The first 20 hours — how to learn anything
Summary of my notes of the TedX video by Josh Kaufman
Today I came across this TEDx video which kind of captured some of my recent fears in learning new things. This is the video if you would like to watch it for yourself. You can start at 396 seconds if you want to skip the intro.
Here are my notes from the talk.
The myth of 10,000 hours
This is a hugely popular quote that you would have heard time and again. If you need to become good at something you need to have at-least 10,000 hours of practice in that skill. But what many people forget is that this is for you to become the PROs in the competitive fields. Let us accept the truth. Most of will never become that and many of us don’t even aspire to become that. Then why this obsession about the 10,000 hours rule? Becoming reasonably good at a skill is sufficient most of the times. Atleast for me this is more than sufficient.
The learning curve
Below is the popular learning curve that we come across in most of the articles. The x axis is the practice time and y axis is the “how good you are at the skill you are learning”
Screenshot from TedX video
What is important here is to notice that the x axis is practice time and not the time since your decision or the learning time. These are the actual number of hours you have spent practicing the skill. I would say a 80:20 is a decent mix. 80 percent of the time for practice and 20 percent time for learning.
The start
As the speaker in the video points out when we start learning something we are grossly incompetent and we know it. This is where we generally keep postponing either by giving reasons or by reading a lot more material than it is necessary for us to get started. But if we cross this stage and start the practice, we will see that the we can quickly become good at it. This is because there are so many things that we learn which makes us much better than what we were just a couple of hours of practice ago. The gains or the rate of learning during this part are exponential.
The plateau
Once we cross this phase we reach a plateau or the so called flattening of the curve. The slope of the curve starts tending towards zero. You can also think of this as the 80:20 rule. In 20% of the practice time you get to learn 80% of the things and for learning the remaining 20% of the skill you need so spend 80% of the time. If your life and earning depends on this skills then it might make sense to spend that 80% of the time to learn remaining 20% of the skills. But for most of the secondary skills this may not be necessary.
The red dotted vertical line
So the ideal trade off would be to find that red dotted vertical line. The speaker claims that it is 20 hours for most of the skills. That might be true or the number might be higher for some skills. But what is important for me is the concept. So let us say instead of 80% of the skill we learn only 60 to 70% that is good enough for me :)
Four steps for Rapid Skill Acquisition
“There is a way to practice intelligently and efficiently.”
Deconstruct the skill.
Learn enough to self correct.
Remove practice barriers.
Practice at-least 20 hours.
The speaker puts it very eloquently and succinctly. So I am just adding the exact words here.
Deconstruct the skill.
“Decide exactly what you want to do when you are done. More you can break apart a skill the more you are able to decide what are the parts of the skill that will actually help me get to what I want and then you can practice those first. If you practice the most important things first you will be able to improve your performance in the least amount of time possible”
Learn enough to self correct.
“Get three to five resource of what it is that you are trying to learn. DVDS, courses or book. But don’t use those a way to procrastinate on practice. What you want to do is learn just enough so that you can actually practice and self correct or self edit as you practice. Learning becomes a way of getting better at noticing when you make a mistake and do something different”
Remove practice barriers.
“Remove barriers to practice. Distractions, internet and television. All of these things that get in the way of you actually sitting down and doing the work. The more able to use a just little bit of will power to remove the distractions that are keeping you from practicing, the more likely you are to actually sit down and practice.”
Practice at-least 20 hours.
“Most skills have a frustration barrier. The grossly incompetent and knowing it part. That is 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. By pre-committing to practice whatever it is that you are learning you for atleast 20 hours you will be able to overcome that initial frustration barrier and stick with the practice long enough to reap the rewards.”