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TEDxCSU  Josh Kaufman – The first 20 hours – how to learn anything

Learning new things is fun.  Need to have free time to do this.  How do we learn quickly?

performance time of a skill reduces with practice time.  But you can still do the skill early on.  You only need a little bit of practice to improve.  Learning curve is steep at the beginning, but levels off.    20 focused hours to become reasonably good at something.

Efficient use of those 20 hours:

  1. Deconstruct the skill – decide exactly what the goal is and break it down
  2. Learn enough to self correct – get 4-5 sources of information (books, YouTube, coaches, courses, etc.)  Don’t do the courses for procrastination – learn enough to start then keep learning/correcting as you practice/do.  Get good enough to learn when you are making a mistake then try changing behaviour/approach.
  3. Remove practice barriers – distractions: TV, Internet, etc.   Have to sit down and actually do the work.
  4. Practice for at least 20 hours.   The learning curve will include a period of feeling stupid as you don’t yet understand the subject.  That feeling stupid will be a barrier to sitting down and doing/learning.  A form of procrastination.  Pre-commit to 20hours to get past that barrier, get far enough to start reaping rewards.
The major barrier to learning anything is not intellectual, we can all learn the core concepts, the major skills, the little tips and tricks, etc. …
it is emotional, we are scared.  Feeling stupid doesn’t feel good, and that is how it feels at the beginning.
Put 20 hours in and you can learn: coding, a language, the ukulele, cooking, draw, etc.
Go and do it and have fun growing.