The First 20 Hours
How to Learn Anything... Fast
Mastery takes ten thousand hours — but “better than most” takes about twenty. Take the skill apart, sit through the ugly first hours on purpose, and the wall between you and any new thing turns out to be a door.
Josh Kaufman is a self-taught business researcher and author of The Personal MBA. Published in 2013, this book argues that reaching a reasonable, useful level of skill takes about twenty hours of focused practice — far less than the ten thousand hours popularized for mastery — and lays out a method for getting there, tested across six new skills he learned while writing it.
A few lines worth keeping:
The major barrier to skill acquisition isn’t intellectual — it’s emotional.
Twenty hours of focused, deliberate practice. That’s about forty-five minutes a day for a month.
Skill is the result of deliberate, consistent practice — and in early-stage practice, quantity and speed trump absolute quality.
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