The First 20 Hours

How to Learn Anything...Fast!

Portfolio, 2013

15 min read

10 take-aways

Text available

What's inside?

You need 10,000 hours of practice to gain mastery, but only 20 hours to become usefully proficient at most skills.

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Editorial Rating

Qualities

Innovative
Applicable

Recommendation

This is a wonderful – if flawed – book. Readers will benefit from the first three chapters, wherein author Josh Kaufman explains his logical, effective “rapid skill-acquisition system.” The “Afterword” and the “Note to the Reader” are also helpful. However, unless the specific skills intrigue you, the chapters in which the author goes through teaching himself yoga, the game of Go, computer programming, windsurfing, touch typing and the ukulele are not as useful, though the author intends them as positive demonstrations. In these case history chapters, any clear sense of Kaufman’s program – and how a reader might apply it – disappears beneath an unnecessary welter of terminology and jargon specific to each endeavor covered. Rather than looking to this manual as an aid in learning those particular skills, savor Kaufman’s journey to discover how you can quickly develop competency in new areas. His first principle is to focus on something you always wanted to learn. The author does not discuss how his techniques work in a corporate setting, but training professionals will immediately see the value of applying his system. getAbstract recommends Kaufman’s effective rapid skill-acquisition process to anyone who wants to gain a new skill quickly and to those who teach skills to others.

Summary

“The 10,000-Hour Rule”

In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-hour rule in his bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success. Based on research by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, this principle states that gaining superior expertise requires at least 10,000 hours of practice. This equates to “eight hours of deliberate practice every day for about three and a half years, with no breaks, no weekends and no vacations” – an enormous, exhausting commitment.

Even the most determined and dedicated performers in, for example, music or professional sports, find that three and a half hours a day is their maximum daily limit for deliberate, productive practice. By that standard, most people would require 10 years or more to gain world-class mastery of a skill or discipline. Considering that most people can find only a couple of hours of extra time a week, this is simply not practical. The 10,000-hour rule assumes that you intend to perform on the level of the world’s top athletes, musicians and other superstars.

If your ambition is to play golf better than Tiger Woods, start putting in your 10,000 hours of purposeful, focused, intense ...

About the Author

Josh Kaufman, who wrote The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, specializes in teaching professionals how to amass business knowledge.

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A. 10 years ago

I think the author is using 'feel good' logic here. The fact that the 10.000 hours rule is inpractical for most people doesn't undermine its validity. And learning a language or a musical instrument for 20 hours won't you bring anywhere. A better approach is to focus on the process rather than the result, a method described in "The Practicing Mind" by Thomas M. Sterner.
- 7 years ago
  
  I disagree. The 10,000 hours rule *is* impractical for most people because most of us don't want to be in the top 99% of golfers or chess players. It's much easier to decrease this quantity of practice when your goals are specific and you're not worried about becoming a world master. 20 hours of deconstruction and dedicated practice is enough to establish the fundamentals of any skill and create enough momentum to keep going.

Josh Kaufman