The 10-Year Rule
Pick one thing and work at it for a decade to reach any level of success
- Difficulty
- Expert
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 72%
The 10-Year Rule is Kagan's antidote to impatience: pick something you can commit to and work on it for ten years, and you will reach whatever level of success you want — millionaire, musician, artist or writer. He arrived at it by listing every business he had started (over 20 across two decades) and realising his first million took that long. The mechanism is compounding through sustained consistency: most people wildly underestimate the time horizon, so they quit during the invisible years before momentum arrives. He cites Marques Brownlee giving the same advice — 'just pick something and work on it for 10 years and then it's probably going to be successful.' The rule's real difficulty is choosing what to commit to, then refusing to stop.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal. Kagan formulated the 10-Year Rule after listing the 20-plus businesses he had started over two decades and noticing his first million dollars took roughly ten years of persistence.
Core principles
- 01Overnight success is a decade of unnoticed work
- 02Consistency compounds over years, not months
- 03The hard part is choosing what to commit to, then staying
- 04Almost any goal yields to ten years of focused effort
How to run it
- 1
Choose one durable pursuit
Pick something you could genuinely enjoy working on for ten years.
Pro tip Favour work you would do even if it made no money — you are more likely to last.
- 2
Reframe it as a decade project
Commit up front to a ten-year horizon rather than expecting quick results.
Watch out Setting short deadlines on a long game can kill your motivation.
- 3
Work through the invisible years
Keep showing up during the early period when little visible progress happens.
Pro tip Momentum begets momentum; the flywheel turns slowly at first.
- 4
Recalibrate your patience
Accept that things take far longer than you imagine and adjust expectations accordingly.
In the wild
The night before this interview Kagan listed every business he had ever started and counted over 20 across roughly 20 years. Only in his first year of med school did a venture start doing well, and he only crossed a million dollars in net worth after two decades of attempts. That timeline convinced him of the 10-Year Rule.
→ He concluded that a decade of focused effort reliably produces the success people want.
Common mistakes
Quitting during the invisible years
Most people stop before the compounding shows up, mistaking slow early progress for failure.
Attaching short deadlines
Imposing arbitrary near-term targets on a decade-long pursuit can crush the motivation that sustains it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Aspiring founders, creators or artists willing to play a long game.
Not ideal for
Situations needing a fast, time-boxed result or quick pivot.
From the transcript
“i call it the 10-year rule so if you can find something and work on it for 10 years you will become a millionaire if…”
“just pick something anything and just work on it for 10 years and then it's probably going to be successful”
From the episode
Bonus Episode: How To Build Career Momentum with Noah Kagan
Noah Kagan