Twenty hours are more than enough to learn a skill -
One of the things I enjoy more than anything else is learning new stuff. Getting curios about something, diving in, fiddling around, learning through trial, error and eventually becoming pretty good at something.
I want to keep learning things, I want to keep growing so what I decided to do is go to the library and the bookstore and look at what research says about how we learn. I read a bunch of books, I read a bunch of websites trying to answer a simple question: “How long does it take to acquire a new skill?” The result I found is 10000 hours!! I read this in book after book, in website after website and my mental experience of reading all this stuff was like: NOOOOOO!!! I don’t have 10000 hours!!!
10000 hours, just to give you a rough order of magnitude, is a full-time job for five years. That’s a long time… We all had the experience of learning something new, and it didn’t take us anywhere close to that amount of time. So, I thought there’s something kinda funky going on here. What the research says and what we expect and have experienced just don’t match.
Diving in more deeply, i found out the 10000-hour rule came out of studies of expert level performance. There is a professor at Florida State University, K. Anders Ericsson; he is the originator of the 10000-hour rule. He studied professional athletes, world class musicians, chess grand masters. He tried to figure out how long does it take to get to the top of these fields. What he found is the more deliberate practice, the more time that those individuals spend practicing the elements of whatever it is that they do, the more time you spend the better you get. The folks at the tippy top of their fields put in around 10000 hours of practice.
A little bit like the game of telephone, an author by the name of Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book in 2007 called “Outliers: The story of Success” and the central piece of that book was the 10000-hour rule: practice a lot, practice well and you will do extremely well reaching the top of your field.
What Dr. Ericsson was actually saying is, it takes 10000 hours to get at the top of an ultra-competitive field in a very narrow subject but ever since Outliers came out, all of the sudden the 10000-hour rule was everywhere and a society wide game of telephone started to be played. So, the message, it takes 10000 hours to reach the top of an ultra-competitive field became it takes 10000 hours to became an expert at something, which became it takes 10000 hours to became good at something, which end to became it takes 10000 hours to learn something but that last statement, it takes 10000 hours to learn something it’s not true.
So how long does it really take from starting something and being grossly incompetent and knowing it to being reasonably good? With constancy and diligence, believe it or not, only 20 hours! You can go from knowing nothing about any skill that you can think of: a language, learn how to draw, learn how to juggle flair bottles, whatever 🙂
If you put 20 hours of focused deliberate practice into that thing you will be amazed at how good you are. 20 hours is doable, it’s about 45 minutes a day for about a month. Of course it takes a method in doing this. You can’t just start fiddling around for about 20 hours and expect super massive improvements. There’s a way to practice smart and efficiently that will make sure you invest those 20 hours in the most effective way that you possibly can. This method applies to anything:
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 are able to decide what are the parts of this skill that would actually help me get to what I want and practice those first.
Get three to five resources about what it is you’re trying to learn: books, videos, courses, could be anything but don’t use those as a way to procrastinate on practice. Stupid example: “I’m going to start learning programming when I will complete 20 books”. That’s simply procrastination. What you want to do is learn just enough that you can actually practice and self-correct 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.
Television, internet (FB, Instagram, Twitter), mobile phone. 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.
Most skills have something we can define as a frustration barrier cause we don’t like to feel stupid. Feeling stupid is a barrier to us when we are sitting down and doing the work. 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.
Pretty much anything that you can think of, 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. The major barrier is emotional. We’re scared; feeling stupid doesn’t feel good and in the beginning of learning anything new you feel really stupid but put 20 hours in anything, it doesn’t matter. What do you want to learn? What turns you on, what lights you up? Go out and do it! It only takes 20 hours 🙂
