The Rule of Three
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
A decision rule Wiseman and his friend Adrian Owen invented in their late teens and both still live by. You are allowed to talk about any idea or plan exactly three times. If you have not started it by the third conversation, you must never mention it again and never do it. The rule works on both ends: it kills the pleasant, permanently deferred ideas that eat conversational energy without ever being executed, and it converts the third mention into a forcing function — you either move now or the idea is dead. Its power comes from the finality. Because the alternative to acting is permanent deletion rather than another comfortable deferral, the third mention stops being a discussion and becomes a decision point.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Notice when an idea recurs
The rule only applies to plans you keep returning to in conversation — the ones that sound fun every time they come up. Recognising a repeat is the trigger.
- 2
Count the mentions
Track how many times the plan has been raised. Wiseman and his friend kept the count between them, which is what made the third mention unmistakable.
Pro tip Run it with a partner — a shared counter is much harder to quietly reset than a private one.
- 3
Make the third mention a decision, not a discussion
On the third time the idea comes up, you either commit and start now, or the idea is over. When Wiseman and Owen raised the touring magic show for the third time, they looked at each other, said they had to do it now, and went on the road.
- 4
Kill it permanently if you did not start
If it has not been done by the third time, you never mention it again and never do it. The honesty is the value: you were not going to do it, so stop spending attention on it.
Watch out The rule only works if the deletion is real — a fourth mention destroys the forcing function.
- 5
Reserve it for reversible adventures
Wiseman applied it to things like a self-funded tour, a show idea, a trip — low-cost, high-experience projects where the cost of a wrong yes is small and the cost of endless deferral is a life not lived.
In the wild
Wiseman and Adrian Owen, then around 18, had been sitting in a treehouse in the New Forest making plans. A few months after inventing the rule they said it would be fun to tour with a big magic show. They spoke about it twice; the third time they looked at each other and said they had to do it now. They persuaded someone to give them a van, a friend supplied a stage and sound system, and they toured the South Coast for a month doing open-air stage shows for Cancer Research, sometimes asking the audience for a spare room and once sleeping in the van.
→ Wiseman calls it probably one of the best months of his life — and both men still live by the rule decades later.
Common mistakes
Letting an idea reach mention four
The whole mechanism rests on the third mention being terminal. Once you allow a fourth conversation, the idea returns to the comfortable category of things you will get to someday, which is exactly what the rule exists to eliminate.
Applying it to big irreversible commitments
Wiseman used it for adventures with a low downside — a van, a month, a charity tour. Forcing a snap yes-or-delete on a decision with large or unrecoverable costs is not what the rule was built for.
Running it alone
Wiseman's version was a pact with a friend, so the count and the deadline were witnessed. Solo, it is trivially easy to lose track of the mentions or to quietly restart the counter.
From the transcript
“And we had a rule. Came up with a rule which is you can only talk about a topic, a plan three times. And if…”
“You talk about it twice and if by you hadn't done it by the third time, just forget about it. You're not going to do…”
From the episode
The Sure-Fire Way To Be Luckier In Life - Advice From Psychology Professor Richard Wiseman