The First 20 Hours – How To Learn Anything – Josh Kaufman (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of author Josh Kaufman’s talk titled “The First 20 Hours – How To Learn Anything” at TEDxCSU 2013 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

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Introduction

Hi everyone. Two years ago, my life changed forever. My wife Kelsey and I welcomed our daughter Lela into the world. Now, becoming a parent is an amazing experience.

Your whole world changes overnight. And all of your priorities change immediately. So fast that it makes it really difficult to process sometimes. Now, you also have to learn a tremendous amount about being a parent like, for example, how to dress your child.

(Laughter) This was new to me. This is an actual outfit, I thought this was a good idea. And even Lela knows that it’s not a good idea. (Laughter)

Challenges of Parenthood

So there is so much to learn and so much craziness all at once. And to add to the craziness, Kelsey and I both work from home, we’re entrepreneurs, we run our own businesses. So, Kelsey develops courses online for yoga teachers.

I’m an author. And 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 done. And life is really, really busy.

The Thought Every Parent Has

And a couple of weeks into this amazing experience, when the sleep deprivation really kicked in, like around week eight, I had this thought, and it was the same thought that parents across the ages, internationally, everybody has had this thought, which is: I am never going to have free time ever again. (Laughter) Somebody said it’s true.

It’s not exactly true, but it feels really, really true in that moment. And this was really disconcerting to me, because one of the things that I enjoy more than anything else is learning new things. Getting curious about something and diving in and fiddling around and learning through trial and error.

The Quest for Learning

And eventually becoming pretty good at something. And without this free time, I didn’t know how I was ever going to do that ever again. And so, I’m a big geek, I want to keep learning things, I want to keep growing.

And so what I’ve decided to do was, go to the library, and go to the bookstore, and look at what research says about how we learn and how we learn quickly. And 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?

The 10,000 Hour Rule

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. And 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.

Debunking the 10,000 Hour Rule

I am never going to be able to learn anything new. Ever again. (Laughter) But that’s not true.

So, 10,000 hours, just to give you a rough order of magnitude, 10,000 hours 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 experiences, they don’t match up.

The Origin of the 10,000 Hour Rule

And what I found, 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.

And where that came from is, he studied professional athletes, world class musicians, chess grand masters. All of this ultra competitive folks in ultra-high performing fields. And he tried to figure out how long does it take to get to the top of those kinds of fields.

And what he found is, the more deliberate practice, the more time that those individuals spend practicing the elements of whatever it is that they do, the more time you spend, the better you get. And the folks at the tippy top of their fields put in around 10,000 hours of practice.

The Game of Telephone

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.

So, the message, what Dr. Ericsson was actually saying is, it takes 10,000 hours to get at the top of an ultra competitive field in a very narrow subject, that’s what that means. But here’s what happened: ever since Outliers came out, immediately came out, reached the top of best seller lists, stayed there for three solid months. All of a sudden the 10,000 hour rule was everywhere.

And a society-wide game of telephone started to be played. So 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. It’s not true.

What the Research Actually Says

So, what the research actually says — I spent a lot of time here at the CSU library in the cognitive psychology stacks ’cause I’m a geek.

And when you actually look at the studies of skill acquisition, you see over and over a graph like this. Now, 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.

‘Cause you can quantify that, right? So, they’ll give research participants a little task, something that requires physical arrangement, or something that requires learning a little mental trick, and they’ll time how long a participant takes to complete the skill. And here’s what this graph says, when you start — so when researchers gave participants a task, it took them a really long time, ’cause it was new and they were horrible.

With a little bit of practice, they get better and better and better. And that early part of practice is really, really efficient. People get good at things with just a little bit of practice.

The Learning Curve

Now, what’s interesting to note is that, for skills that 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 his famous and widely known, this is the learning curve.

And the story of the learning curve is when you start, you’re grossly incompetent and you know it, right? (Laughter) With a little bit of practice, you get really good, really quick. So that early level of improvement is really fast.

And then at a certain point you reach a plateau, and the subsequent games become much harder to get, they take more time to get. Now, 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?

The 20 Hour Rule

In hopefully, as short a period of time as possible. So, 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? (Laughter) 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 days, here and there.

The Method

20 hours isn’t that hard to accumulate. Now, there’s a method to doing this. Because 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. There’s a way to practice efficiently, that will make sure that you invest those 20 hours in the most effective way that you possibly can. And here’s the method, it applies to anything:

The first is to deconstruct the skill. Decide exactly what you want to be able to do when you’re done, and then look into the skill and break it down into smaller pieces. Most of the things that we think of as skills are actually big bundles of skills that require all sorts of different things.

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 me get to what I want? And then you can practice those first.