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

by Josh Kaufman

For updates about the material in this book, visit http://first20hours.com/updates.

To make life even more interesting, we welcomed our daughter, Lela, into the world. Lela is nine months old as I write this. Before Lela was born, Kelsey and I decided that if we were going to have kids, we wanted to make raising them ourselves a priority. One of the major reasons I quit my former management-track job at a Fortune 500 corporation was to have the flexibility to work from home, set my own schedule, and spend as much time as possible with my family. Kelsey and I share parenting responsibilities equally. Since we’re a two-business household, Kelsey works in the morning, while I take care of Lela. In the afternoon, Kelsey takes care of Lela, and I work until dinnertime. That gives me around twenty-five hours each week to work, plus whatever time I can snatch while Lela is napping. After Lela was born, I felt like I barely had enough time to get my work done, let alone acquire new skills. For a learning addict, it was crazy-making. I don’t want to give up on learning and growth completely, even with my new responsibilities. I don’t have very much free time, but I’m willing to invest what I have as wisely as possible. That’s what prompted my interest in what I call rapid skill acquisition: methods of learning new skills quickly.

Rapid skill acquisition has four major steps: Deciding exactly what you want to be able to do. Deconstructing a skill into the smallest possible subskills; Learning enough about each subskill to be able to practice intelligently and self-correct during practice; Removing physical, mental, and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice; Practicing the most important subskills for at least twenty hours.

In my first book, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business (2010), I explained why I decided to skip graduate-level business education in favor of teaching myself the principles of modern business practice and starting my own company. By avoiding business school, and spending my time actually building businesses instead, I learned a ton, and saved over $150,000 in the process. Given what I wanted to accomplish, dedicating time to business skill acquisition on my own was better than business school in every respect. 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.

In academic literature, this general process is called the “three-stage model” of skill acquisition,4 and it applies to both physical and mental skills. The three stages are 1. Cognitive (Early) Stage—understanding what you’re trying to do, researching, thinking about the process, and breaking the skill into manageable parts. 2. Associative (Intermediate) Stage—practicing the task, noticing environmental feedback, and adjusting your approach based on that feedback. 3. Autonomous (Late) Stage—performing the skill effectively and efficiently without thinking about it or paying unnecessary attention to the process.

As Dr. Dweck says in Mindset: “Your mind is like a muscle: the more you use it, the more it grows.” The more you practice, the more efficient, effective, and automatic the skill becomes.

1. Choose a lovable project. Karl Popper was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He’s the guy who popularized the idea of scientific falsifiability. In layman’s terms, if you can’t potentially prove something wrong via observation or experiment, it’s not actually science. Popper said many wise things, but I think the following remark is among the wisest: “The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.” If you want a formula for living a satisfying, productive life, you can’t go wrong with that one. Rapid skill acquisition requires choosing a lovable problem or project. The more excited you are about the skill you want to acquire, the more quickly you’ll acquire it.

If you focus on acquiring your prime skill (that is, your most lovable project) before anything else, you’ll acquire it in far less time.

2. Focus your energy on one skill at a time. One of the easiest mistakes to make when acquiring new skills is attempting to acquire too many skills at the same time. It’s a matter of simple math: acquiring new skills requires a critical mass of concentrated time and focused attention. If you only have an hour or two each day to devote to practice and learning, and you spread that time and energy across twenty different skills, no individual skill is going to receive enough time and energy to generate noticeable improvement.

Coaches aren’t the only source of fast feedback. Capture devices, like video cameras, can help you watch yourself as you perform. Tools like computer programs, training aides, and other devices can immediately indicate when you make a mistake or something is amiss.

The solution for this is to practice by the clock. Buy a decent countdown timer3 and set it for twenty minutes. There’s only one rule: once you start the timer, you must practice until it goes off. No exceptions. This simple technique will make it easier to complete longer periods of sustained practice, even when you get tired or frustrated.

In that spirit, here are the ten major principles of effective learning: 1. Research the skill and related topics. 2. Jump in over your head. 3. Identify mental models and mental hooks. 4. Imagine the opposite of what you want. 5. Talk to practitioners to set expectations. 6. Eliminate distractions in your environment. 7. Use spaced repetition and reinforcement for memorization. 8. Create scaffolds and checklists. 9. Make and test predictions. 10. Honor your biology.