What is equally important but almost completely overlooked is the fact that someone could become the best at a skill in just 100 sessions — approximately 100 hours.

Deliberate Practice * 10,000 Hours = World-Class Skill

Deliberate Practice * Skill Selection * 100 Hours = World-Class Skill

The 100-Hour Rule is the theory that to master a topic and get the benefits of greatness doesn’t need to take 10,000 hours. Rather, it can often take approximately 100 hours if you break down skills into rare and valuable micro-skills.

First, the 100-Hour rule gives fast results.

“Many things aren’t fun until you’re good at them . Every skill has what I call a frustration barrier, a period of time in which you’re horribly unskilled and you’re painfully aware of that fact.” — Josh Kaufman

Second, the benefits of learning grow exponentially as we go from novice to competent to world-class.

This stacking approach is typified by the world’s top entrepreneurs and investors

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.

Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression — to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets — a part of their founding narrative.

Thiel’s three-step approach echoes Warren Buffett’s #1 mental model, which is the Circle Of Competence. This framework advocates the idea that you should always stay in niches where you have a comparative advantage.

Step #1: Break skills into their subskills (i.e. micro-skills)

Step #2: Identify the $1,000/hour skills with little competition

To find these $1,000 skills, plot the micro-skills you identified in step #1 on the following graph. To find a valuable skill, think about how much employers or customers would theoretically pay per hour for that skill. To find a rare skill, target smaller, underserved micro-niche like Peter Thiel recommends.

Step #3: Learn $1,000/hour skills with a month-long learning challenge