How long does it take to learn something? Not 10,000 hours, as many people think. If Josh Kaufman is right and you do not aim to be one of the best performers of that field, you may get away with just 20 hours of deliberate practice. Does it sound too fantastic? It is all a question of how good and comfortable you want to feel by doing it – and how you spend those 20 hours.
Can you remember how long it took you to learn a skill like driving a car or write your first computer program? That did not take an enormous time. Most of what matters where known to you after 20 hours. However, by keep doing it you spend many more hours on it and got much better. While 20 hours may not be enough to get a level you feel comfortable with, you still can learn a lot in just 20 hours.
Steps to follow
Josh Kaufman defines those four important steps you must follow:
- Deconstruct the skill
- Learn enough to self-correct
- Remove practice barriers
- Practice at least 20 hours
Most skills depend on multiple things you need to know. Splitting it into defined, manageable parts is therefore the first and most important step. You end up with more parts to keep track of, but those parts are specific and you can check if you understand them more simply.
Feedback is important; you do not want to spend hours learning the wrong things. It is vital to get as fast as possible into a position where you can self-check your progress. Only when you can check are you able to correct your actions. Some skills, like programming, offer so many distractions to lose your way. You keep adding just one little part more until it will work and repeat this for hours. You look busy, but that is not the same as being productive.
A speedy removal of barriers that prevent you from practicing is essential. If you want to play the guitar, you need to get a guitar early on. Without practicing the skill you want to learn, you are not learning, you are fantasising about it.
The 20 hours come from the observation that you can learn the most when the learning curve is the steepest. That is the hard part and therefore the part where most stop. Keep pushing ahead, accept that feeling of knowing absolutely nothing and ignore it. If you are stuck, try another part you identified as an important sub-skill in step one.
How did I put it in action?
In the last few months since reading The First 20 Hours (ISBN: 978-1591846949) I had multiple small opportunities to try this approach. I started with a list of questions about a topic. That worked well for splitting and identifying important sub-tasks. Next, I learn enough to answer those questions. Sometimes the result is good enough so that I can mark this question as answered. Often I get new questions that I add to my list and try to answer later. This workflow delivers quick feedback, saves time on unneeded parts and let me gain a lot of knowledge in a small amount of time.
To save you the time of reading the book you can watch this Ted X presentation by Josh Kaufman:
Conclusion
I find this approach to learn new things very interesting. The first result are promising and I will keep using it for bigger things. Give it a try, the worst thing that can happen is that it works and you want to keep learning new things.
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