What the 100 Things To Believe In List Actually Is
The 100 Things To Believe In is essentially a curated collection of principles, habits, and mindset shifts designed to improve how you approach work, relationships, and personal growth. It started as a blog post years ago and got picked up by various productivity communities. The full list exists in a few different formats online, but the core idea hasn't changed: pick small, actionable beliefs and test them for a set period. I've been running variations of this list in my own workflow for about three years now. The short version is that it works decently if you treat it like an experiment log rather than a scripture. Most people fail with it because they try to adopt all 100 items at once, which is obviously impossible. You pick maybe five at a time. Then you drop two that don't fit and add two new ones.
Where to Find the 100 Things To Believe In
The original list circulates across a few sites. A reliable copy lives on productivity forums and some lesser-known blog archives. There's also a community-maintained GitHub gist that tracks updates and modifications from people who've actually used it. If you search for the exact phrase 100 Things To Believe In, you'll find a PDF version that's been shared around the periphery of online forums. I wouldn't call any single source definitive since the list has been remixed so many times, but the gist is probably the closest thing to a canonical version at this point. Here's the practical setup I use. Every Sunday evening, I pull up the current version of the list. I scan through and highlight three items I want to test that week. I write them in a separate doc with a column for "result" so I can check in on Friday. That's it. No fancy apps, no habit-tracking software. Just a text file and a calendar reminder. The list includes items like "assume good intent," "edit before you send," and "write down your top three priorities every morning." Some of them are useful. Some of them are generic advice dressed up as revelation. The ones that actually move the needle tend to be the specific behavioral prompts rather than the vague motivational statements.
I ran into a real problem last winter where I hit a wall with item number 47, which suggests you should rewrite every piece of writing you produce before sending it out. On a good day that takes ten minutes. On a busy day with a tight deadline, it added an hour to my workflow and I started dreading the list entirely. The workaround was simple: I created a tier system. Low-stakes internal messages get a quick scan. Client-facing or published work gets the full rewrite treatment. This cut my daily time spent on that habit down to roughly fifteen minutes instead of spreading it unpredictably across the entire day.
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Common Mistakes People Make With This List
Most beginners treat the 100 Things To Believe In as something to memorize. That's the wrong approach. It's meant to be something to interact with, not recite. You'll forget about half the items within a week unless they're tied to an active habit loop. The items that stick are the ones you've actually applied in a real situation and seen a concrete result from. Another trap is collecting multiple versions of the list without comparing them. People grab a "revised" version from one site and a "premium" version from another, then end up with conflicting guidance on the same topic. Pick one source and stick with it for at least ninety days before switching. Thirty days is the minimum window where you can actually tell whether a belief is working for you. There's also a structural weakness in the list itself. It mixes deeply personal philosophy with generic productivity tips in a way that makes prioritization hard. Items about self-compassion sit right next to items about email formatting. That's not a flaw in your understanding of the list, it's a flaw in the list. You have to be the one deciding which category an item falls into and allocating your energy accordingly.
A Counter-Intuitive Take
The items you discard are more valuable than the items you keep. I've found this to be true across every version of the list I've tried. The things that clearly don't fit your situation tell you something about your actual working style, your environment, and your priorities. When I dropped the "never check email before noon" rule, it revealed that I'm actually someone who responds better to early-day communication pressure than I realized. That insight was worth more than adopting the rule would have been.
Bottom Line
The 100 Things To Believe In isn't a complete system. It's a prompt generator. The structure is sound enough, but the output quality depends entirely on how selectively you apply it. Start with five items. Track results. Drop what doesn't work. Replace it with something that does. Repeat. The list itself will outlive whatever version of it you're reading right now, but the method of using it remains the same.
