I recently spoke to Josh Kaufman, who is the author ofThe Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business and the new book, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast!. Josh specializes in teaching professionals in all industries and disciplines how to master practical business knowledge and skills. The widely-acclaimed Personal MBA manifesto and recommended reading list has been downloaded over 1.28 million times from ChangeThis.com. His site hosts over 50,000 readers every month, and has been visited by over 2 million readers since its founding in 2005. Josh's current projects involve ongoing research in the fields of business, education, and skill acquisition.
In this interview, Josh disprovesMalcolm Gladwell's thesis that it takes 10,000 hours to learn a new skill, he explains why it's so hard to learn new skills, how to decide which skills to focus on and more.
Why is it so hard to learn new skills in the beginning?
Most of us are deeply disturbed at the prospect of being horrible at something, even temporarily. When you try something new, you’re usually very bad, and you know it. The easiest way to eliminate that feeling of angst is to quit practicing and go do something else, so that’s what most of us do.
The early hours of trying something new are always challenging, but a little persistance can result in huge increases in skill. The human brain is optimized to pick up new skills extremely quickly. If you persist and practice in an intelligent way, you’ll always experience dramatic improvements in a very short period of time.
Can you share a time in your life when you were trying to learn a new skill and what you did to not get frustrated?
I just learned how to program, since creating software to automate certain parts of my business would make my day-to-day life much easier.
At the beginning, learning how to code was a constant struggle: programming involves setting up your computer in a certain way, learning arcane commands, and trying not to throw your computer across the room when it didn’t do what I wanted it to do.
Pushing through the early frustration involved a few simple techniques. First, I precommitted to putting in at least 20 hours of practice, which made it much easier to persist when the going got rough instead of quitting at the first sign of difficulty. Second, I learned just enough about the core concepts to start writing real programs, instead of spending a ton of time completing canned tutorials. Third, I broke my program into smaller parts, then worked on one at a time until the software worked, testing and fixing bugs along the way.
As a result, I became a reasonably competent Ruby programmer after only 20 hours of practice. Today, my business runs completely on custom software I created. Programming is a now skill that I use every day, and the short and long-term rewards for developing the skill are huge.
Do you believe it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill? Are there any shortcuts?
I think the idea of “mastering” a skill when you’re just getting started is counterproductive: it can be a significant barrier to exploring a new skill in the first place.
The original research that resulted in the “10,000 hour rule” is valid, as far as it goes. Dr. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, as well as other researchers, have found that it takes around 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice to reach the top of ultracompetitive, easily ranked performance fields, like professional golf, music performance, or chess. In those fields, the more time you’ve spent in deliberate practice, the better you perform compared to people who have practiced fewer hours.
Most of the time, however, performance in ranked competition against world-class rivals isn’t the goal: it’s far more likely that you want to pick up a new skill to get a particular outcome. For career skills, the focus is on performing well enough to produce a result that’s meaningful to you. For personal skills and hobbies, the focus is on enjoying the process and having fun.
In these instances, the “10,000 hour rule” and the idea of “mastery” can actually serve as barriers to sitting down to practice – if you believe it takes that long to see results, you’re less likely to start in the first place. The real priority is to practice enough to get the results you’re looking for, not to attain a certain level of status or competitive performance.
You don’t have to “master” every skill you ever learn. I believe that developing new skills in a way that allows you to perform *well enough for your own purposes* is – by far – the most common and valuable purpose of skill acquisition. Based on my research, reaching that level doesn’t take anywhere close to 10,000 hours – you can usually achieve the goals you set yourself in around 20 hours of deliberate practice.
How do you know what skills to focus on and which ones to avoid?
It’s important to pay attention to what what you’re personally most interested in learning at this point in time, even if you think you “should” focus on learning something else. When you’re naturally interested in a particular skill, you’ll learn extremely quickly, so follow your interests where they lead, and avoid forcing yourself to grind through topics you’re not really interested in exploring.
That said, some skills aren’t exciting in themselves: they’re a means to an end. In business, topics like accounting and bookkeeping aren’t usually super-stimulating, but they’ll help you get better results. If the potential results are enticing, you’ll find yourself interested in the topic, and you’ll pick up the essentials in far less time.
One of the best uses of the “20 hour” precommitment is to gauge your level of interest in learning a new skill before you start practicing. Are you willing to rearrange your schedule so you can practice for roughly 40 minutes each day for a month? If not, you’re likely better off learning something else.
What are your top three tips for mastering a new skill?
First, decide what you want to be able to do. I call this a *target performance level*: what does skilled performance look like? If you have a clear idea of how good you want to become, it’s much easier to find specific practice methods that will help you get there as quickly as posssible.
Second, break the skill down into smaller parts. This process is called *deconstruction*. Most skills are really just bundlles of smaller subskills you use at the same time. By breaking down the skill into managable parts, you eliminate the early feelings of overwhelm and make it easier to get started.
Third, practice the most important subskills first. A few subskills will always be more important than others, so it makes sense to begin by practicing the things that will give you the greatest increases in performance. By focusing your early practice on the most critical parts of the skill, you’ll see a dramatic increase in your performance after a few hours of practice.
How can you prove that it takes only 20 hours to learn anything? What research based evidence backs that up?
Numerous studies in the fields of motor and cognitive skill acquisition have established that the first few hours of practicing a new skill always generate the most dramatic improvements in performance.
The general pattern looks like this: when you start, you’re horrible, but you improve very quickly as you learn the most important parts of the skill. After reaching a certain level of skill very quickly, your rate of improvement declines, and subsequent improvement becomes much slower.
In the research literature, this phenomenon is referred to as the “power law of practice,” and it’s one of the most consistent findings in skill acquisition research. The effect has been widely known since at least 1926, and it’s been replicated many times since in studies of both physical and mental skills. One study I found (“Toward an Instance Theory of Automatization,” G.D. Logan, Psychological Review, 1988) even went so far as to say “any theory of skill acquisition that does not accommodate the power law function for learning can be rejected immediately.”
The exact amount of time it takes to acquire a new skill depends on your desired performance level - if you don’t make things harder than they really need to be, it’s not at all uncommon to reach your initial objective in a few hours. For example, I learned enough about yoga in three hours to be able to practice safely at home. Given what I wanted to learn, that was enough.
The 20 hour threshold comes from combining the power law of practice with insights from behavioral psychology and game theory. Precommitting to 20 hours of practice does a few important things:
1. It’s an important indicator of how important the skill really is to you right now. If you’re not willing to rearrange your schedule to make time for practice, or you’re not willing to invest that much time to get what you want, it’s a good indicator the skill really isn’t that important to you at the moment, so you’re better off choosing to do something else.
2. Making a serious precommitment to practice at least 20 hours before acting at all helps overcome the slippery slope of procrastination. Instead of saying “I’ll get to it later,” the precommitment serves as a variation of what’s called a “Schelling point,” which pressures you to behave in a manner that’s consistent with your precommitment. It’s a line-in-the-sand designed to influence your behavior in the moment, so you actually practice.
3. 20 hours is long enough to experience dramatic improvements in skill, but not so long that it feels overwhelming to get started in the first place.
I field-tested the practice methods I explain in theFirst 20 Hourson a wide variety of skills in several contexts: fine and gross motor movements, cognitive processing, personal hobbies, and professional skills. In each instance, I noticed the most dramatic improvements during the first 20 hours of practice.
I’d recommend testing the theory on your own project. If you sit down and complete 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice in any skill you want to pick up, you’ll be astounded at how good you become. No matter what you choose to learn, you’ll always improve dramatically in those critical early hours of practice. The real challenge is sitting down to practice in the first place.
That’s why having an intelligent practice strategy is so important. Anything you can do to ensure you complete those early hours of practice in a smart way is a win.
Even after you learn a new skill, don't you have to continue to practice it or you'll lose it over time?
Sure. Skills deteriorate over time if they’re not used, but they’re also easy to re-acquire after you’ve learned them. It usually doesn’t take much practice to bring your skills back up to past levels once you know what you’re doing: you’re just reconnecting parts of your brain that haven’t been connected in a while. The neural wiring is still there, it’s just a bit rusty.
For example: I played the trumpet in high school, but I haven’t picked one up in over a decade. Even so, it wouldn’t take more than an hour or two to reacquire the core skills I’d need to play.
Once you pick up a new skill, it doesn’t take much practice to maintain it: an hour or two every few months is usually sufficent to maintain your current level of performance
Dan Schawbel is the New York Times best-selling author of Promote Yourself. Subscribe to hisfree monthly newsletterfor more insights.
