to do that is to start doing the thing you want to mas­ter every sin­gle day. For me, a thirty day project works well for this. I just com­mit to doing a cer­tain thing every sin­gle day for thirty days (if that’s pos­si­ble). At the end of it, I’ve usu­ally vastly improved at what­ever skill or attribute I was try­ing to develop.

Quite often, thirty days is enough to estab­lish a pos­i­tive new rou­tine in your life, so keep it up. Keep doing that thing every day until it becomes truly nor­mal and seem­ingly effortless.

Then, take a risk. Change what you’re doing a bit. Make it more dif­fi­cult, or at least dif­fer­ent. Explore some­thing new. If you’re tak­ing a walk every day, increase your walk­ing pace a bit and use a stop­watch to slowly trim your time around the block. If you’re try­ing to break through at work, vol­un­teer for a task that you might have avoided before, like giv­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion. If you’re play­ing a game, try a com­pletely dif­fer­ent strat­egy and see how it works. If you’re invest­ing, dig into some new invest­ments that you haven’t looked at before and con­sider putting some money into them after you’ve stud­ied them.

What you’ll find is that your already-built skill will help carry you through this new chal­lenge and that the rewards of this new risk are great. You end up in bet­ter shape, with a bet­ter career, with a bet­ter gam­ing expe­ri­ence, and with bet­ter invest­ments – or with improve­ment in any­thing you’d like to take on in life.