Book Summary: The First 20 Hours
Joshua Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours is all about learning new skills quickly. Learn everything you need to know to begin to master skills you’ve always wished you knew and had the time for.
Related Book Summaries:
What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast – Laura Vanderkam
The Obstacle Is The Way – Ryan Holiday
Quotes:
If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.
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.
The trouble comes when we confuse learning with skill acquisition. If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough.
The First 20 Hours Book Summary Notes:
- Many people give up on learning new skills thinking that it’s too late in their life for it.
- You can learn the basics of any skill and become relatively effective at it with around 20 hours of dedicated practice.
- Focus on just one skill at a time, make sure to pick your favorite to begin.
- It can even be helpful to keep a list of skills you would like to acquire, keep it somewhere handy like on your phone and choose one whenever you feel like beginning this process.
- Learning more than one skill at a time means much slower progress on each and as a result can be very demotivating.
- You’ll need to figure out what level of skill you’d like to acquire, to begin with. This could be a particular song you’d like to play on an instrument or completing a certain level of challenge in a sport. Whatever it is, it’s important to choose a particular level so that you can break it down into achievable parts that you can work towards in your practice.
- Make sure you have access to the right equipment for learning your skill. You’ll also want to clear your workspace of distractions as much as possible, create a peaceful practice area for yourself.
- Allocate enough time each day for your practice, at least a solid hour for dedicated practice. This could be a great opportunity to cull something you don’t particularly enjoy from your life to free up the time for your new skill’s practice time.
- You’ll also need a method of getting feedback on your practice sessions, this could come by way of a tutor or an app if one exists for teaching your particular skill.
- Aiming for several short bursts of practice each day can also really help. Use a strategy like 2-3 Pomodoro sessions to help stay on top of your practice each day.
