The 20 - 5 - 1 Conjecture

How do you become the best in the world at something?

The first thing you need is a way to compare people who work on a particular craft (or skill). If you think of ranking craftspeople as a stack where people are ranked top to bottom then there’s 3 overlapping groups that arise towards the top of the stack. You have the first group that has the top 20% of people, the next group that has the top 5% of people, and the final group, which is often hard to determine, the top 1%.

The 20-5-1 conjectures states the following: if you work on your craft in a disciplined way you can get to the top 20% quite easily, getting to the top 5% is a lot more difficult, and getting to the top 1% requires full dedication on the order of at least 5 years. Getting to the top 1% will also likely require lengthy direct interactions with some who are already at this level in order to maximize the rate of learning.

If you are willing to dedicate a portion of your life to a craft, like a few hours per day, getting to 20% won’t take more than a year if you are disciplined. At this point, you will be better at your craft than most people you know. This will vary based on the population size of your craft (e.g. making pizza versus programming) but a year is a good heuristic to start with. Most people who work on things professionally and are described as “good at what they do” fall into this category.

Getting to the top 5% will take anywhere from a year to a few years and will require working with or talking to others who are either in this category or looking to get into this category. Putting yourself in an environment where a lot of these people are is the best way I’ve found to speed up the process to get to this level. This comes with obvious physical changes, such as perhaps moving to a different city or country, but also comes with the mental change that all of a sudden you will be surrounded by the craft. Oftentimes this will be when you realize whether you truly enjoy your craft since it will start to take over your life. Getting to this level without working closely with others is possible but the rate of learning will be much slower since you can only run so many tests by yourself. Getting good at learning, and especially learning from others, is a great skill that is worth developing. Some people who work on their craft professionally will be at this level, but not as many as you might initially guess since, by definition, they are rare. Though as you start to creep higher up in the stack you’ll find that more and more people either know each other or know of each other.

Getting from 5% to 1% will take several years of full time dedication and rarely can be done without working closely with others that are already at a top 5% or 1% level. The people at this level have dedicated significant, if not all, portions of their lives to their craft and should be revered. Whether they are Pizzaiolos like Anthony Mangieri, Tony Gemignani, and Franco Pepe, athletes like Lionel Messi and Kobe Bryant¹, or comedians like Dave Attell, Gilbert Gottfried, Richard Pryor, and Bill Burr, the common thread is the absolute commitment that has been poured into their craft throughout decades of their lives. Getting to this level in any craft is not for the faint of heart.

An interesting thing to note is that, apart from those who are also in the top 5%, most people will not be able to tell the difference between a craftsman in the top 5% and one at the top 1%. This likely stems from the fact that getting from 5% to 1% requires understanding each part of your craft thoroughly instead of focusing only on the parts that a layman sees when evaluating the craft.

For most things, getting to the top 20% is more than you will ever need. Remember, there’s an entire 80% of a population that is below you at that point so if your goal is money, recognition, or status, then you’ll likely be able to get some part of that already if you reach this category. These rewards tend to follow exponential curves so you won’t see huge returns until you start to hit the top 5% and 1% for a craft, but you have to ask yourself if that is worth it. You only have a fixed amount of time on this earth so is it really worth taking time away from friends and family to get there? Only you can answer that. However, if you have such a deep interest in something that you want to get to that next level, then understand what you’re getting yourself into and enjoy the ride.