antobenn xavyera renney
Jude Petkus
LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.
The major barrier to learn something new is not intellectual, it's not the process of you learning a bunch of little tips or tricks or things. The major barrier is emotional. We're scared. Feeling stupid doesn't feel good. In the beginning of learning anything new you feel really stupid. But put 20 hours into anything. It only takes 20 hours.
Below is my summary on the 19-minute TED talk by Josh Kaufman in 2013. It is one of the top 25 most-viewed TED talks published to date. You can start video at 8:00 mins to reach the learning curve captured in my summary below. At 16:00 mins, Josh launches into a wonderful little medley of pop songs (including "with or without you", "No woman no cry", "Gangnam style") to hit his 20th hour of playing ukulele.
Josh Kaufman's research focuses on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, and practical wisdom. He is the author of three bestselling books including The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business.
Snapshot below is the learning curve. And the story of the learning curve is when you start, you're grossly incompetent and you know it, right? With a little bit of practice, you get really good, really quick. So that early level of improvement is really fast. And then at a certain point you reach a plateau, and the subsequent games become much harder to get, they take more time to get.
Now, my question is, how long does it take from starting something and being grossly incompetent and knowing it to being reasonably good? In hopefully, as short a period of time as possible. So, how long does that take?
It only takes 20 hours. That's it. You can go from knowing nothing to being reasonably good. Any skill that you can think of (learn a language, learn how to draw, learn to code, learn to write), if you put 20 hours of focused deliberate practice into that thing, you will be astounded at how good you become.
20 hours isn't that hard to accumulate. 20 hours is doable, that's about 45 minutes a day for about a month. Even skipping a couple days, here and there. There's a method to doing this. There's a way to practice intelligently. There's a way to practice efficiently, that will make sure that you invest those 20 hours in the most effective way that you possibly can. And here's the method, it applies to anything:
The first is to deconstruct the skill. Decide exactly what you want to be able to do when you're done, and then look into the skill and break it down into smaller pieces. Most of the things that we think of as skills are actually big bundles of skills that require all sorts of different things. The more you can break apart the skill, the more you're able to decide, what are the parts of this skill that would actually help me get to what I want?
So, get three to five resources about what it is you're trying to learn. Could be book, could be DVDs, could be courses, could be anything. But don't use those as a way to procrastinate on practice. What you want to do is learn just enough that you can actually practice and self-correct or self-edit as you practice.
Remove barriers to practice. Distractions, television, internet. All of these things that get in the way of you actually sitting down and doing the work. And the more you're able to use just a little bit of willpower to remove the distractions that are keeping you from practicing, the more likely you are to actually sit down and practice, right?
And the fourth is to practice for at least 20 hours. Now, most skills have what I call a frustration barrier. You know, the grossly-incompetent- and-knowing-it part? That's really, really frustrating. We don't like to feel stupid. And feeling stupid is a barrier to us actually sitting down and doing the work. So, by pre-committing to practicing whatever it is that you want to do for at least 20 hours, you will be able to overcome that initial frustration barrier and stick with the practice long enough to actually reap the rewards.
So, the first couple hours are just like the first couple hours of anything. You have to get the tools that you are using to practice. You have to make sure they're available. My ukulele didn't come with strings attached. I had to figure out how to put those on. And learning how to tune, learning how to make sure that all of the things that need to be done in order to start practicing get done.
Now, one of the things when I was ready to actually start practicing was I looked in online databases and songbooks for how to play songs. And they say, okay, ukuleles, you can play more than one string at a time, so you can play chords, that's cool. And when I started looking at songs, I had an ukulele chord book that had like hundreds of chords. Looking at this and "Wow, that's intimidating". But when you look at the actual songs, you see the same chords over and over, right? As it turns out, playing the ukulele is kind of like doing anything, there's a very small set of things that are really important and techniques that you'll use all the time. And in most songs, you'll use four, maybe five chords, and that's it, that's the song. You don't have to know hundreds, as long as you know the four chords, and those chords are G, D, Em and C. Four chords pump out every pop song ever.
What do you want to do. The major barrier to learn something new is not intellectual, it's not the process of you learning a bunch of little tips or tricks or things. The major barrier is emotional. We're scared. Feeling stupid doesn't feel good, in the beginning of learning anything new you feel really stupid. So, the major barrier's not intellectual, it's emotional. But put 20 hours into anything. It doesn't matter.
What do you want to learn? Do you want to learn a language? Want to learn how to cook? Want to learn how to draw? What turns you on? What lights you up? Go out and do that thing. It only takes 20 hours. Have fun.
The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman on Audible: =B00D2661LG&source_code=SCLGB904VWS062013Get this audiobook free when you try Audible: =B00D2661LG&source_code=SCLGB904VWS062013Summary:"Learn anything... fast!" Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What's on your list? What's holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills - time you don't have and effort you can't spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of practicing something new are always the most frustrating. That's why it's difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It's so much easier to watch TV or surf the web... In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition: how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you'll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. This method isn't theoretical: it's field-tested. Kaufman invites readers to join him as he field tests his approach by learning to program a Web application, play the ukulele, practice yoga, re-learn to touch type, get the hang of windsurfing, and study the world's oldest and most complex board game. What do you want to learn?
Have you ever heard that you need 10.000 hours to achieve mastery in a field? This concept was introduced by Anders Ericsson, a Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, and was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his popular book Outliers. The book was so successful that this concept was replicated through various media, and has been quoted as the time needed to really learn something ever since.
But, how is that possible? I mean, 10.000 hours equal to a full-time job for approximately 5 years, and none of us ever needed that much time to learn something new. There is obviously something going wrong here.
Now, how is THAT possible? I mean 10.000 hours seem really a lot, but 20 hours seems like a REALLY low number. The answer lies in the learning curve, illustrated below. The learning curve shows that the most massive improvements happen in the early stages of learning. It is therefore there that we can put our focus on, and 20 hours can actually be enough.
Before diving into the exact process, there are some foundational concepts that can and will help you in this process. To begin with, choose to learn something that you like. You might have wanted to learn how to dance or how to play the guitar your whole life. Choose the subject that makes you click.
And, finally, you had better wrap your head around the fact that this is possible! Josh Kaufman, in his book, illustrates how he applied the 20 hours rule to learning web development, how to play the ukulele, practice yoga, relearn touch typing, windsurfing and Go, an old, very complex, board game. Many have replicated his process, and so can you.
The goal here is to break the skill apart as much as possible, in order to identify the most important items you need to tackle first. The more crucial the things you practice are, the least amount of time you will need to improve.
To achieve that, first absorb knowledge through a few (3-5) sources, selected utilizing the 80/20 rule. Those could be books, videos, courses, or anything for that matter. Then try to associate the information with preexisting knowledge and mental models (find out more about this in my article on chunking). The next step is to jump into practice, as fast as possible.
c01484d022