The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!

by Josh Kaufman

Here’s another uncomfortable truth: many things aren’t fun until you’re good at them. Every skill has what I call a frustration barrier—a period of time in which you’re horribly unskilled, and you’re painfully aware of that fact. Why start something when you know you’re going to be bad at it?

Carlos never took a class. He doesn’t know the formal rules of English grammar. He can’t even tell you how he knows English. That isn’t really important. He can speak and write English fluently, which is what really matters.

If my goal was to be able to speak Spanish fluently, a few weeks of trying to converse with people in Spanish would’ve produced better results than four years of schooling.

If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough.

Skill acquisition requires practicing the skill in question. It requires significant periods of sustained, focused concentration. It requires creativity, flexibility, and the freedom to set your own standard of success. Unfortunately, most modern methods of education and credentialing require simple compliance. The primary (but unstated) goal isn’t to acquire useful skills, it’s to certify completion of a mostly arbitrary set of criteria, established by standards committees far removed from the student, for the purpose of validating certain qualities some third party appears to care about.

If you want to get good at anything where real-life performance matters, you have to actually practice that skill in context. Study, by itself, is never enough.

I also recommend precommitting to completing at least twenty hours of practice. Once you start, you must keep practicing until you hit the twenty-hour mark. If you get stuck, keep pushing: you can’t stop until you reach your target performance level or invest twenty hours. If you’re not willing to invest at least twenty hours up front, choose another skill to acquire. The reason for this is simple: the early parts of the skill acquisition process usually feel harder than they really are. You’re often confused, and you’ll run into unexpected problems and barriers. Instead of giving up when you experience the slightest difficulty, precommitting to twenty hours makes it easier to persist.

It doesn’t take much practice at all to go from “very slow and grossly incompetent” to “reasonably fast and noticeably competent.”

Contrary to popular usage, “steep learning curves” are good, not bad.

Once you start practicing something new, your skills will naturally and noticeably improve in a very short period of time. The trick is to start practicing as quickly as possible. Not thinking about practicing or worrying about practicing, but actually practicing.

If you want to be able to bake the perfect croissant, pick up a few good books related to baking and pastries. Instead of reinventing the process, you’ll find existing techniques that have been perfected over many years by the masters of the field. If you see the same technique or process described in multiple resources, chances are good it’s important to know.

If you’re not confused by at least half of your early research, you’re not learning as quickly as you’re capable of learning. If you start to feel intimidated or hesitant about the pace you’re attempting, you’re on the right track. Provided you’re working on a lovable problem or project, the more confused you are at the outset, the more internal pressure you’ll feel to figure things out, and the faster you’ll learn.

The best use of this technique is in instances where fast recall of information is essential. If you’re learning common vocabulary words in order to acquire a new language, spaced repetition and reinforcement is valuable. In instances where fast recall isn’t crucial, you’re usually better off skipping the flash cards in favor of maximizing practice and experimentation time.

Getting into the habit of making and testing predictions will help you acquire skills more rapidly. It’s a variation on the scientific method, with four key elements: Observations—what are you currently observing? Knowns—what do you know about the topic already? Hypotheses—what do you think will improve your performance? Tests—what are you going to try next? I recommend using a notebook or other reference tool to track your experiments and form hypotheses as you practice. By keeping track of your predictions and generating new ideas, you’ll have more fruitful experiments to test.

the optimal learning cycle appears to be approximately ninety minutes of focused concentration.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

it would be a complete embarrassment to have an instrument this nice in my house and not be able to play it. In addition, if I don’t learn to play, I’ll have wasted a good chunk of money. I’m now invested substantially in the outcome, so it’s more likely I’ll make time to practice, making this purchase a great example of using a precommitment to change behavior.

Chris hosts a very fun conference called World Domination Summit. Imagine bringing together over a thousand people who are each doing crazy/odd/interesting things in the same general area: that’s WDS.

There are many places to find chord charts: pretty much every ukulele book contains a set of chord diagrams. What makes Mike’s chart unique is that it’s organized by frequency of use. Common chords, like the chords featured in the “Four Chord Song,” are listed first. Rare chords, like G#SUS4, are listed at the bottom, since you’ll rarely see them used. This type of frequency analysis is very, very useful: the power law applies to music as well. To be able to play songs, you don’t need to know hundreds of chords. Ten to twelve chords cover most songs.

Memorize the song by just singing first! It’s important to separate instrument-knowledge from song-knowledge. You need to be able to just sing the whole thing, no instrument in hand. (Voice quality doesn’t matter: sing, hum, whistle, anything.)

Once you have the song memorized, sing the note-names instead of the lyrics. Memorize the song like this, eyes closed.

Finally, add the instrument, singing the note-names as you play ...

Every day, I play and sing the song over and over again: I’ve lost count of how many times. My chord transitions are becoming smoother, the strumming pattern is getting more consistent, and I’m remembering most of the words. A few of the transitions between songs are tricky, so I spend extra time practicing them.

Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit. —CONRAD HILTON,

The major barrier to rapid skill acquisition is not physical or intellectual: it’s emotional. Doing something new is always uncomfortable at first, and it’s easy to waste a ton of time and energy thinking about practicing instead of practicing.