I’m a big fan of Josh Kaufman. I first read The Personal MBA during my freshman year of college and it’s been a constant on my everchanging bookshelf. I go back to it time and time again for snippets of wisdom and new ideas.
Kaufman has another book, The First 20 Hours, that I looked at for years, but never read. I watched his TedTalk on the book and listened to podcasts episodes inspired by it, but I never read the book… until now. I wish I read it sooner. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Read my notes and then, if you want to know more, buy the book and read it all the way through.
A Note to the Reader
- Every skill has a frustration barrier, which Kaufman’s calls, “A period of time in which you’re horribly unskilled, and you’re painfully aware of that fact” (ix).
- Skills don’t start being fun until you get through the frustration barrier.
- Therefore, Kaufman asks, “Is it possible to acquire new skills less painfully, in a way that requires far less time and effort?” (x)
- “When you decide to learn something completely new, you’re not competing against other people: you’re competing against your own previous lack of ability, and any improvement is a win” (xi).
- “In every area of life, it’s useful to know how to pick up new skills quickly. Whether you use this method to explore a new interest, improve your career, or get the best possible start on a skill you intend to develop to mastery, you’ll find the principles in this book quite useful” (xi).
Chapter 1: Learning Junkie
- “The process of skill acquisition is not really about the raw hours you put in…it’s what you put into those hours” (3). This makes sense to me. In Grit, Angela Duckworth extensively discussed the importance of deliberate practice for skill development. Passive/Ambient practice is a horribly inefficient way to acquire a new skill and, at some point, stops improving your skill at all.
- Malcolm Gladwell and Anders Ericsson have popularized the idea of the 10,000 Hour Rule, which states that “expert-level performance takes, on average, ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve” (3).
- While the 10,000 Hour Rule seems to be true, the caveat, Kaufman says, is that “it only applies to developing expert-level performance in competitive fields, not acquiring new skills for personal use” (4). Most skills, even those you want to monetize, do not require “world class, expert-level performance.” If you want to be among the best in the world in regards to a particular skill, you will have to put in ten thousand hours of deliberate practice over the course of decades. But if you have lower goals than “best in the world,” you may get there with 20 hours of deliberate practice over the course of a few weeks or months.
- Kaufman defines deliberate practice as, “intentionally and systematically practicing in order to improve a skill” (4).
- Kaufman outlines five major steps to rapid skill acquisition:
- “Deciding exactly hat 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” (5).
- Of regular schooling, Kaufman says, “Academic learning and credentialing have almost zero overlap with skill acquisition” (7). For example, he says, “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” (8). After four years of straight-A grades in Spanish classes, Kaufman was completely unable to hold conversation in Spanish.
- The fact that learning is different than skill acquisition does not mean learning is useless, just that it is overused. Learning still has a place in the rapid skill acquisition process. Kaufman says, “Learning concepts related to a skill helps you self-edit or self-correct as you’re practicing” (8).
- Training is also different from skill acquisition. Kaufman defines training as, “improving a skill you’ve already acquired through repetition” (9).
- “You must fully appreciate the fact that you’re capable of acquiring new skills” (11).
- Kaufman presents the “three-stage model” of skills acquisition:
- “Cognitive (Early) Stage: understanding what you’re trying to do, researching, thinking about the process, and breaking the skill into manageable parts.
- Associative (Intermediate) Stage: practicing the task, noticing environmental feedback, and adjusting your approach based on that feedback.
- Autonomous (Late) Stage: performing the skill effectively and efficiently without thinking about it or paying unnecessary attention to the process” (13).
Chapter 2: Rapid Skill Acquisition
- Kaufman provides the “ten major principles of rapid skill acquisition” as a checklist you can reference during the skill acquisition process. The principles are,
- “Choose a lovable project.
- Focus your energy on one skill at a time.
- Define your target performance level.
- Deconstruct the skill into subskills.
- Obtain critical tools.
- Eliminate barriers to practice.
- Make dedicated time to practice.
- Create fast feedback loops.
- Practice by the clock in short bursts.
- Emphasize quantity and speed” (14-15).
- In addition to the ten principles, Kaufman provides guidance on how to use them: “You won’t need to use every one of these principles for every skill you acquire, but you’ll always find at least a handful of them essential… Whenever you decide to learn something new, just go through the checklist and decide which principles apply to your particular project” (26-27).
Chapter 3: Effective Learning
- “Doing a bit of research before you jump into practice can save you precious time, energy, and emotional fortitude. Learning makes your practice more efficient, which lets you spend more of your practice time working on the most important subskills first” (28).
- Kaufman also provides ten principles of effective learning:
- “Research the skill and related topics.
- Jump in over your head.
- Identify mental models and mental hooks.
- Imagine the opposite of what you want [inversions].
- Talk to practitioners to set expectations.
- Eliminate distractions in your environment.
- Use spaced repetition and reinforcement for memorization.
- Create scaffolds and checklists.
- Make and test predictions.
- Honor your biology” (28-29).
- The goal of early research into the skill and related topics is “to identify the most important subskills, critical components, and required tools for practice…[and] to collect a wide body of knowledge about the skill as quickly as possible, creating an accurate overview of what the skill acquisition process will look like” (29).
- “For rapid skill acquisition, skimming is better than deep reading” (29).
- As you research, you’ll notice patterns and ideas popping up repeatedly. These are mental models, about which Kaufman says, “Mental models are the most basic unit of learning: a way of understanding and labeling an object or relationship that exists in the world” (30).
- In addition to mental models, there are mental hooks: “analogies and metaphors you can use to remember new concepts” (31).
- Imagining the opposite of what you want, a process called inversion, is helpful because, “By studying the opposite of what you want, you can identify important elements that aren’t immediately obvious” (32).
- Spaced repetition, using a tool like Anki or physical flashcards, is useful when you have to be able to recall information quickly. However, “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” (35).
- “Checklists are handy for remembering things that must be done every time you practice” (35).
- “Scaffolds are structures that ensure you approach the skill the same way every time” (35). Kaufman gives the example of a basketball player with a pre-free throw routine. The player “wipes hands on pants, loosen the shoulders, catch the ball from the ref, bounce three times, pause for three seconds, and shoot. That’s a scaffold” (35). I’m sure I use scaffolds, but it’s hard to think of an example or to think of deliberately developing a scaffold. That’ll take practice itself.
- Kaufman recommends using the four elements of the scientific method when making and testing predictions. Those four elements are,
- “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?” (36)
- “The optimal learning cycle appears to be approximately ninety minutes of focused concentration” (36). Practicing in short interval, like with a Pomodoro timer, may make practicing easier and more effective.
- “Whenever you decide to acquire a new skill, just review this checklist and decide which principles apply to your project (37).
Afterword
- “Remember: once you start, you can’t stop until you reach your target performance level or the twenty-hour mark. Struggle if you must, but don’t stop. Show your grit, and keep pushing forward. You’ll get there: all it takes is practice” (258).
Conclusion
For the rest of the book, Kaufman uses the principles of effective learning and the principles of rapid skill acquisition to learn six new skills:
- Yoga (asana)
- Programming (Ruby)
- Touch Typing (Colemak)
- Go (the board game)
- Ukulele
- Windsurfing
Reading his experiments with acquiring these six skills was fun. He gave illustrative examples of all of the major principles of both effective learning and rapid skill acquisition. That said, I don’t think I need to take extensive notes on his notes on learning those skills. Instead, I’ll take his two checklists and jump into my own experiments with acquiring new skills.
If you’re curious to see how he acquired each of these skills, I highly recommend reading the book and reviewing his other resources on the topic.
Resources
- The First 20 Hours (book)
- The First 20 Hours (TedTalk)
- The First 20 Hours (website)
- The featured image is Brett Jordan on Unsplash
