The Universal 50% Rule

Published: 2025-02-26

The 50% rule is a rule that students in the DrawaBox online art course must follow. It was created by Irshad “Uncomfortable” Karim. It is as follows:

“At most, half of your time spent drawing can be used for studying.”

“At least half of your time drawing must be spent on doing it for its own sake. Play. Exploration. Pushing boundaries.”

Other than the 250 box challenge, it’s probably the teaching method DrawaBox is most famous for. Uncomfortable does a great job at justifying it’s existence and value within the context of drawing.

Later on in my japanese study, I encountered a resource: “A Year to Learn Japanese” that also mentions using a 50% rule in your Japanese study (directly citing DrawaBox as it’s inspiration). That was when I started to consider how applicable the rule was to any kind of learning.

Almost any skill can be seperated into the two halves of the 50% rule: Studying the thing, and doing the thing. Studying the thing is learning the information and skills relevant to performing the task, and practicing those skills in isolation. Studying is the input. Doing the thing is the output. It’s when you try (and usually fail at the beginning) to do the thing yourself.

Doing the thing is always the goal, studying simply helps us learn how to get there, we shouldn’t put the cart before the horse. We don’t do figure drawings to draw figures, we do it to draw characters in dynamic poses. We don’t study music theory to learn about music theory, we do it to make music. We don’t study kanji to be able to recognize kanji, we do it so we can communicate ideas and information in Japanese. I think Curedolly put it best in her “How NOT to Fail in Japanese” video where she said:

“It’s precisely because Japanese is seen as something we do for it’s own sake, as opposed to something we do for the sake of the content, for the sake of what we’re actually doing with Japanese, that this “art for art’s sake” school of Japanese has gained such influence.”

It’s important to consciously think about this divide between studying and doing, because if we aren’t actively trying to balance the 50% rule, we’ll naturally gravitate towards the studying half. To our brains, working on both sides feel the same, but studying something instead of doing it is much easier and safer. There are no risks to take in trying and failing in study, as It’s not the thing we’re actually trying to do, it’s just things to prepare us to do the things we’re trying to do, which we’ll get to… eventually.

Learning through actually doing the thing is where the learning happens, but it’s much more difficult. Failure is very scary, but it’s in failing that we end up learning the most. Scott H Young’s Book Ultralearning recommends making a vast majority of your practice “doing” the thing. Additionally The 50% is the maximum amount of studying, not the maximum amount of doing. More doing is always better.

Spending a lot of time studying without application also sets up expectations of quality that aren’t justified. It’s how people get stuck in tutorial hell. You could spend years learning about boxing, for example: you learn about different stances, footwork, types of punches, how to breathe, and how to build endurance. You could even read all of Hajime no Ippo!

But once you finally step into a ring or even wrap up and put gloves on for the first time, how good would you expect yourself to be?

People are afraid of failure. They’re scared and embarrassed of being “bad” at something, and set up unrealistic expectations of themselves. We’re scared of challenging ourselves, but that’s where the growth comes from. If you swap out the phrase “doing it bad bad” with “doing it like a beginner”, you’ll start to notice how unreasonable your (and other peoples) expectations of themselves doing something new are, because you ARE a beginner.

The fear of failure is taught. Young Children don’t have this problem, they’re in it for the love of the game. Look at any Toddler learning how to walk through falling repeatedly. Years of school and other societal factors providing consequences for failing have helped create the fear, but it’s not inherit to us, It can be unlearned.

Childlike play is the most important aspect of learning a skill. We need to remember how to not be concerned of the outcome, but simply love the act itself.

Only then, ironically, can the outcome improve.