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P ER S O NA L F I NA NC E | 7/19/2013 @ 9:26AM | 19,273 views

How To Learn A New Skill Fast

Richard Eisenberg, C ontributor

Every day, I walk down the stairs

into the living room and there it is:
The Piano.
This glorious grand Knabe
belonged to my mom when she was
a child in Newark, N.J. Then, my
sister, Robin, tinkled the same
ivories growing up in our familys
suburban house (I can hear her
playing Beethovens Fr Elise
now).

Thinkstock

But when my parents downsized to an apartment a few decades ago, they had
no room for the piano and neither did Robin. So my wife, Liz, and I inherited
it. We dont play.
I can bang out a tune by ear with the wrong fingers, but thats about all.
Periodically, Ive thought about taking lessons and decided against it. I felt
that Id be embarrassed about playing badly, which would lead to aggravation
and then anger. What fun is that?
(MORE: How Learning to Play Jazz Piano Made Me Sane)
The Way to Overcome My Fears
But after interviewing Josh Kaufman, author of the new book, The First 20
Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast, Im beginning to reconsider.
He convinced me that I can get past my apprehensions by following his rules.
If youve put off learning a skill due to similar concerns, you should rethink
your inertia, too especially if youre in your 50s or 60s.
The advantage for people who are nearing retirement or retired is that its a
wonderful time of life to learn new skills, Kaufman, 31, told me. If you have
kids, theyre probably out of the house now, so you have more time and
energy to learn the thing you never could before.
Learning 6 Skills in a Year
For his new book, Kaufman, a business adviser in Fort Collins, Colo., decided
to teach himself a smorgasbord of skills in the course of one year: the ukulele,
windsurfing, yoga, computer programming, a faster way of touch typing and
the ancient Chinese board game, Go.
Not only did he learn all six, Kaufman picked up each skill in fewer than 20

hours. Yoga took just three.

He isnt a savant; Kaufman just cleverly figured out the keys to learning
something new quickly what he calls rapid skill acquisition and put
them to use.
(MORE: Want to Age Well? Learn New Tricks, Not Facts)
Here are highlights of our conversation, where Kaufman talks about those
principles:
Next Avenue: Lets start with the basic premise of the book: Rapid
skill acquisition. What is that?
Kaufman: Rapid skill acquisition means being able to perform a skill at a
certain threshold to get a certain result.
So its not academic learning in the sense of just acquiring knowledge and
memorizing facts.
But that doesnt mean being able to master the skill, right?
Right. A huge expectation of mastering a skill is becoming extremely good,
which makes it that much harder to get started.
During the first 20 hours of skill acquisition, youre really in exploration
mode. Youre trying to figure out what this thing is, how it works, if you like it
and if its going to be worthwhile to keep going. So the method of the first 20
hours is going from zero to being reasonably good at something.
And then?
Then you have a choice. You may have improved to the point where youre
getting the value that you want and you stay there and reap the value. Or you
may decide you really like it and will practice a little more to get even better. Or
you may decide that in the grand scheme of your life, there are more
important things to pay attention to and you stop using this new skill.
Some bosses and hiring managers think older people cant learn
new things. But thats not the case?
Not the case at all. In fact, this stereotype is an opportunity in disguise. After
acquiring a new skill, you can walk into your bosss office and say, Heres
what I learned how to do on my own. That can be super valuable.
Is it easier for kids to learn new skills than adults?
Theres a huge misconception that we learn more quickly when were
younger. Its not necessarily true.
Young children have a couple of advantages over adults. They usually have
more unstructured free time and they are way less self-conscious when they
try something and it doesnt work. When a toddler is learning how to talk and
falls down, he doesnt curse himself and say Im not talented at walking. He
just gets up and tries again.
As adults, we have more responsibilities and commitments and tend to be way
more self-conscious. So when you dabble at something for the first time and it
doesnt go well, you say, Im not good at that; Ill try something else. Adults
dont like to feel stupid. So that holds us back.
Are there advantages adults have over kids for skill acquisition?
Yes. We have more life experience, so we can attach learning to things we
already know and can be much more strategic.
Instead of failing until we get it, we can do research and approach the process

in a way to maximize the things that work and minimize the things that dont.
So we can learn just as quickly as kids; we just learn in a different way.
Whats really fun is theres not an age where this process tops out.
A lot of people have interpreted Malcolm Gladwells book Outliers
as saying that you have to spend 10,000 hours to be good at
something. You dont?
No. Its an extremely common misconception. The research Gladwell was
reporting was about achieving world-class performance in extremely
competitive fields. And that research is very clear: If you want to, for example,
step on a golf course and be able to compete with Tiger Woods, 10,000 hours
is about what its going to take.
What I want to help people understand is that to acquire a skill, the threshold
is around the 20-hour mark, not the 10,000-hour mark.
Why 20 hours and not two hours?
In the early hours of learning something new, its difficult and frustrating. So
you want to make sure you practice long enough to break through that barrier
and start seeing results. That usually happens for the more complex skills
around the five- to six-hour mark.
The hours before that are terrible, but if you can persist long enough to break
through, youll be able to do things you couldnt do before. The trick is you
need to keep practicing long enough to achieve results.
But you dont need to practice for more than 20 hours?
Right. Other research has shown that skill acquisition shouldnt feel like a
huge commitment at the beginning or youll never sit down and practice in the
first place.
I found that setting a pre-commitment of under 20 hours before starting to
learn the skill is a great way to make sure youll practice long enough to push
through the barrier 20 hours lets you see dramatic results but doesnt feel
so scary that you could never commit to it.
I cant tell you how frustrating the first hour of learning to touch type on a
different keyboard was. The only thing that kept me going was my precommitment.
Youre not against learning a skill through total immersion, but
you think that process isnt realistic for most people. Why not?
To learn a new language, yeah, you could pack your bags and move to France.
But very few people can actually do that.
I wanted to acquire skills in a real-world context. So in the process of learning
the ones for the book, I was still running my business. I only had a half-hour
or 45 minutes a day to devote to a new skill.
You say that one of the key principles of skill acquisition is: define
your target performance level. What does that mean and how do
you do it?
Your target performance level is deciding what you want to be able to do. The
more specific you can be, the better. People often fall down in this process by
not being specific enough about what they want to accomplish.
Instead of saying you want to learn Italian, set a performance level like being
able to go on a vacation in Italy and converse with waiters and waitresses.
Then focus your early hours of practice on being able to get to that point.

You also make the point that its important to dedicate time to
practice. Why?
Life tends to intervene if you dont set aside a specific time. If you dont
practice, you wont get better.
When I was learning how to play the ukulele, I set aside a half-hour before
bed every day.
Speaking of going to bed, you note in the book that theres a
connection between sleep and learning a new skill. Tell me about
it.
This was one of the most fascinating things I uncovered. For skills that
require physical movement, if you can practice within about four hours of
going to sleep and that could be going to sleep for the night or taking a nap
the practice will be more effective.
I found that when I was learning touch-typing. It was kind of freaky. I would
practice typing before bed and not be able to do certain things and go to sleep.
Then Id wake up in the morning and try again and I was always better as a
result of the combination of the rest and practicing the night before
noticeably so.
You also recommend creating fast feedback loops. What are
they?
Anything that helps you see how well youre performing while youre
practicing. When I was learning how to program, the computer tells you right
away whether what youre doing is working. When I was learning how to
windsurf, it was falling off the board. Paying attention to whats not working
lets you make changes to get better.
Why should people practice in short bursts of time?
The limiting factors when youre acquiring a new skill are energy and your
level of frustration. When I was beginning to windsurf, I could only be out on
a board for about 20 minutes. Beyond that, I was too exhausted and it was
entirely nonproductive. Same thing with learning the ukulele; at some point,
your fingers hurt.
Have you learned any new skills lately?
One of the things I wanted to learn was how to make videos. So Ive now gone
from not having a video camera to creating a movie, which you can see at
First20hours.com. I bought a camera and did the shooting, color correcting
and exporting in about 20 hours. That was super fun.
What skill do you want to learn next?
Theres an interesting shorthand system called Yublin thats on my list. You
look at a small set of words that are used most often and it has one- or twoletter combinations for each of them.
Richard Eisenberg is the senior Web editor of the Money & Security and Work
& Purpose channels of Next Avenue. Follow Richard on Twitter @richeis315.
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My Quest to Learn French

This article is available online at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/07/19/how-to-learn-a-new-skill-fast/