The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU

How long does it take to learn to be good at doing something

we don't need 10000 hours to learn a new thing, because we don't need to be a master.

yeah, the 10000-hour rule is for a master. For a habby, won't take such long time.

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Like this picture shows, we well improve very quickly at first, then the bottleneck period well come. we don't need be a master, remember? so, the question is: how long does the quickly improvement period take.

Josh discover that it just takes 20 hours.

20 hours, it means 45mins a day, keep for a month.

Four tips

So is there some specific tips to help us quickly be good at something?

four tips:

1. Deconstruct your skill:
   Decide what you want to be able to do when you done, then look into the skill and break it down into smaller pieces.
   Most of the things that we think of skills are consist of different skills.The more you can break apart the skill, the more you're able to decide what are the parts of this skill that would actually help you to reach the goal.
2. Learn enough to self-correct:
   Get three to five(just a few) resources about what it is you're trying to learn, but don't use those as a way to procrastinate on practice.
   What you want to do is learn "just" enough that you can actually practice and self correct or self-edit as you practice.
   Remeber you don't need be a master.
3. Keep away from barries:
   like your phone. Just sit down and practice.
4. practice for at least 20 hours:
   most skills have a frustration barrier, which means the grossly-incompetent-and-knowing-it part. That's really, really frustrating, we don't like to feel stupid. And feeling stupid is a barrier to us actually sitting down and doing the work.
   So, by pre-committing to practicing whatever it is that you want to do for at least 20 hours. You will be able to overcome that initial frustration barrier and stick with the practice long enough to actually reap the rewards.

Ukulele for example

Josh want to learn Ukulele. ukulele has hundreds of chords, that's scary, right? But when you look at the actual songs, you see the same chords over and over.

As it turns out, playing the ukulele is kind of like doing anythings. There's a very small set of things that are really important, and techniques that you'll use all the time.

So you don't have to know hundreds of chords, as long as you know the four or the five.

Conclusion

So it's amazing, pretty much anything that you can think of, what do you want to do. The major barrier to learn something new is not intellectual, it's not the process of you learning a bunch of little tips or tricks or things. The major barrier's emotional. We're scared. Feeling stupid doesn't feel good, in the beginning of learnign anything new.

So the major barrier's not intellectual, it's emotional.

But put 20 hours into anything. It doesn't matter what you want to do. Go out and do that thing. It only takes 20 hours. Have fun.