The Two-Year Test
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
One of the core frameworks taught inside ship 30 for 30, the Two-Year Test answers the question of what to create content about. You look backwards two years and inventory the skills you built, hobbies you picked up, life transitions you made and jobs you started or quit — knowledge that now feels obvious to you but would have been enormously valuable to yourself two years ago. Alternatively you look forward two years, list what you want to learn, and document the process of learning it. The audience is always the people roughly two years behind you on the same journey, which dissolves the 'why would anyone listen to me' objection: you do not need to be an expert, only marginally ahead. Alternating between the two directions is what Dickie calls the infinite game.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Inventory the last two years
List the big categories of things you have learned: skills built, hobbies picked up, transitions made, jobs started or quit. This is knowledge already sitting in your head that only needs distilling and sharing.
Pro tip Write the list as though briefing yourself from two years ago: what you got wrong, what surprised you, what you would skip.
- 2
Inventory the next two years
Separately list everything you want to go and learn. This becomes your forward-looking content: documenting the journey rather than teaching from the far side of it.
- 3
Name the person two years behind you
Picture sitting down with yourself from two years ago. That person is your reader. The internet is large enough that you do not need many of them for the work to be worth doing.
Watch out Do not aim at the people eight years ahead — you cannot even have the conversation, and they are not your audience.
- 4
Publish against the value test
For any piece you hesitate over, ask: would this have been valuable to you two years ago? If yes, publish it. If no, make it better. That single question replaces the imposter-syndrome debate.
Pro tip You will know when the job is good enough because the answer becomes obvious.
- 5
Add your own application to anything you curate
Summarising alone is commodity work. Summarise, then say how you used it and what happened. Your interpretation and experiment are unique even when the source material is not.
- 6
Run the loop forever
Learn from the people just ahead, distil it, teach the people just behind, then level up and repeat. Backward-looking knowledge becomes today's products; forward-looking learning becomes tomorrow's.
Pro tip Products should be built from the backward-looking material you have genuinely lived.
In the wild
Dickie spent nine months writing a weekly newsletter and getting nowhere before Twitter finally worked. Ship 30 for 30 is the distillation of everything he wished that earlier version of himself had known at the start, which is why the curriculum accelerates a process that was originally painful and slow. The product exists because he wrote down what he would tell himself two years earlier.
→ A course built entirely from backward-looking knowledge that scaled past a million dollars a year.
Ali's early study videos were backward-looking: he had already spent two years learning those techniques and simply packaged them. His productivity content was initially forward-looking, learned in order to survive a demanding job. Now he treats productivity as backward-looking material for products, while reading about business, health, fitness and relationships as the forward-looking documentation that will become future books.
→ A content system that never runs out of subject matter as he levels up.
Common mistakes
Waiting to become an expert before publishing
The framework only requires you to be marginally ahead of your reader. Holding output until you feel expert means the most useful window — while the beginner problems are still fresh — passes unused.
Teaching forward-looking topics as if lived
If you are still learning something, document the journey rather than posing as the authority. The framework and the product come later, once you have actually done it.
From the transcript
“this is one of the key Frameworks in ship 30 we call it the two-year test and so it's what should you create content around…”
“the people who would most be interested are the ones that are on your journey two years behind you”
“would it have been valuable to you two years ago yes publish it no make it better”
From the episode
5 Ways To Make $1 Million As A Writer - Nicolas Cole
Nicolas Cole