The first 20 hours (Josh kaufman)
hi everyone
two years ago
my life changed forever
my wife kelsey and i
welcomed our daughter leela into the
world
now becoming a parent is an amazing
amazing experience your whole world
changes
overnight and all of your priorities
change immediately so fast
that it makes it really difficult to
process
sometimes
now
you also have to learn a tremendous
amount about being a parent like for
example
how to dress your child
this was new to me i i this is an actual
outfit i thought this was a good idea
and even leela knows that it's not a
good idea
so there was so much to learn and so
much craziness all at once
and to add to the craziness kelsey and i
both work from home we're entrepreneurs
we run our own businesses
so kelsey is a uh
develops courses online for yoga
teachers i'm an author and so i'm
working for home kelsey's working for
home we have an infant and we're trying
to to make sure that everything gets
done that that needs done
and
life is really really really busy
and
a couple weeks into this amazing
experience
when the sleep deprivation
really kicked in like around week eight
i had this thought
and it was the same thought that parents
across the ages internationally
everybody has had this thought which is
i am never going to have free time
ever again
and this is
somebody said it's true yeah it's it's
not exactly true
but it feels really really true in that
moment and this this was really
disconcerting to me because one of the
things that i enjoy
more than anything else is learning new
things
getting curious about something and
diving in and fiddling around and
learning through trial and error and
eventually becoming pretty good at
something
and
without this this free time i didn't
know how i was ever going to do that
ever again and so
i'm a big geek i want to keep learning
things i want to keep growing and so
what i decided to do was
go to the library and go to the
bookstore and look at what research says
about how we learn and how we learn
quickly
and i read a bunch of books i read a
bunch of websites
and
trying to answer this question how long
does it take
to acquire a new skill
you know what i found
10
000 hours
[Music]
anybody ever heard this
10 it takes 10 000 hours if you want if
you want to learn something new if you
want to be good at it it's going to take
10 000 hours to get there
and i read this in book after book and
website after a website and the
uh my mental experience of of reading
all of this stuff was like no
i don't have time i don't have to i
don't have 10 000 hours i am never going
to be able to learn anything new
ever again
but that's not true so 10 000 hours just
to give you a rough order of magnitude
ten thousand hours is a full-time job
for five years
that's a long time and we've all had the
experience of learning something new and
it didn't take us anywhere close to that
amount of time right so what's up
there's there's something kind of funky
going on here what the research says and
and what we expect and have experiences
they don't match up
and what i found
here's the wrinkle
the ten thousand hour rule came out of
studies of expert
level performance
there was a professor at florida state
university his name is kay anders
erickson he's the originator of the ten
thousand hour rule
and where that came from is he studied
professional athletes
world-class musicians
chess grand masters all of these ultra
competitive folks in ultra high
performing fields
and he tried to figure out how long does
it take to get to the top
of those kinds of fields and what he
found is the more deliberate practice
the more time that those individuals
spent practicing the elements whatever
it is that they do
the more time you spend the better you
get and the folks at the tippy top of
their fields
put in around 10 000 hours of practice
now we're talking about the game of
telephone a little bit earlier
here's what happened
an author by the name of malcolm
gladwell
wrote a book
in 2007 called outliers the story of
success and the centerpiece of that book
was the ten thousand hour rule practice
a lot practice well and you will do
extremely well you reach the top of your
field
so
the message what dr ander erickson was
actually saying is
it takes ten thousand hours to get the
top of an ultra competitive field in a
very narrow subject
that's what that means
but here's what happened ever since
outliers came out
immediately came out reached the top of
the bestseller list stayed there for
three solid months
all of a sudden the ten thousand hour
rule was
everywhere
and a society-wide game of telephone
started to be played
so this message it takes ten thousand
hours to reach the top of an
ultra-competitive field
became it takes ten thousand hours to
become an expert at something
which became it takes ten thousand hours
to become
good at something which became
it takes ten thousand hours to learn
something
but that last statement it takes ten
thousand hours to learn something
it's not true
it's not true
so
what the research actually says if i i
spent a lot of time here at the csu
library in the cognitive psychology
stacks because i'm a geek
and
when you actually look at the studies of
skill acquisition you see over and over
and over
a graph like this now researchers
whether they're studying a motor skill
uh something you do physically or a
mental skill
they like to study things that they can
time
because you can quantify that right
so they'll give research participants a
a little task something that requires
physical arrangement or something that
requires
learning a little
uh mental trick
and they'll time how long a participant
takes
to complete the skill
and here's what this graph says when you
start so when researchers gave
participants a task it took them a
really long time because it was new and
they were horrible
with a little bit of practice they get
better and better and better and that
early part of practice is really really
efficient people get good at things
with just a little bit of practice
now what's interesting to note is that
if you know we don't really
for skills that we want to learn for
ourselves we don't care so much about
time right we just care about how good
we are whatever good happens to me
so if we re-label performance time to
how good you are
the graph flips and you get this famous
and widely known this 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 gains become
much harder to get they take more time
to get now
my question is
i want that
right how long does it take
from starting something and being
grossly incompetent and knowing it
to being reasonably good
in hopefully a a period of time as
possible
so how long does that take here's what
my research says
20 hours
that's it
you can go from knowing nothing
about any skill that you can think of
want to learn a language
want to learn how to draw
want to learn how to juggle flaming
chainsaws
if you put 20 hours of focused
deliberate practice into that thing you
will be astounded astounded
at how good you are
20 hours is doable that's about 45
minutes a day
for about a month
even skipping a couple days here and
there 20 hours isn't that hard to
accumulate
now
there's a method to doing this because
it's not like you can just start
fiddling around for about 20 hours and
expect these massive improvements
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 and 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 the skill that will
actually help me get to what i want
and then you can practice those first
and if you practice the most important
things first you'll be able to improve
your performance in the least amount of
time possible
the second is learn enough to
self-correct
so
get three to five resources about what
it is you're trying to learn could be
books it could be dvds could be courses
could be anything
but
don't use those as a as a way to
procrastinate on practice i i know i do
this right get like 20 books about the
topics like i'm gonna start learning how
to program a computer when i complete
these 20 books no
that's procrastination what you want to
do is learn just enough
that you can actually practice and
self-correct
or self-edit
as you practice
so the learning becomes a way of getting
better at noticing when you're making a
mistake
and then doing something a little
different
the third
is to 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 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 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
all right that's it it's not rocket
science four
very simple steps that you can use to
learn
anything
now
this is easy to talk about in theory
but it's more fun to talk about in
practice so one of the things that i've
wanted to learn how to do for a long
time
is play the ukulele
has anybody seen jake shimabukuro's
ted talk where he plays the ukulele and
makes it sound like he's like an ukulele
god it's it's amazing
it's like i saw that it's like that is
so cool it's such a neat instrument i
would i would really like to learn
how to play
and so i decided
that to test this theory i wanted to uh
put 20 hours into practicing the ukulele
and see where we got
and so
the first thing
about playing the ukulele is in order to
