The 80-20 Learner

We need to find that sweet spot where things are just challenging enough.

We can think of the eighty-five percent rule as the 80/20 rule when applied to failure itself, i.e., what’s the optimal level of failure if we want to learn more quickly and effectively?

Finding Your Optimal Challenge Level

Fail more than fifty percent of the time and it leads to anxiety and overwhelm.

Fail zero percent of the time and it leads to boredom and stagnation.

It is through a mixture of success and failure that we can differentiate between effective and ineffective approaches, allowing for learning and progress.

various learning algorithms perform best when the training error rate is around 15.87%, which translates to a training accuracy of approximately eighty-five percent.

the eighty-five percent rule basically suggests that optimal learning occurs when individuals succeed or achieve the correct outcome around eighty-five percent of the time.

The Eighty-five Percent Rule