How to learn faster

This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - This is Knowable. Hey everyone, Savannah here. I'm
a producer at Knowable. And today we're going to dive into an original course that I helped produce.
It's hosted by Julia Furlan. She's an audio journalist who has worked at places like Fox, NPR and
Buzzfeed and she currently teaches at the New School. This lesson is about how to learn any skill in
just 20 hours.

The 20-hour rule

- So I've been trying to learn guitar, and I got to say it's not exactly going well. (off-key guitar) Oops.
(off-key guitar) Oh no. Basically I've been doing that thing where you talk a lot about how you're
going to learn something new, and I have a book about how to learn guitar, but the actual learning
part hasn't exactly happened as often as I would've liked. But I talked to this guy named Josh
Kaufman, and maybe my life is about to change, I don't know. - [Josh] I'm the author of a couple of
books, "The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business," and "The First 20 Hours: How to Learn
Anything Fast." - One of Josh's books lays out a strategy for getting moderately better at something
in just 20 hours, which honestly sounds doable. And if I'm honest, it's also one of the first signs of
hope that someday I will learn the guitar. - [Josh] The 20 hours is a rule of thumb that I learned
through research and experimentation and actual practice. And so in the literature, there's no rule of
thumb of, you know, what does it take to go from knowing absolutely nothing to being reasonably
good? And so based on the research literature, we know that the early hours of skill acquisition, if
you approach them in a conscious strategic way, can be very effective and very efficient. And so I
decided to be my own guinea pig and put the theory to the test and see, roughly, how long did it
take? And what I found is the order of magnitude that we're looking at, you know, going from
nothing to being reasonably good is in the 10 to 20 hour range. - And you're talking like
snowboarding and cooking and learning Portuguese and doing a cartwheel? Like - Yeah. Just like a
variety of different kinds of skills? - Yeah, it's fully universal.

Set specific goals

- So where do we start when we're doing our 20 hours? Can you like start with the idea that you
have to set specific goals? - Yes, so step zero of all of this is deciding what you want to be able to do.
Unless you know what the end destination looks like, you're going to have a really difficult time
figuring out A, what to practice, and B, whether or not the practice is leading toward the result that
you're looking for. - So instead of me saying, "I want to learn how to play the guitar," I would say, "I
want to learn to play these two songs on the guitar." - Exactly, yep, that's it. - Filtering down your
goals. - Yes, and that becomes what I call your key performance level. That's what success looks like,
and it's very different from like, I want to play the guitar, which is broad and nebulous and doesn't
have any detail to help you. Yeah, there's no direction there. It's also something that is a concrete
specific achievable thing that you can go after in a direct way. This often comes up when learning
languages and so, you know, it's different to say, "I want to learn how to speak Italian," and then
saying, "I want to travel to Italy and I want to order all of my meals in the local language." That's a
specific achievable thing that you can start working on. Whereas, you know, speaking, reading Italian
is something that will take a much longer.
Deconstruct

- That makes sense, so we've set out our specific goals, what is the next step to learning the new
thing? - Okay, so the next step after you've decided what you're going to do is what I call
deconstruction. This is breaking a complex skill into much smaller, more manageable parts. So going
back to your guitar example, learning how to play chords is not all of playing the guitar, it's a small
part of playing the guitar, but depending on the songs you want to play, it's a pretty big important
part. And so figuring out, okay, I'm going to focus on chords now and here's the song I want to play,
and this song has, let's say, six or seven chords in it. And so you can say, all right, I'm going to spend
some of my practice time working specifically on these three chords and switching between those
chords. So let's say you do like G and D and C, music is so great too, because you see the same
chords popping up over and over and over again in songs, and so, you know, there's a handful, you
know, maybe eight to 10 that you learn first, and if you learn how to play that chord and then switch
between those chords very quickly, you can learn how to play most songs. Chords are something, a
discreet, smaller part of the skill that you can focus on and just worry about that for a while.

Research

- [Speaker 1] And so, this kind of leads us into the third step of the process, which is research. You're
researching each sub skill that you've deconstructed to practice in an efficient way. So in this case,
it's finding what are the eight to 10 chords that you're going to play over and over and over again.
Start there first. And what's really nice about research and a little tricky, depending on how much
you like learning, research can be a place where a lot of people get stuck. - [Speaker 2] Oh, yeah. I
call it productive procrastination sometimes. - [Speaker 1] Absolutely. - [Speaker 2] I also call it
reporting, which is like a lot of my job. (both speakers laughing) - [Speaker 1] Oh, I love that. I had
the experience, one of the things that I learned for "The First 20 Hours" book was computer
programming. I do a lot of work on the web, super useful skill to have and I wasn't anywhere near as
good at it as I wanted to be. And so, I went to the bookstore and I probably ordered 10 programming
books. - [Speaker 2] Yes, the old I will acquire knowledge by purchasing the books. - [Speaker 1]
Exactly. - [Speaker 2] I love it. Definitely done that before. - [Speaker 1] Once you've identified the
sub skills, you're doing just enough research to help you figure out you know, what are those critical
few things that you need to focus on? And then exiting the research process as quickly as possible so
you can get, like, how quickly can you start making mistakes is a really good frame of reference for
this stage. - [Speaker 2] Ooh, I love that. How quickly can you start making mistakes? - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. So on programming, for me it's like, okay, I need to figure out how to install the language, set
up an application, and just get it to run once on my screen. If I can do that, then I can fiddle with it,
do more and more of, okay, now I want to make it do this. Let's see if I can make it do that. But if the
language is not installed and the application is not up and running, you can't do anything until that
happens. So that's the place to start.

Remove barriers to practice

- [Speaker 1] Right, so like after research, what's the next step? - [Speaker 2] Okay, this is where
we're going to use some cognitive and behavioral psychology to make your life easier, which is
removing barriers to practice. And there are two ways to think about it. The first is making it easy to
do the thing that you want to do. For example, with you learning how to play the guitar, having the
guitar in its case several rooms away, like in a closet somewhere, is not going to be as helpful for you
as having the guitar on a stand by your desk or by wherever you sit every day, like within arm's
reach. You can alter the structure of your environment around you to make it easier to practice, to
make it easier to do the thing that you've already decided is important and valuable for you. In the
same way, you can make it difficult to do the things that you've decided aren't as important or
valuable to you. So things like blocking the internet, leaving your phone in the other room, closing
the door, everything that you can do to add a little bit of friction so it is harder to be distracted,
harder to stop doing what you're doing during practice and start doing something else. Anything that
you can do to remove barriers to practice or add barriers to distraction is going to help you a lot. -
[Speaker 1] Right, and I think that you have to commit to it.

Pre-commit to 20 hours

- Right? - Yes and this is the last step of the process, which is arguably the most important part.
Which is pre-commit to 20 hours of focus practice. Just, you know, rough, rough guideline, that's
about 40 minutes a day for about a month or 20 minutes a day over two months. Just depends on
how much spare time and capacity you have. - Yeah. - But the pre-commitment part is on the
psychology side, one of the best things that you can do to make sure you practice long enough to
actually see the results that you're looking for. And it does a couple of things. We already talked
about the frustration barrier, which is you know that depending on the skill, the first five to 10 hours
are going to be hell. And you know it's going to be difficult when you're going in. So that part is not a
surprise. - Right, I guess that I would love to know when you're sitting down to practice, you've done
all of these steps, what does practice look like?

Practice deliberately

- [Presenter] So practice, and the word is thrown around a lot, but I think it's a good term to have in
mind. It's called deliberate practice. So you're focusing the entirety of your intention on the thing
that you're trying to improve. You are focusing on a specific, concrete, immediate thing, and you are
comparing the level of your performance in the moment to a reference that you've done through
research of what things are supposed to look like. - [Interviewer] How often does a person need to
practice? - [Presenter] Yeah, I would focus on more often rather than less. So think more like once a
day versus once a week, but for smaller time increments. You can get really good practice in 20 to 40
minutes, which, you know, on the smaller end of the time scale, even super busy people can carve
out 20 minutes or half an hour to work on something that's valuable and meaningful to them.
There's a little bit of a hesitation for some people like, "Well, you know, if I can't set aside three
hours to do this I'm just not going to get very much done." I don't think that's accurate. I think, you
know, 20, 30, 40 minutes, but consistently and every day is a really good place to start.

Mistakes to avoid

- [Interviewer] So, sort of as we're wrapping this up I would love to know what some common
mistakes are that people make that we should tell them to avoid when using the 20 hour method. -
[Interviewee] Yeah, the first is don't go into the process with unrealistic expectations. And I think a
lot of people shoot themselves in the foot by setting the bar of what acceptable performance is way
too high, way too early. So think about every skill that you have as more of an asset in your portfolio
versus a binary you have it or you don't. It's always better for you to be able to do something than to
not do something. Some skill in an area is always better than no skill. And so anything that you pick
up, any new skill you you acquire is always a win from a capability standpoint.

Key takeaways

(upbeat guitar music) - So it turns out you can learn anything in 20 hours. I mean, he says brain
surgery, but like maybe I'll stick with guitar for now. Anyway, let's review. Step zero is set a specific
goal. Instead of attempting to learn the entirety of guitar, you might start with learning a few
popular chords. Or instead of learning how to paint, you could filter it down to painting a specific
thing, like beach landscapes. Then deconstruction, break the skill into itty bitty little achievable parts.
Let's go back to that painting example. What are the typical components of a beach scene? Water,
sand, plants, rocks, maybe a turtle, if you're really getting into it write down all the parts that come
to mind. And then after that, do some research. How do you paint water? Which brushes do you
need? What techniques should you use? Just remember, don't use the research phase as an excuse
to procrastinate. If you're going to binge Bob Brass videos on YouTube, make sure you're actually
painting along with him. Happy little waves, my friends. Step three is remove barriers to practice.
Josh mentioned some tools to block internet distractions and we'll definitely link to those in the app
but this also means putting what you need, whether it's your guitar, your paint brushes, your
skateboard, wherever you can easily see it. So now I have put my guitar on top of my toilet so I will
never forget it. Okay, that's a joke, but you get what I mean. Step four, pre-commit to at least 20
hours. Rachel Woo talked about commitment in an earlier lesson but it's really worth repeating.
Committing to at least 20 hours will help you break that frustration barrier. Try splitting up those
hours into 20 minutes each day. What this means is that I've got to commit to my guitar journey.
Maybe I just want to learn like two songs. I'm going to start there because it feels manageable. I'll let
you know how it goes. (upbeat pop music) (calm string music) - Noble, (calm string music) now you
know. (calm string music)