Josh Kaufman in TEDxCSU said The first 20 hours how to learn anything

Headlines - Hi everyone. Two years ago, my life changed forever. My wife Kelsey, and I welcome dar daughter Leila, into the world. Now, becoming a parent is an amazing, amazing experience, your whole world changes overnight. And all of your priorities change immediately so fast, that it makes it really difficult to process sometimes. Now, you also have to learn a tremendous amount about being a parent, like, for example, how to dress your child. This was new to me, I this is an actual outfit, I thought this was a good idea. And even Lila knows that it's not a good idea. So there was so much to learn, and so much craziness all at once. And to add to the craziness, Kelsey and I both work from home, we're entrepreneurs, we run our own businesses. 

So Kelsey is a develops courses online for yoga teachers, I'm an author. And so I'm working for home, Kelsey is working for home, we have an infant, and we're trying to make sure that everything gets done that needs done. And life is really, really, really busy. And a couple of weeks into this amazing experience, when the sleep deprivation really kicked in, like around a week eight, I had this thought. And it was the same thought that parents crossed the ages internationally, they everybody has had this thought, which is I am never going to have free time ever again. And this, somebody said it's true. Yeah, it's, it's not exactly true. But it feels really, really true in that moment. And this, this was really disconcerting to me, because one of the things that I enjoy more than anything else is learning new things, getting curious about something and diving in, and fiddling around and learning through trial and error, and eventually becoming pretty good at something. And without this, this free time, I didn't know how I was ever going to do that ever again. And so I'm a big geek, 

I want to keep learning things I want to keep growing. And so what I decided to do was go to the library, and go to the bookstore, and look at what research says about how we learn and how we learn quickly. And I read a bunch of books, I read a bunch of websites, and trying to answer this question, how long does it take to acquire a new skill? You know what I found?

10,000 hours.

Anybody ever heard this 10,000 takes 10,000 hours if you want if you want to learn something new, if you want to be good at it, it's gonna take 10,000 hours to get there. And I read this in book after book and website after website. And the it might my mental experience of reading all of this stuff

was like, No, I don't

have time, I don't have to I don't have 10,000 hours, I am never going to be able to learn anything new, ever again. But that's not true. So 10,000 hours just to give you a rough order of magnitude 10,000 hours is a full time job for five years. That's a long time. And we've all had the experience of learning something new and it didn't take us anywhere close to that amount of time, right? So what's up, there's there's something kind of funky going on here. what the research says and what we expect and have experiences. They don't match up. And what I found, here's the wrinkle. The 10,000 hour rule came out of studies of expert level performance. There was a professor at Florida State University His name is Kate Anders Ericsson. He's the originator of the 10,000 hour rule. And where that came from, is he studied professional athletes, world class musicians, chess grandmasters, all of these altra competitive folks in ultra high performing fields. And he tried to figure out how long does it take to get to the top of those kinds of fields. And what he found is the more deliberate practice, the more time that those individual spent practicing the elements of whatever it is that they do. The more time you spend, the better you get. And the folks at the tippy top of their fields. 

Put in around 10,000 hours of practice. Now, we're talking about the game of telephone a little bit earlier. Here's what happened. And author by the name of Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book in 2007, called outliers, the story of success. And the centerpiece of that book was the 10,000 hour rule, practice a lot practice well, and you will do extremely well you reach the top of your field. So the message, what Dr. Anders Ericsson was actually saying is, it takes 10,000 hours to get to the top of an ultra competitive field in a very narrow subjects. That's what that means. But here's what happened ever since outliers came out, immediately came out reached the top of the bestseller list stayed there for three solid months, all of a sudden, the 10,000 hour rule was everywhere. And a society wide game of telephone started to be played. 

So this message, it takes 10,000 hours to reach the top of an ultra competitive field became, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something which became it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something which became, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something. But that last statement, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something. It's not true. It's not true. So what the research actually says if I spent a lot of time here at the CSU library, in the cognitive psychology stacks, because I'm a geek. And when you actually look at the studies of skill acquisition, you see over and over and over a graph like this. Now, researchers, whether they're studying a motor skill, something you do physically or a mental skill, they'd like to study things that they can time, because you can quantify that, right? So they'll give research participants a little task, something that requires physical arrangement or something that requires learning a little mental trick. And they'll time how long a participant takes to complete the skill. And here's what this graph says, when you start. So when researchers gave participants a task, it took them a really long time, because it was new, and they were horrible. 

With a little bit of practice, they get better and better and better. And the early part of practice is really, really efficient, people get good at things, with just a little bit of practice. Now, what's interesting to note is that if you know we don't really for skills that we want to learn for ourselves, we don't care so much about time, right? We just care about how good we are, whatever good happens to mean. So if we read label performance time to how good you are, the graph flips. And you get this famous and widely known. This is the learning curve. And the story of the learning curve is when you start, you're grossly incompetent, and you know it, right?

With a little bit of practice, you get really good really quick. So that early level of improvement is really fast. And then at a certain point, you reach a plateau, and the subsequent gains become much harder to get to take more time to get. Now my question is, I want that. Right? How long does it take from starting something and being grossly incompetent and knowing it to being reasonably good? And hopefully, a shorter period of time as possible? So how long does that take? Here's what my research says. 20 hours. That's it. You can go from knowing nothing about any skill that you can think of want to learn language. Want to learn how to draw, want to learn how to juggle flaming chainsaws. If you put 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice into that thing, you will be astounded, astounded at how good you are 20 hours is doable. That's about 45 minutes a day, for about a month. 

Even skipping a couple days here and there. 20 hours isn't that hard to accumulate. Now, there's a method to doing this, because it's not like you can just start fiddling around for about 20 hours and expect these massive improvements. There's a way to practice intelligently. There's a way to practice efficiently, that will make sure that you invest those 20 hours in the most effective way that you possibly can. And here's the method it applies to anything. The first is to deconstruct the skill. decide exactly what you want to be able to do when you're done and then look into the skill and break it down into smaller and smaller pieces. Most of the things that we think of as skills are actually big bundles of skills that require all sorts of different things, the more you can break apart the skill, the more you're able to decide what are the parts of the skill that will actually helped me get to what I want. 

And then you can practice those first. And if you practice the most important things, first, you'll be able to improve your performance in the least amount of time possible. The second is learn enough to self correct. So get three to five resources about what it is you're trying to learn could be books, could be DVDs, could be courses could be anything. But don't use those as a as a way to procrastinate on practice, I know I do this, right? Get like 20 books about the topics like I'm gonna start learning how to program a computer, when I complete these 20 bucks. No, that's procrastination, what you want to do is learn just enough that you can actually practice and self correct, or self edit, as you practice. So the learning becomes a way of getting better at noticing when you're making a mistake. And then doing something a little different. 

The third is to remove barriers to practice, distractions, television, internet, all of these things that get in the way of you actually sitting down and doing the work. And the more you're able to use just a little bit of willpower to remove the distractions that are keeping you from practicing, the more likely less likely you are to actually sit down and practice, right. And the fourth is to practice for at least 20 hours. Now most skills have what I call a frustration barrier, you know, the grossly incompetent knowing it part. That's really, really frustrating, we don't like to feel stupid. And feeling stupid is a barrier to us actually sitting down and doing the work. 

So by pre committing to practicing whatever it is that you want to do for at least 20 hours, you will be able to overcome that initial frustration barrier and stick with the practice long enough to actually reap the rewards. Alright, that's it. It's not rocket science for very simple steps that you can use to learn anything.

Now, this is easy to talk about in theory. But it's more fun to talk about in practice. So one of the things that I've wanted to learn how to do for a long time, is play the ukulele. as anybody seen Jake Shimabukuro his TED Talk, where he plays the ukulele and makes it sound like, he's like a ukulele. God, it's, it's amazing. It's like I saw that it's like that is so cool. It's such a neat instrument, I would I would really like to learn how to play. And so I decided that to test this theory, I wanted to put 20 hours into practicing the ukulele and see, see where we got. And so the first thing about playing the ukulele is in order to practice, you have to have one, right. So I got it. And Lily and mice, my lovely assistant. Thank you, sir. I think I need the cord here. 

It's not just the laelia. It's an electric delay. Yeah. So the first couple hours are just like the first couple hours of it anything, you have to get the tools that you're using to practice, you have to make sure that they're available. my ukulele didn't come with strings attached, I had to figure out how to put those on. Like that's kind of important, right? And learning how to tune in learning how to make sure that all of the things that need to be done in order to start practicing, get done right. 

Now, one of the things when I was ready to actually start practicing, was I looked in online databases and song books for how to play songs and they say, okay, ukuleles, you can play more than one string at a time. So you can play chords, that's cool. You're accompanying yourself, you. And when I started looking at songs, I had I had an ukulele chord book that like hundreds of courses, looking at the same a Whoa, that's intimidating. But when you look at the actual songs, you see the same chords over and over, right? As it turns out, playing the ukulele is is kind of like doing anything. 

There's a very small set of things that are really important and techniques that you'll use all the time. And so in most songs, you'll use four, maybe five chords and that's it. That's the song You don't have to know the hundreds as long as you know the four or the five. So while I was doing my research, I found a wonderful little medley of pop songs by a band called axis of awesome and somebody is somebody knows it.

And what what access Wasim says is that you can learn or you can play pretty much any pop song of the past five decades. If you know four chords and those chords are g D, E minor, C. Four gourds pump out every pop song ever right? So I thought this is cool. I would like to play every pop song ever. So that was the first song I decided to learn and I would like to actually share it with you ready? Just a small town

girl. Living in a lonely world. midnight train going anywhere. I heard that you settle down that found the girl that you're married now. Every night in my dreams I see you. I feel you badasses how I know we'll take no more no more kids cannot wait. Tom yours is you are amazing. We did amazing things back then I would go wherever you were.

With or without you. What I found myself find myself in tons of trouble. Mother Mary comes to me. Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner. No woman no crap. Surely is a dream come true Melinda. Once a jolly Swagman cams by a billabong, Hey, I just met you. And crazy, right here by number to call me Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, boom, diagnose, I have to say goodbye or closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginnings. And thank you. I love that song.

And I have a secret to share with you. So by playing that song for you. I just hit my 20th hour of practicing the ukulele. And so it's amazing. Pretty much anything that you can think of. What do you want to do? The major barrier to learning something new is not intellectual. It's not the process of you learning a bunch of little tips or tricks or things. The major barriers emotional. We're scared. Feeling stupid doesn't feel good in the beginning of learning anything new. You feel really stupid. So the major barrier is not intellectual. It's emotional. 

But put 20 hours in anything. Doesn't matter. What do you want to learn? You want to learn language? Learn how to cook. You want to learn how to draw? What turns you on what lights you up? Go out and do that thing. That only takes 20 hours. How fun

great job