I've read "The first 20 hours" by Josh Kaufman

I have a 'thing' for people who are just so good at what they do, and I'm fascinated by people who are able to get good and stay good by driving their own development. Somewhere in the tag line of this blog I describe myself as a 'serial learner'. Josh Kaufman is an intriguing guy who describes himself as a 'learning junkie'. He has taught himself a number of things over the years such as how to do an MBA without going to a business school, how to learn the ukelele, how to learn yoga, how to program a web site, etc. I've just finished reading his book "The first 20 hours, how to learn anything fast" where he shares his rapid skills acquisition process with the rest of the world.

How long does it take do learn a skill?

You are probably familiar with the 10.000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell positioned in his book 'Outliers'. Those 10.000 hours are actually the practice top athletes would need to reach the top. But what if your goals are not to be among the top, but to be 'good enough'? Josh Kaufman points us to the learning curve - it might take a very long time to get close to perfection, but it doesn't take as long to get the basics as skill acquisition (cognitive / motoric - not so much applicable to behavioral) goes fast at the start. His whole process of '20 dedicated hours of deliberate practice' is to help people get over what he calls the 'frustration barrier' of being totally unskilled (and likely to give up) to a level you feel confident to keep learning.

And how can you do it?

Basically his process is explained in the first chapters of the book book, and illustrated by a few skills he learned over the years in later chapters. It goes a bit like this:

1. Choose a lovable project
2. Focus your energy on one skill at a time
3. Define your target performance level
4. Deconstruct the skill into subskills
5. Obtain critical tools
6. Eliminate barriers to practice
7. Make dedicated time for practice
8. Create fast feedback loops
9. Practice by the clock in short bursts
10. Emphasise quantity and speed

The book is no rocket science, but a well written and good read on how someone takes what we know about effective learning and turning it into his own learning process. His tips for effective learning include goodies like spaced repetition over time, creating scaffolds and checklists, identify mental models and hooks, getting fast feedback, etc. And since we live in Internet times where information is abundant, he starts each skill acquisition 'lovable' project with researching the topic - a few hours of dedicated googling can get you a long way... 

Here are some quotes I took from the book:

• What's holding you  back from getting started? Two things: time and skill.
• Every day I come up with an idea for another project or experiment, which I add to my ever growing "someday / maybe" list.
• There's an old cliché 'work smarter, not harder'. As it turns out, the process of skill acquisition is not really about the raw hours you put in ... it's what you put into those hours.
• Rapid skill acquisition is a process - a way of breaking down the skill you're trying to acquire into the smallest possible parts, identifying which of those parts are most important, then deliberately practicing those elements first. It's as simple as that.
• Modern methods of education and credentialing have almost nothing to do with skill acquisition.
• You must fully appreciate the fact that you're capable of acquiring new skills. (...) Don't expect overnight results.
• The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears. (Karl Popper)
• Don't panic. Your initial confusion is completely normal. In fact, it is great.
• The true test of useful learning is prediction.
• The optimal learning cycle appears to be approximately 90 minutes of focused concentration.
• "If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." Edsger Dijkstra
• Anything worth doing well, is worth doing poorly at first. (Ray Congdon)
• Achievement seems to be connected with action. Succesful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit. (Conrad Hilton)

Here is the author on a TED talk:

 

... what will I learn in 2015?

Mark 'Facebook' Zuckerberg has decided to read a lot of books this year. I have decided I'm going to make an app. I have no idea which app yet (well, in fact I have several and I'll need to select one), but that's OK because first I need to get my head around JQuery Mobile and all of that. I'll keep you updated on my learning journey...