The First 20 Hours — How to Learn Anything, A Speech Given by Josh Kaufman TEDxCSU
Highlights of the speech summarized by Evan Wu, currently an architecture student studying at CUHK School of Architecture.
A way to practice intelligently, to practice efficiently, which will make sure we invest those 20 hours in the most effective way that we possibly can.
1st step: Deconstruct the skill.
Decide what we want to be able to do when we are done. Then, look into the skill and break it down into smaller pieces. Skills that we want to acquire are actually big bundles of skills that require all sorts of different things. The more we can break apart the skill, the more we are able to decide what are parts of the skill can help us get to where we want. And then we can practice those first.
2nd step: Learn Enough to Self-Correct.
Get 3–5 resources about the skill that we are trying to learn, which could be books, DVDs, courses, and anything. But don’t use those as a way to procrastinate on practice. Like getting 20 books about the topic, “I’m going to start learning how to program when I complete these 20 books”, which is procrastination. What we want to do is to learn just enough that we can actually practice and self-correct or self-edit when practicing.
3rd step: Remove Practice Barriers,
Such as distractions, television, the internet. Things that stop you from sitting down and doing the work.
4th step: Practice at least 20 hours.
By pre-committing to practice the skill for 20 hours, we are able to overcome the frustration barrier at the beginning of learning a new thing. The first couple hours are like the first couple hours of anything. You have to have the tools that you are using to practice, which also means you have to make sure that they are available.
The major barrier to skill acquisition isn’t intellectual…it’s emotional.
We are scared of feeling stupid at the beginning when we learn a new skill.
Reference
- [TedxTalks]. (2013, March15). The First 20 Hours — How to Learn Anything [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv6_HuCYExM