The Law of 100
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
Kagan's persistence framework, built from his own most expensive mistake. Most people who start something quit long before the point where results compound, so he replaces outcome goals with a rep count: commit to 100 of a single repeatable unit — 100 videos, 100 emails, 100 calls, 100 days, 100 posts — and refuse to evaluate results until you get there. The mechanism is that early feedback is noisy and almost always disappointing relative to expectation, so judging on it produces false negatives. A fixed rep count immunises you against that noise and, by breaking down to roughly one action a day, stays compatible with a job, kids and a family. Kagan quit a podcast at 40 episodes despite 30,000 downloads each because it was not 100,000 — the exact failure the law is designed to prevent.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Choose one repeatable unit
A video, a cold email, a sales call, a post, a day of doing the thing. It must be a single countable action, not a project.
Pro tip Pick the unit that most directly touches a customer or an audience.
- 2
Commit to 100 of them up front
Declare the number before you start so the finish line is set by count, not by mood or results. Abdaal told himself his first 100 videos would be crap and he would reassess only after.
- 3
Reduce it to one a day
Kagan is explicit that if you have a day job, kids and a family, the cadence must be one call, one post or one email per day. The number is large; the daily load must be trivial.
Pro tip Attach it to an existing daily anchor so it survives busy weeks.
Watch out Batching to catch up usually signals the unit is too big.
- 4
Suspend judgement until rep 100
Do not read the metrics as verdicts. Abdaal hit 1,000 subscribers at video 52, went viral at 82, viral again at 93, and had no way of predicting any of it from the earlier videos.
Watch out Quitting on a 40-rep sample is the exact failure mode this prevents.
- 5
Reassess at 100, then re-commit
At the finish line, decide whether to continue with better information. Kagan is three years into YouTube and now on a ten-year plan for it.
In the wild
When Abdaal started YouTube in 2017 he told himself the first 100 videos would be crap and that he would simply get through them before reassessing. Video 52 took him past 1,000 subscribers. Video 82 went viral and carried him to around 10,000. Video 93 went viral again and took him to 50,000. By video 100 he was at roughly 58,000 subscribers, an outcome he says he had no idea was coming. The only thing he knew going in was the number.
→ A rep-count commitment produced ~58,000 subscribers by video 100 with no early signal it would work.
Kagan was running a podcast that was doing around 30,000 downloads per episode. Because the number was not 100,000, he judged it a failure and quit at roughly 40 episodes. In hindsight he treats this as the origin of the law of 100: he had strong traction by any objective measure and stopped because he was measuring against an arbitrary expectation instead of a rep count. He now uses the framework explicitly to stay with YouTube.
→ A podcast with 30,000 downloads an episode was abandoned at rep 40 — the loss that produced the rule.
Common mistakes
Judging results before rep 100
Early numbers are noise. Kagan killed a podcast pulling 30,000 downloads because it was not 100,000, and Abdaal's channel gave no indication at video 50 of what video 82 would do.
Choosing a unit too big for daily reps
If one rep takes a weekend, 100 is unreachable alongside a job and family, and the commitment quietly collapses into another abandoned project.
From the transcript
“and then sticking with it which is law of 100 which is like doing these things and sticking with these things”
“so love 100 is how do you apply to 100 days or 100 videos or 100 emails or 100 calls whatever it is for me…”
“one call a day one social post a day one email a day whatever it is just pick a hundred of them and then stick…”
From the episode
How To Start Your First Business in 48 Hours - Noah Kagan
Noah Kagan