Speaker 1: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist. We don't want to focus politics on a notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens organize their lives.

Speaker 2: We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think.

Speaker 3: Two years ago I became very curious about the process of learning something new, deciding finally to sit down and learn that thing, or in my case several things, that have been in the back of my mind for a long time now. And so I decided to really take a step back and do some research to figure out how do we learn? How do we learn things quickly? How do we learn things in a way that allows us to go from knowing absolutely nothing about a skill to being really good in a very short period of time? And hopefully to have that process be as fun and exciting and not frustrating and not stressful. And so I decided to go to the library and look up what cognitive psychology says about how we learn. And there's one idea that keeps coming up over and over and over again. The 10,000-hour rule. It takes 10,000 hours to learn something. The 10,000-hour rule was popularized in a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Fantastic book. The research is really fascinating. So the original idea of the 10,000-hour rule came from studies, it was a gentleman by the name of K. Anders Erickson at the University of Florida, who studied people like chess grandmasters and people who win the PGA Tour at golf. People who are the very best in the world at whatever it is that they do. And what Dr. Erickson found was very simple. The more you practice, the more time you spend in what he called deliberate practice, focusing and systematically working on the elements of the skill, the more time you spend, the better you get. And in every discipline, what you usually find is the people at the pinnacle of their careers, the people that are the best in the world, have spent around 10,000 hours over a period of at least 10 years systematically practicing that element of skill. So that set of research is valid as far as it goes. But it doesn't go very far. And here's why. Most of us, when we decide to learn something new for ourselves, we do not have the goal of setting out to be the very best in the world at some very narrow competitive field. But since this idea came to the popular consciousness five or six years ago, we've played a society-wide game of telephone about this particular idea. So Dr. Erickson was saying something very specific. It takes 10,000 hours to reach the top of ultra-competitive, easily-ranked performance fields. Right? Very specific. But as that message passed from one person to another, it became, it takes 10,000 hours to master something. It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. It takes 10,000 hours to become good at something. And it takes 10,000 hours to learn something. But that last statement, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something, is demonstrably not true. It's not true. And thank goodness it's not true. Because we can decide to sit down for ourselves and spend a little bit of time going from knowing absolutely nothing about any subject that you could think of, putting a little bit of practice, and becoming very, very good in a very short period of time. And what my research over the past two years has indicated is the order of magnitude of going from knowing absolutely nothing to being really good and knowing that you're good is about 20 hours, not 10,000. 20 hours is about 40 minutes a day, every day, for about a month. Even in the busiest schedules, if you can clear a half an hour to 45 minutes a day to sit down and finally learn that thing that you've always wanted to learn, you will be astounded, absolutely astounded at how good you become in a very short period of time. And so what I discuss in the first 20 hours is a method of sitting down, deciding to learn something you've never done before, and then learning that in as effective and efficient a way as you possibly can. And the method, very broadly, has five steps. And they're very simple. The first is decide exactly what you want. What do you want to be able to do? What is it going to look like when you're done? What are you going to be able to look at yourself and say, I did this thing that I've always wanted to do? What does it look like? The more clearly and completely you're able to define exactly what you want to be able to do, the easier it will be for you to find ways to accomplish that desired end result as quickly and efficiently as possible. I call this defining a target performance level. How well do you want to be able to perform? And what does that performance actually look like in the moment? The second thing that you do is what I call deconstructing the skill. So most of the things that we think of as skills aren't really just one skill. They're bundles of smaller subskills that we use in combination with each other. So imagine a skill like golf. Golf is not just one thing. It's a bundle of all sorts of things. And for example, driving off the tee and chipping on the green have very little to do in common with each other. Very few skills overlap there. But they're both important if you want to be able to play golf well. So instead of trying to learn golf as a global skill, you break it apart into these smaller parts and you practice the most important subskills, the things that you're going to use most first. That allows you to focus on the elements of practice that actually give you the performance that you're looking for. So you're breaking the skill down into the smallest parts you possibly can and practicing the individual subskills. Now the third part is researching. Researching just enough that you're able to identify the most important subskills involved in whatever it is that you want to learn how to do. But also understanding and being able to self-correct as you're practicing. So go out and find three to five books, courses, DVDs, trainers, people or resources that can help you do that initial deconstruction and understand which are the subskills that are going to help you get as good as you possibly can as quickly as possible. Now the trick is, don't allow that research to become a form of procrastination in itself. The best approach is to pick three, four, five resources. You don't go through them completely. You skim them. And what you're looking for in that initial research process, go through lots of different resources and see, identify the ideas that come up over and over and over again. That's a very clear indication that those concepts and those techniques are particularly important. So those are the things that you should know so you can self-correct as you practice. And those are the subskills that you should probably practice first. The fourth part is removing barriers to practice. Making it easy to sit down and actually do the thing you want to get better at. So in our lives, we have thousands of distractions. We have the television and the internet and social media and family members and friends and all of the things in our lives that make us so busy. During the practice process, it's extremely important to make sure that you are not distracted by outside forces. Turn off the TV. Block the internet. Close the door. Turn off your cell phone. Remove the distractions that can take your focus away from whatever this thing that you're trying to practice is. And make sure that that time that you have set aside to practice in a way that was going to make you better is as undivided and focused as possible. Likewise, anything you can do to make it easy for yourself to practice, do that. So instead of relying on your willpower to force yourself to sit down every single time, use a little bit of willpower once and make it easy for yourself to do the things you want to do. So for example, one classic skill that people usually want to learn, playing the guitar. Which is easier? Picking up a guitar that is right next to you, sitting on a stand by the chair that you usually sit on, or getting a guitar out of a case that's in the back of a closet on the other side of your house every time you want to practice. By making it easy, having the guitar next to you, you make it easier to remind yourself that practice is a priority and you make it easier to actually pick up that guitar and start practicing in the moment. Anything you can do to remove friction or remove effort from desiring to practice to getting started is a benefit. It helps you do what you've already decided to do. And fifth, and very importantly, pre-commit to at least 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice before you begin. And that pre-commitment is very important because it serves a couple of different purposes. The first is the pre-commitment itself, deciding I'm going to invest at least 20 hours in this skill or I'm not going to do it at all, is a check upon yourself. How important is this, really? If it is important to you and you're willing to make that pre-commitment of at least 20 hours of practice, it does a number of important things. The first is the early hours of practice are frustrating for everyone. Everybody at the beginning of everything is absolutely horrible and they know it. And so understanding that that is a fundamental feature of how skill acquisition works, by pre-committing to at least 20 hours of practice, you are guaranteeing to yourself that you are going to make it through those early frustrating hours where nothing is working or you come up against an unexpected obstacle or you're really horrible and you're not very comfortable with that. By pre-committing a certain amount of time, you are guaranteeing to yourself that you are able to push past that early frustration and actually see results from your practice. So the idea of pre-committing 20 hours is really, there's nothing magical about that number. It's a line in the sand. 20 hours of deliberate practice is long enough to see really dramatic results, going from knowing absolutely nothing to being very good in a short period of time. But it's not also so long that it's a barrier to committing to that practice time in the first place. And that's really it. There's no magic to it. It's just focused, strategic effort invested in something you care about and something that is going to be rewarding to yourself and to your life. Learning is a uniquely human activity. We're all learning. We're all capable of learning hundreds or thousands of different things over the course of our life. And what this process really does, it may strike you as common sense. It is. It's intentionally so. Learning, the process of learning, is not difficult. What we're doing in this process is really just removing all of the frustrations, all of the barriers, all of the things that get in the way of us sitting down and doing the work. And so instead of dabbling a little bit here and dabbling a little bit over there and not really amassing enough time to get good at something, we're shaping our behavior in such a way that we will actually see results from the time and attention that we're spending improving something. So it is common sense. And really, when you sit down and learn something, these are the things that everybody naturally does. We just have a choice. We can do it the hard, inefficient way. Or we can do it the easy, straightforward, strategic way. And if you do it the strategic way, you can save yourself a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of effort. Playing the ukulele is a really great example of a classic motor skill. You are learning how to move your body in such a way in a certain time and make certain shapes with your fingers in order to make music come out of the instrument. So it's very akin to learning how to skateboard or learning how to windsurf or learning how to chop with a knife when you're cooking. Those types of physical movement skills in the research literature are called motor skills. And so one of the interesting things about learning motor skills is there's a tremendous amount of research in motor skill literature that says if you practice shortly before sleeping, you actually learn or remember, you can consolidate the practice in a way that helps you perform better the next day. And so the practice strategy for ukulele was very simple. Forty minutes every day before I went to bed, I practiced. And the practice looked something like this. Usually with deconstruction, if you feel like you're being too simple, you're probably doing it right. And so I started, got a nice ukulele, and the very first thing was it didn't have strings on it. So I had to put strings on it, otherwise you couldn't play, right? Sometimes there are environmental things, things that you need to make sure are present, certain tools, certain characteristics, before you can start practicing. So I got an ukulele, I put strings on it, I tuned it, and the early hours of practice were very simple. I was learning chords, which basically shapes of the fingers on my left hand pressing down on the fretboard, and then strumming patterns on the right hand. So the early hours of practice were this is a G chord, and this is a D chord, and this is an E minor chord, and this is a C chord. Very simple. And I would just go back over and over, trying to memorize the chord name and the shape of the fingers and make sure that my technique was good enough. I was pressing down on the frets in a way that caused it to sound relatively good, right? Very simple. Very straightforward. So isolate the left hand, shapes of chords. Right hand was very much strumming patterns, so I'm doing something different, doing something more complicated. The same thing on the left hand, something different on the right hand. You have no idea how much I've practiced this sequence over and over and over again. And the repetition is really important because by doing it over and over again, you allow your brain to go through what's, there are three phases of learning. So cognitive, you're really thinking about it, you're really focusing, it's like this is a G chord, this is a D chord, you're really really thinking about it. The interrelating part of the learning process is where you're starting to do it on your own, it's starting to feel more natural, you don't have to spend as much time and energy thinking about it. And eventually the third stage of learning is where it's automatic. You can just do it. As it turns out, you can play approximately 60% of songs ever written with two chord progressions. So twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Very simple 1-4-5 progression, right? There was a wonderful band in Australia called Axis of Awesome, they are a comedy rock band and they have a song that they call the four chord song. And the gag is that you can play every pop song ever written if you know four chords and you know how to switch between them.

Speaker 4: I see you, I feel you, that is how I know we'll go on.

Speaker 3: I won't hesitate no more, no more, it cannot wait, I'm yours, cause you were amazing, we did amazing things, if I could, then I would, I'll go wherever you will, and can you feel

Speaker 1: the love tonight? She will be loved, and she will be loved.

Speaker 3: When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner, no woman, no cry, my brother surely is a dream, I come from a land down under. Once a jolly swag man, camped by a billabong, hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but

Speaker 4: here's my number, so call me, hey, sexy lady, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, gangnam

Speaker 1: style, time to say goodbye. Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Thank you. I love that song. And so, you can really start to see, you know, I started out with the simplest of the simple, where does my left hand go, and where does my right hand go, and what do I do together? Practiced that enough, so learning the chords, learning the progression became reasonably automatic, and then just layered the songs on top of it. One of the nice parts about this process is, you get to 20 hours, you have a certain level of skill, if you want to keep improving, just do it again, do another 20 hours, and decide what you want to go from there. So, learning songs that require more than just simple strumming, going up and down the fretboard, that's the next challenge. And, it's nice, the first 20 hours that I put into learning the instrument has prepared me for that next step, and I'll get as far as I can go in 20 hours, see where I am, and just layer the practice on top of each other over and over and over again, until I'm as good as I want to be. And, you know, that's the really nice part about this learning process in general, you can use it to learn anything, literally anything. So, what is that thing for you? What do you want to learn? What lights you up? Go and learn that thing. It only takes 20 hours.

Speaker 2: The motivation to keep going through the part of practice when you're horrible, and you just, it's depressing how little progress you kind of make. What does the literature say from your research in terms of how far you should push yourself to be out of your comfort zone, to keep failing to kind of stretch yourself, versus building it up in a sort of more incremental way, so that you constantly feel like you're making progress, and you get that kind of psychological reward of knowing, oh, I've just done that, you know, you don't kind of crash too often, if you know what I mean. What's the sort of right balance to get that, because that can be a hard thing to start.

Speaker 3: Sure. The research literature actually says very little about this topic, because, you know, most of the research about skill acquisition, at least of this type, tends to focus more on the longer term, you know, becoming extremely good at something. The best that they've found is a result that keeps coming up over and over and over again, which is your rate of learning, your rate of skill acquisition is absolutely the highest in those first couple of hours, across every skill. It's called the power law of practice, or the power law of learning. You improve a tremendous amount in those early few hours. But how to go about that process for professional or personal skills, not a whole lot of research on that. That's actually where the idea of the first 20 hours came from, because by making that pre-commitment to practicing at least 20 hours before you start doing anything, part of what you're doing is transferring what you feel, the excitement, or whatever it is that you want to get out of the skill, by making that pre-commitment, you're kind of advancing that into the future, right? You're making it easier for yourself to remember that there's a reason why you're going through this pain right now, because you want to get something from it.

Speaker 2: Setting, I guess, a limit on it, so it doesn't feel like it's an indefinite amount of pain. Exactly.

Speaker 3: It's a manageable amount. And you know what, if you really don't like something, or you're really horrible at it, 20 hours isn't a tremendous amount of time. And so, if you reach the 20 hour mark, and you say, you know what, this is not for me. This is not something that I'm interested in, or I'm not good at. I don't think I can invest more time and get any more use out of, then fantastic. Drop it at that point. Now you have 20 hours worth of personal experience about what that thing actually looks like. The biggest failure is dabbling for an hour or two, and deciding I'm not talented at fill in the blank, whatever it is that you're doing. And not continuing to explore something that you may be really good at, and that may be really beneficial to you.