Josh Kaufman | 20 Hours to Learn Anything (Key Points Talk)

Hello everyone. One of the things I enjoy is

learn

ing new things. How long does it take to acquire a new skill? Do you know what I found? 10,000

hours

? Nooooo! I will never be able to

learn

anything

new again. But that's not true. The 10,000-hour rule emerged from expert-level performance studies. Professional athletes, world-class musicians. People at the top of their fields put in around 10,000

hours

of practice. But that last statement: does it take 10,000 hours to learn something? Is not true. This is the learning curve, and the story of the learning curve is that when you start you are wildly incompetent and you know it.

With a little practice, you get really good, really fast, and then at a certain point you hit a plateau and subsequent gains become much harder to come by. How long does it take from starting something and being wildly incompetent and knowing it to being reasonably good? Here's what my research says: 20 hours, that's all. You can go from not knowing

anything

; If you put 20 hours of deliberate, focused practice into it, you'll be surprised how good you are. 20 hours is doable, that's about 45 minutes a day for about a month. There is a method to do this. The first is to deconstruct the skill, decide exactly what you want to be able to do, and break it down into smaller and smaller parts.

The more you can decide what parts of this skill are that will really help me get what I want? You will be able to improve your performance in the shortest time possible. The second is to learn enough to self-correct. Get 3-5 resources on what you're trying to learn - these can be books, courses, or anything. What you want to do is learn enough to be able to practice and self-correct. Realize when you're making a mistake and then do something a little different. The third is to remove barriers to practice: distractions, television, the Internet. And the fourth is to practice at least 20 hours.

Now, most skills have what I call a frustration barrier. If you commit to practicing what you want to do for at least 20 hours, you can overcome that initial barrier of frustration and keep practicing long enough to really reap the rewards. That's it, it's not rocket science. The main barrier to learning something new is not intellectual. The main barrier is emotional. Feeling stupid doesn't feel good and at the beginning of learning something new... you feel really stupid. But spend 20 hours on anything. Do you want to learn a language? Do you want to learn to cook? Do you want to learn to draw?

Go out and do that. It only takes 20 hours. Have fun.