100 hours. Out loud.
Hours announced out loud get done at roughly twice the rate of hours planned in private: that’s the entire mechanism. Pledge your exam and your sitting, get the tracker, log the focused hours, and cross the finisher’s line whatever the score says. The wall remembers the work.
Four milestones between the pledge and the roll
The foundation
25 hrs
Syllabus mapped, first topics down, the habit forming. Most quitters quit before here: you didn’t.
The grind ridge
50 hrs
The unglamorous middle where sittings are actually won. Your mid-point email lands here with one question: pace vs plan?
Practice-exam country
75 hrs
From learning to performing: timed sets, the mistakes bank, exam-day conditions.
The finisher’s line
100+ hrs
You sit the exam having done the work. Pass or fail, your name goes on the finishers’ roll. The hours were real either way.
The rules (there are only five)
- Pledge one exam and one sitting date: specific beats ambitious
- Count only focused hours: problems, timed sets, active review. Podcasts at the gym are lovely; they don’t count
- Log every session, the free tracker, the dashboard you build, or paper. What’s written is what’s real
- Behind pace? Say so at the mid-point check-in. Adjusting a plan is discipline, abandoning it silently isn’t
- Sit the exam. The challenge ends at the exam center, not at 100 on a spreadsheet
Make the pledge
Say it here, and it becomes twice as likely to happen. That’s not motivation-poster math: it’s the announcement effect, and it’s the whole point.
Finish and tell me, your name (or initials) joins the finishers’ roll on the Wins Wall, next to the exam and the hours. Pass or fail. The wall honors work, and work is the only thing entirely inside your control.
Why 100 hours?
It’s the community’s rule of thumb: roughly 100 focused hours per exam hour, so ~300 total for a 3-hour prelim. The challenge pledges the first 100 because the first 100 builds the habit that produces the rest. Finish it once and the second hundred is just Tuesday.
What if I fail the exam?
You still finished the challenge. Pass rates hover near 50%. Half of every sitting fails, including future fellows. The finishers’ roll honors the hours, and the postmortem (was it hours, method, or exam-day execution?) is the real prize. My own fail is on this site in writing.
What do the emails involve?
Exactly three: the tracker on signup, one mid-point nudge asking pace-vs-plan, and one check-in near your sitting so your finish gets counted. No sequences, no upsells riding along.
Can I do it with a pod?
The best version of the challenge is a whole pod pledging together, four public commitments compounding. Sign up for a pod and put your pod’s name in the pledge; podded pledgers finish at conspicuously higher rates.
I’m mid-prep already. Can I still pledge?
Absolutely. Pledge the hours remaining between now and your sitting. The point isn’t the number’s purity: it’s the announcement.