The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

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.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Future Bright by Martin E. Martinez

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Kaufman, Josh. The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast.  New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013.

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

David Shenk has good news. Geniuses aren’t born, and very few of us have genetic limitation on our capacities.  Just to make sure you get it, his book is entitled The Genius in All of Us.

Shenk challenges the notion that genius, talent, and the potential to excel in a field is something a few people are born with, lucky people who hit the jackpot in the genetic lottery.  He is not entirely an advocate of nurture in the nature-versus-nurture debate.  He looks at new science that suggests that that is a false notion to begin with.  Traits, including intelligence, develop form the interaction of genes and the environment.

Genes are not a blueprint that determine out traits.  Genes influence our reaction to the environment.   The environment influences the expression of our genes.  It’s complex.  Shenk devote a chapter to epigenetics.  This is material in our cells that protect and support the function of our genes.  Our epigenes influence the expression of our genes, are influenced by the environment, and most astounding are hereditable.  Environmental and behavioral factors can change the epigenes in ways that are passed on to offspring for generations and affect the expression of genes in those offspring.

Unless we have some unusual genetic disorder, the lesson of this book is that our genes are just one card in the hand we are dealt, and genes are not necessarily the most important card.  Genes are important, but so are a lot of other things.  Our traits are malleable, shaped by genes, environment, and behavior, and to the degree that we can influence those things we can change our traits.  We can become geniuses.

The bad news is the road to genius is not an easy one.  Mozart and Michael Jordon have in common that they put in a lot of time over a many years deliberately practicing and improving their skills.  Beethoven and Yo-Yo Ma may seem like born prodigies, but they were surrounded my music, music teachers, encouragement, challenges, competition, high expectations, and opportunities from birth.  Abundant practice and continuing improvement from early childhood helped them become very competent musicians as children, and many more years of deliberate practice, commitment, and mentoring resulted in the genius they exhibited as adults.

Based on this, Shenk presents a chapter on how to become a genius.  Genius may not be quite the right word, especially if you starting something later in life after years of thinking you had little ability.  However, I think his advice is likely to lead to great improvement, even above normal success and excellence.  The first piece of advice is to find your motivation.  If you have the motivation to devote a lot of time to practice, and the commitment push yourself to always seek improvement, you will get better and with time will be excellent.  Shenk also has a lot to say about how this information can help parents and educators see the potential in children and contribute to the development of their traits and their success in any field.

I was very impressed with this surprisingly short book.  Actually, if you include the extensive notes, which are worth reading, it is not a short book.  It opened my eyes to a new, and I think more fruitful, way of looking at the way people develop.

Shenk, David.  The Genius in All of Us:  Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetic, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong.  New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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