the first 20 hours

Book Notes: The First 20 Hours

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The First 20 Hours, by Josh Kaufman, is a book about learning things quickly. It offers tactical advice on how to rapidly acquire a new skill.

The first few chapters provide a lot of useful and in-depth principles for how to learn something fast. The latter chapters (while interesting) serve as appendices for how the author applied these principles to different things he wanted to learn.

To put his points in context, the author explains the critical difference between learning a skill, versus mastering a skill:

  • Rapid skill acquisition is different from mastery. Mastery, (as described in Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell) requires 10,000 hours of practice.
  • In most cases, you aren’t looking to master something, you are looking to learn something new. As long as you are intentional about the steps you take, you can learn something new in only 20 hours.
  • Many avoid skill acquisition because the 10,000-hour principle seems daunting. Reframing skill acquisition with this 20-hour requirement is less intimidating.

Practice is Central to Skill Acquisition

  • Practice is central to skill acquisition. You cannot learn anything without practice. Studying and researching will only get you so far.
  • You must practice deliberately. Engaging in a new skill casually, without intent to improve or learn, will not affect your performance. Practice with the intention to learn is the best way to acquire a new skill.
  • We often avoid practice because we are afraid. We are afraid of failing, of looking silly, of embarrassment. Understand this tendency and push past it. Do not put off practice.

Steps for Skill Acquisition

  1. Choose a lovable project — Choose a project you will enjoy doing. Otherwise, you will avoid practicing or wanting to learn.
  2. Focus your energy on learning one skill at a time — Do not spread yourself too thin by trying to learn multiple skills all at once. Keep one skill a priority, focus, and learn it deeply. Once you’ve learned this one skill, you can move on to the next.
  3. Define your target performance level — Define what “good enough” looks like. Spend just enough time to get to “good enough” and no more. Don’t overdo it, but don’t “underdo” it either.
  4. Deconstruct a skill into sub-skills — Determine the fundamentals of a skill. Find the smaller components of a given skill, then focus your energy on learning one sub-skill at a time.
  5. Obtain critical tools needed for learning and practice — You can’t learn a skill without the required tools. Acquire them.
  6. Eliminate barriers to practice — The easier you can make it for yourself to practice, the better. You want practicing to become a habit, and you want to avoid relying on willpower to enforce practice.
  7. Make dedicated time for practice — You cannot learn without practice. If you are not willing to dedicate 20 hours to skill acquisition, then you must find another skill.
  8. Create fast feedback loops — The faster you can understand if you are doing something correctly or incorrectly, the better. This gives you the ability to change your approach to learn the right technique. This has parallels to the economics of pivots in The Lean Startup.
  9. Practice by the clock in short bursts — Practice enough to hit your 20-hour commitment, but keep each practice session short enough to avoid overwhelm. Allow your brain to digest what it had just learned during a practice session.
  10. Emphasize quantity and speed — The more times you practice something, the better. Practice often, quickly, and repetitively. Failing and tweaking your approach will prove way more effective. Look for as many “at-bats” as possible.

Ten Principles of Effective Learning

  1. Research the skill and related topics — start by researching, so you know where to start practicing. Avoid deep reading. Skim material and look for recurring themes. Recurring themes in multiple publications are the skills (or sub-skills) that you should focus on learning.
  2. Jump in over your head — start practicing and get uncomfortable. As you practice, look for the things you don’t know yet or things that confuse you. If you aren’t confused by at least half of your research or practice, you’re not learning fast enough.
  3. Identify mental models and mental hooks — Look for the fundamental principles of the skill that apply to other areas of the skill. These mental models serve as the building blocks. Learn those, so you can understand the subject more deeply.
  4. Imagine the opposite of what you want — By imagining the opposite of what you want, you’ll be able to identify additional important things you need to learn.
  5. Talk to practitioners to set expectations — You’ll learn a lot faster if you can consult others who have already acquired the skill and can share what they’ve learned. This can help you avoid mistakes (and time wasted) just by learning from others.
  6. Eliminate distractions from your environment — The more distractions you have, the harder it will be to practice. Eliminate as many distractions as possible, so you can focus and ensure you are practicing deliberately.
  7. Use spaced repetition for reinforcement — Flashcards can be a very effective tool in learning and memorizing concepts for the skill you are looking to learn. Repetition helps to reinforce. Spacing out this repetition improves memorization. Give your mind space to process what you are trying to learn.
  8. Create scaffolds and checklists to learn — Create checklists and processes for your next steps in your skill acquisition to make your system of learning simpler to follow.
  9. Make predictions when learning — Use the scientific method to hypothesize, test, observe, then conclude. Conclusions are new hypotheses that need more testing. Testing and observing based on your prediction allows you to learn the fundamentals more deeply and apply what you are learning in real-time.
  10. Honor your biology when learning — Your mind and body will only be able to take about 90 minutes of concentrated learning before needing a break.
    • Learning is reinforced during sleep — Your brain solidifies your learning while sleeping. Your sleeping brain will continue to learn and process the information you acquired during your waking and practice hours. Thus, sleep is critical to the learning process. Ideally, you should attempt practice before bedtime or napping to improve the onboarding of new skills.