THE FIRST 20 HOURS

You may have heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill but what if you don't want to master a skill what if you just want to be good enough to enjoy using the skill and get value out of it like playing a few songs on your guitar.

According to over 90 years of scientific research attaining a level of competency with any skill can happen much much quicker than you may think if you approach skill development in a systematic way you can climb up the learning curve and reach a point of noticeable proficiency in just 20 hours.

Author Josh Kaufman says you would be astounded at how good you could get at any skill in just 20 hours. However, if you approach the skill development process without the proper game plan you're unlikely to get anywhere in 20 hours

Here is the 3 steps blueprint to rapidly develop any skill and experience surprising competency after just 20 hours :

1. Imagine your Target Performance
2. Known just enough
3. Struggle & Sleep

Imagine your Target Performance

The faster that you can imagine a specific target performance with your new skill the faster you'll reduce that the feeling of overwhelming an excellent way to imagine your target performance is to picture yourself in a situation using that skill within the next few weeks once you have that situation in mind imagine the situation being a complete disaster.

Let's say you've always wanted to speak Italian the most effective way to break down the task of speaking Italian into something more manageable is to picture yourself in the next few weeks going to Italy and going to a small town where no one speaks English.

You don't have access to data so you can't use your cell phone you are completely lost and you need to find your way around town so you ask local people for directions.

As you try to explain what you want you use hand gestures and you stumble to find the right words to mitigate this disaster you'd first need to be able to introduce yourself then you need to know how to say the Italian words for the different places you want to go nouns like hotel or restaurant. It will be helpful to know which verbs to use with those nouns to help the locals understand what you want

Then you would need to learn how to structure a question by using interrogatives like Where, When, and How.

By imagining a situation where not having the desired skill makes that situation a disaster you can come up with a list of sub-skills that you need to work on and the order in which you need to work on them.

Known just enough

Now that you know what to do you'll need to know how to do it at this stage in the skill development process people spend too much time studying skills and too little time practicing a skill. If you are learning how to toss a football it's not very productive to study the physics of throwing a football for five hours before playing catch in the backyard. The sole purpose of studying a skill before doing it is to be knowledgeable enough to know if you're doing something wrong and how to fix it.

Learning before practicing is only valuable if what you're learning allows you to plan edit and correct yourself while practicing when learning to toss a football it would be helpful to spend a few minutes watching a collection of YouTube videos or flipping through a stack of top-rated football instructional books.

Once you've found a technique from these sources then it's time to go outside and start practicing the moment you understand how to execute a sub-skill and how to self-correct, drop the books, turn off the videos and go practice.

As you practice you'll come up with more questions to study and you can go back to the resources looking for specific answers if you want to shorten your study time use coaches or mentors to point out exactly what you're doing wrong. To make the most of your first 20 hours learn just enough to self-correct.

Struggle & Sleep

It turns out the brain only bothers to upgrade your abilities during sleep if you struggled during the day therefore the equation for rapid improvement is short bursts of struggle + sleep.

The more intervals of struggle and sleep you experience the faster you'll improve to make the most of your first 20 hours.

Conclusion

Start practicing your desired skill for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night for an entire month the morning will allow you to practice without distraction and practicing in the evening will increase the odds of consolidating that skill while you sleep if you practice intensely and systematically for 40 minutes a day at the end of the month you will accumulate twenty hours of deliberate practice and be surprisingly good at whatever skill you want.