So ... how long does it take to learn a new skill?

I'd thought that I would unleash a little graph, piece of research, magic number or statistic about learning every day for the next week or so.
The field of learning is filled with 'myths', beliefs and debunked research. Cathy Moore wrote a great blog post about it: How to be a learning mythbuster.

PS this graph is 'invented' by Cathy Moore, much like the diagrams on "we remember 10% of what we read etc.". So please don't use it as fact :-). That would be too ironic even for my taste...


So let's start the series with:

"How long does it take to learn a new skill?"

Great question. Glad you asked.
The answer: it depends.
More specifically: it depends on what your target level of performance is.

One of the popular figures flying around is the 10.000-hour rule. This is the hours of practice it takes for top athletes, top musicians or any other 'tops' in a highly competitive field to excel as experts. Malcolm Gladwel made this rule popular in his book Outliers.

That's a lot. It is about 5 years of work time. But if your goal is not to be the top, but rather be 'good enough', the number is a lot smaller. The reason is this 'learning curve' thing - the first tens of deliberate and focused practice you put in will have a high return, but it plateaus and subsequent performance increase comes much slower. That's what Josh Kaufman claims in his book 'the 20 hour rule' : you need 20 hours to get sufficiently good. Not great.

But the key is indeed to practice. To learn a skill, you need to do it. And get feedback on it. And do it again. And get feedback on it. And do it again. Rince and repeat.

Here's an anecdote on the value of practice from the book "Art & Feat" by Bayles and Orland:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.