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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.
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.
Here are the ten major principles of rapid skill acquisition: 1. Choose a lovable project. 2. Focus your energy on one skill at a time. 3. Define your target performance level. 4. Deconstruct the skill into subskills. 5. Obtain critical tools. 6. Eliminate barriers to practice. 7. Make dedicated time for practice. 8. Create fast feedback loops. 9. Practice by the clock in short bursts. 10. Emphasize quantity and speed.
“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.”
Pick one, and only one, new skill you wish to acquire. Put all of your spare focus and energy into acquiring that skill, and place other skills on temporary hold.
Focusing on one prime skill at a time is absolutely necessary for rapid skill acquisition. You’re not giving up on the other skills permanently, you’re just saving them for later.
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”
The best approach to making time for skill acquisition is to identify low-value uses of time, then choose to eliminate them.
On the contrary: time spent reading or watching is not time spent practicing.
The intent of this early research is to identify the most important subskills, critical components, and required tools for practice as quickly as possible.
T. K. V. Desikachar: “The recognition of confusion is itself a form of clarity.”
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.
Not being willing to jump in over your head is the single biggest emotional barrier to rapid skill acquisition.
Mental models are the most basic unit of learning: a way of understanding and labeling an object or relationship that exists in the world.
According to Tony Schwartz, author of The Power of Full Engagement (2004) and Be Excellent at Anything (2011), 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
