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. This is an actual outfit; I thought this was a good idea. Even Lela knows that it’s not a good idea. So there is so much to learn and so much craziness all at once.
To add to the craziness, Kelsey and I both work from home. We’re entrepreneurs; we run our own businesses. Kelsey develops courses online for yoga teachers. I’m an author. So, I’m working from home, Kelsey’s working from home, we have an infant, and we’re trying to make sure that everything gets done that needs to be done. Life is really, really busy.
A couple of weeks into this amazing experience, when the sleep deprivation really kicked in, around week eight, I had this thought. It was the same thought that parents across the ages, internationally, everybody has had: I am never going to have free time ever again. Somebody said it’s true. It’s not exactly true, but it feels really, really true in that moment. This was really disconcerting to me because one of the things I enjoy more than anything else is learning new things. Getting curious about something and diving in, fiddling around, learning through trial and error, and eventually becoming pretty good at something. Without this free time, I didn’t know how I was ever going to do that again.
So, I’m a big geek; I want to keep learning things, I want to keep growing. What I decided to do was go to the library and the bookstore and look at what research says about how we learn and how we learn quickly. I read a bunch of books, I read a bunch of websites, and tried 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? It takes 10,000 hours. If you want to learn something new, if you want to be good at it, it’s going to take 10,000 hours to get there. I read this in book after book, in website after website. And my mental experience of reading all of this stuff was like: No!! I don’t have time! 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.
10,000 hours, just to give you a rough order of magnitude, 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 something kinda funky going on here. What the research says and what we expect and have experienced don’t match up.
Here’s the wrinkle: the 10,000-hour rule came out of studies of expert-level performance. There’s a professor at Florida State University, his name is K. Anders Ericsson. He is the originator of the 10,000-hour rule. Where that came from is, he studied professional athletes, world-class musicians, chess grandmasters, all of these ultra-competitive folks in ultra-high performing fields. He tried to figure out how long it takes to get to the top of those kinds of fields. What he found is, the more deliberate practice, the more time those individuals spend practicing the elements of whatever it is they do, the better they get. The folks at the tippy top of their fields put in around 10,000 hours of practice.
Now, we were talking about the game of telephone a little bit earlier. Here’s what happened: an author by the name of Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book in 2007 called “Outliers: The Story of Success,” and the central piece of that book was the 10,000-hour rule. Practice a lot, practice well, and you will do extremely well, you will reach the top of your field.
What Dr. Ericsson was actually saying is, it takes 10,000 hours to get to the top of an ultra-competitive field in a very narrow subject. But here’s what happened: ever since “Outliers” came out and reached the top of best-seller lists, stayed there for three solid months, the 10,000-hour rule was everywhere. A society-wide game of telephone started to be played. 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, is not true.
So, what the research actually says — I spent a lot of time at the CSU library in the cognitive psychology stacks because I’m a geek. When you look at the studies of skill acquisition, you see over and over a graph like this. Researchers, whether they’re studying a motor skill, something you do physically, or a mental skill, they like to study things that they can time, because you can quantify that. They’ll give research participants a little task, something that requires physical arrangement or learning a little mental trick, and they’ll time how long a participant takes to complete the skill.
Here’s what this graph says: 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. That early part of practice is really efficient. People get good at things with just a little bit of practice.
Now, what’s interesting to note is that for skills 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 relabel performance time to how good you are, the graph flips, and you get this famous and widely known learning curve. 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. That early level of improvement is really fast. Then at a certain point, you reach a plateau, and the subsequent gains become much harder to get, they take more time to get.
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? Hopefully, in as short a period of time as possible. 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 a 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 of days here and there. 20 hours isn’t that hard to accumulate. Now, there’s a method to doing this. 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, efficiently, that will make sure you invest those 20 hours in the most effective way possible.
Here’s the method; it applies to anything:
1. Deconstruct the skill: Decide exactly what you want to be able to do when you’re done, then break it down into smaller pieces. Most things we think of as skills are actually big bundles of skills requiring all sorts of different things. The more you can break apart the skill, the more you can decide what parts will actually help you get to what you want. Then practice those first. If you practice the most important things first, you’ll improve your performance in the least amount of time possible.
2. Learn enough to self-correct: Get three to five resources about what you’re trying to learn. Could be books, DVDs, courses, anything. But don’t use those as a way to procrastinate on practice. I know I do this — get like 20 books about the topic and think, “I’m going to start learning how to program a computer when I complete these 20 books.” No. That’s procrastination. Learn just enough to practice and self-correct or self-edit as you practice. The learning becomes a way of getting better at noticing when you’re making a mistake and then doing something a little different.
3. Remove barriers to practice: Distractions like television and the internet get in the way of actually sitting down and doing the work. Use a little willpower to remove distractions that keep you from practicing. The more likely you are to sit down and practice, the better.
4. Practice for at least 20 hours: Most skills have what I call a frustration barrier. The grossly-incompetent-and-knowing-it part is really frustrating. We don’t like to feel stupid, and feeling stupid is a barrier to sitting down and doing the work. By pre-committing to practicing whatever it is for at least 20 hours, you will overcome that initial frustration barrier and stick with the practice long enough to reap the rewards.
That’s it! It’s not rocket science. Four simple steps to learn anything.
This is easy to talk about in theory, but it’s more fun to talk
about in practice. One of the things I’ve wanted to learn for a long time is how to play the ukulele. Has anybody seen Jake Shimabukuro’s TEDTalk where he plays the ukulele and makes it sound like — he’s like a ukulele god. It’s amazing. I saw it, and thought, “That is so cool!” It’s such a neat instrument. I wanted to learn how to play.
So I decided to test this theory. I wanted to put 20 hours into practicing the ukulele and see where it got me. The first thing about playing the ukulele is, to practice, you have to have one, right? So, I got a ukulele and — My lovely assistant? Thank you, sir. I think I need the chord here. It’s not just a ukulele, it’s an electric ukulele.
The first couple of hours are just like the first couple of hours of anything. You have to get the tools you need to practice. 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? Learning how to tune, making sure that all the things that need to be done in order to start practicing get done.
When I was ready to start practicing, I looked in online databases and songbooks for how to play songs. They say, okay, ukuleles, you can play more than one string at a time, so you can play chords. That’s cool, you are accompanying yourself, yay you. When I started looking at songs, I had an ukulele chord book with hundreds of chords. Looking at this, I thought, “Wow, that’s intimidating.” But when you look at the actual songs, you see the same chords over and over.
As it turns out, playing the ukulele is like doing anything. There’s a very small set of important things and techniques you use all the time. In most songs, you’ll use four, maybe five chords, and that’s it, that’s the song. You don’t have to know hundreds of chords, just the four or five.
During my research, I found a wonderful medley of pop songs by a band called Axis of Awesome. Somebody knows it. — Axis of Awesome says you can play pretty much any pop song of the past five decades if you know four chords: G, D, Em, and C. Four chords pump out every pop song ever, right? So I thought, this is cool! I would like to play every pop song ever.
It’s amazing, pretty much anything 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 learning a bunch of little tips or tricks. The major barrier is 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 into anything. It doesn’t matter. What do you want to learn? Do you want to learn a language? Want to learn how to cook? Want to learn how to draw? What turns you on? What lights you up? Go out and do that thing. It only takes 20 hours. Have fun.