Success Rate

Success rate is the proportion of your learning projects and sub-projects that you finish successfully against their stated goals. In CF it is not a passive statistic but an actionable control: if your rate is too low, you deliberately pick easier work; if it is comfortably high, you can stretch. The unit of measurement is the project, not the individual action — missing five basketball shots is not a failed project if your goal was to practice until you sank five in a row. What counts as success therefore depends on how you set and judge the goal, which is why effective self-evaluation is a prerequisite.

CF’s specific guidance: aim for over 90%; over 75% can still work; around 50% means you are in serious trouble. People typically achieve less than they target, so set the bar high. These are loose guidelines, not precise thresholds — count enough tiny sub-steps and even 99% looks bad, so the numbers are meant for the mini-project level.

The distinctive move is treating low success as a signal to reduce ambition, not to push harder. CF argues many learners mistakenly take pride in attempting hard things and failing, valuing impressiveness over actual progress. Padding your rate with small, slightly-useful sub-projects is not cheating — it is exactly what you should be doing most of the time. This connects to baseline skills you can already check, finding breakpoints just past them, and recovering via exponential difficulty backoff after consecutive failures. It contrasts sharply with overreaching on tasks too hard to even judge.