A lot has been written over the last few years about expertise,
often referring to a 10,000-hour rule. Research indicates that the people who
exhibit the highest level of expertise, even possibly being a genius, have in
their life put in 10,000 hours or more of deliberate
practice.
Your response to that bit of knowledge might be like mine: “I’d don’t
have 10,000 hours to put into learning something new.” What if you don’t need
to be an expert; you just need to be proficient. Maybe you want to learn
something for your personal edification, and you do not aspire to be great, but
simply to be good enough.
According to Josh Kaufman,
gaining a basic proficiency in a new skill is within reach. With an orderly
approach, it can be achieved in as little as 20 hours. Kaufman event entitled
his book on the subject The First 20
Hours.
Unlike other books on learning
I’ve read, Kaufman focuses more on skill than
knowledge, more on being able to do something than knowing about something.
Acquiring knowledge is important to learning a new skill, and he acknowledges
this by making research a part of his program, but he still emphasizes using as
much of the 20 hours as you can on deliberate practice.
Kaufman lays out a strategy for rapid skill acquisition. If compressed
to a list, it wouldn’t cover the length of a page. Part of what he does is
break down his method into parts that are easy, at least conceptually. That is
one of the methods: breaking a skill into sub-skills that can be more easily
learned and practiced. In this way, his method is simple.
If simple were easy, more things would be simple. Kaufman’s methods may reduce gaining
proficiency in a skill to 20 hours, but they are 20 hours of focused work to
which you must commit yourself. You can give yourself some early wins that will
make it easier to overcome the discouragement that comes when you become
frustrated by difficulties, but The First
20 Hours holds no strategies for overcoming laziness or disinterest.
If Kaufman only described his method, his book would be quite short. He
illustrates the methods by showing how he used them to rapidly acquire six
different skills. In addition to reiterating the steps to rapid skill
acquisition, he demonstrates the variety of skills one can learn. They range
from knowledge-intensive, technical
skills (programming) to physical skills (yoga), and much in between (playing
an instrument).
The skills that interested Kaufman were not skills that were of much
interest to me. Even so, it prompted me to think of skill I would like to
acquire and how I might apply his strategies to the task.
Kaufman also hints that his method could be used by a proficient person
to improve his skill, taking a step closer to expertise. The strategies are
aimed at engaging you in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is the heart
of both acquiring and improving a skill.
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