"The First 20 Hours" by Josh Kaufman

• Being the best in the world at anything, even for a little while, requires years of relentless practice. If you’re not willing to put in the time and effort, you’ll be overshadowed by those who do.
• Developing world-class mastery takes time.
• Word-class mastery may take ten thousand hours of focused effort, but developing the capacity to perform well enough for your own purposes usually requires far less of an investment.
• Deliberate practice is the core of skill acquisition.
• Embracing the idea of sufficiency is the key to rapid skill acquisition.
• If you ultimately decide to master a skill, you’ll have a better chance of success if you start with twenty hours of rapid skill acquisition.
• By knowing what you’re getting into, learning the fundamentals, practicing intelligently, and developing a practice routine, you’ll make progress more quickly and consistently, and you’ll achieve expert status in record time.
• Rapid skill acquisition is a process--a way of breaking down the skill you’re trying to acquire into the smallest possible parts, identifying which of those parts are the most important, then deliberately practicing those elements first.
• Rapid skill acquisition has four major steps:
• Deconstructing a skill into the smallest possible subskills;
• Learning enough about each subskill to be able to practice intelligently and self-correct during practice;
• Removing physical, mental, and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice;
• Practicing the most important subskills for at least twenty hours.
• The desire for instant gratification is one of the primary reasons people don’t acquire new skills very quickly.
• The amount of time it will take you to acquire a new skill is largely a matter of how much concentrated time you’re willing to invest in deliberate practice and smart experimentation and how good you need to become to perform at the level you desire.
• Academic learning and credentialing have almost zero overlap with skill acquisition, let alone achieving it quickly.
• Learning concepts related to a skill helps you self-edit or self-correct as you’re practicing.
• Learning helps you plan, edit, and correct yourself as you practice. That’s why learning is valuable.
• 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.
• There’s a huge difference between skill acquisition and training. Training, in this context, means improving a skill you’ve already acquired through repetition. It’s what happens after you’ve acquired a basic skill if you want to keep improving.
• Preparation and conditioning can make some forms of skill acquisition easier, but they can never replace practice.
• Skill acquisition requires practicing the skill in question. It requires significant periods of sustained, focused concentration. It requires creativity, flexibility, and the freedom to set your own standard of success.
• Creativity, flexibility, and freedom to experiment--the essential elements of rapid skill acquisition--are antithetical to the credentialing process.
• If you want to get good at anything where real-life performance matters, you have to actually practice that skill in context. Study, by itself, is never enough.
• You can improve any skill, provided you’re willing to practice.
• As you learn any new skill, physical or mental, the neurological wiring of your brain changes as you practice it.
• Over time, your neurons begin to fire in more efficient patterns in response to the feedback you receive from your environment as you practice.
• The three-stage model of skill acquisition:
• Cognitive (Early) Stage--understanding what you’re trying to do, researching, thinking about the process, and breaking the skill into manageable parts.
• Associative (Intermediate) Stage--practicing the task, noticing environmental feedback, and adjusting your approach based on that feedback.
• Autonomous (Late) Stage--performing the skill effectively and efficiently without thinking about it or paying unnecessary attention to the process.
• Your brain is learning, encoding, and consolidating new skills all the time.
• The more you practice, the more efficient, effective, and automatic the skill becomes.
• Rapid skill acquisition happens naturally when you become so curious and interested in something that other concerns fall away, at least temporarily.
• 10 major principles of rapid skill acquisition:
• Choose a lovable project.
• Focus your energy on one skill at a time.
• Define your target performance level.
• Deconstruct the skill into subskills.
• Obtain critical tools.
• Eliminate barriers to practice.
• Make dedicated time for practice.
• Create fast feedback loops.
• Practice by the clock in short bursts.
• Emphasize quantity and speed.
• The more excited you are about the skill you want to acquire, the more quickly you’ll acquire it.
• You’ll naturally learn things you care about faster than things you don’t.
• If you focus on acquiring your prime skill (that is, your most lovable project) before anything else, you’ll acquire it in far less time.
• One of the easiest mistakes to make when acquiring new skills is attempting to acquire too many skills at the same time.
• Pick one, and only one, new skill you wish to acquire. Put all of your spare focus and energy into acquiring that skill, and place other skills on temporary hold.
• Focusing on one prime skill at a time is absolutely necessary for rapid skill acquisition.
• A target performance level is a simple sentence that defines what “good enough” looks like.
• Once you determine exactly how good you want or need to be, it’s easier to figure out how to get there.
• The best target performance levels seem just out of reach, not out of the realm of possibility.
• Remember, world-class mastery is not the end point of rapid skill acquisition. We’re shooting for capacity and sufficiency at maximum speed, not perfection.
• Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills.
• Once you’ve identified a skill to focus on, the next step is to deconstruct it--to break it down into the smallest possible parts.
• Once the skill is deconstructed sufficiently, it’s much easier to identify which subskills appear to be most important.
• By focusing on the critical subskills first, you’ll make more progress with less effort.
• It’s more effective to focus on the subskills that promise the most dramatic overall returns.
• Deconstructing the skill before you begin also allows you to identify that parts of the skill that aren’t important for beginning practitioners. By eliminating the noncritical subskills or techniques early in the process, you’ll be able to invest more of your time and energy mastering the critical subskills first.
• Taking a moment to identify critical tools before you start practicing saves precious time. By ensuring you have the resources you need before you begin, you maximize your practice time.
• We only have so much willpower at our disposal each day, and it’s best to use that willpower wisely.
• The best way to invest willpower in support of skill acquisition is to use it to remove these soft barriers to practice.
• By rearranging your environment to make it as easy as possible to start practicing, you’ll acquire the skill in far less time.
• “Finding” time is a myth. 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 approach to making time for skill acquisition is to identify low-value uses of time, then choose to eliminate them.
• I recommend making time for at least ninety minutes of practice each day by cutting low-value activities as much as possible.
• I also recommend pre-committing to completing at least twenty hours of practice. Once you start, you must keep practicing until you hit the twenty hour mark.
• If you’re not willing to invest at least twenty hours up front, choose another skill to acquire.
• “Fast feedback” means getting accurate information about how well you’re performing as quickly as possible. The longer it takes to get accurate feedback, the longer it will take to acquire the skill.
• Fast feedback naturally leads to rapid skill acquisition. If feedback arrives immediately, or with a very short delay, it’s much easier to connect that information to your actions and make the appropriate adjustments.
• The more sources of fast feedback you integrate into your practice, the faster you’ll acquire the skill.
• In the early phases of practicing a new skill, it’s very easy to overestimate how much time you’ve spent practicing. When you’re no good (and you know it), time seems to slow to a crawl, and it feels like you’ve been practicing for a longer period of time that you actually have.
• The more periods of sustained practice you complete, the faster your skill acquisition.
• Set aside time for three to five practice sessions a day, and you'll see major progress in a very short time.
• When you begin to acquire a new skill, it’s tempting to focus on practicing perfectly--a recipe for frustration. Instead of trying to be perfect, focus on practicing as much as you can as quickly as you can, while maintaining “good enough” form.
• Skill is the result of deliberate, consistent practice, and in early-stage practice, quantity and speed trump absolute quality.
• The faster and more often you practice, the more rapidly you’ll acquire the skill.
• First, ensure you’re practicing using form that’s good enough to satisfy your target performance level. Once you’re practicing in good form at least 80 to 90 percent of the time, crank up the speed for faster skill acquisition.
• It doesn’t take much practice at all to go from “very slow and grossly incompetent” to “reasonably fast and noticeably competent.”
• The general pattern of the learning curve looks like this: When you start, you’re horrible, but you improve very quickly as you learn the most important parts of the skill. After reaching a certain level of skill very quickly, your rate of improvement declines, and subsequent improvement becomes much slower.
• It’s all too easy to feel like you’re investing a lot of time in a skill without practicing very much at all.
• The most well-known general method of rapid skill acquisition is immersion: completely changing your environment in a way that results in constant deliberate practice. In general, immersion works.
• Immersion works because it ensures that you complete the crucial first hours of practice without fail: you can’t escape your environment, so the practice happens automatically.
• The downside of immersion is that it usually requires making the skill your primary focus for an extended period of time.
• Take the immersion opportunities as they come, but don’t count on them.
• Learning isn’t the same thing as skill acquisition.
• Doing a bit of research before you jump into practice can save you precious time, energy, and emotional fortitude.
• Learning makes your practice more efficient, which lets you spend more of your practice time working on the most important subskills first.
• 10 major principles of effective learning:
• Research the skill and related topics.
• Jump in over your head.
• Identify mental models and mental hooks.
• Imagine the opposite of what you want.
• Talk to practitioners to set expectations.
• Eliminate distractions in your environments.
• Use spaced repetition and reinforcement for memorization.
• Create scaffolds and checklists.
• Make and test predictions.
• Honor your biology.
• Time spent reading or watching is not time spent practicing.
• The intent of early research is to identify the most important subskills, critical components, and required tools for practice as quickly as possible. The more you know in advance about the skill, the more intelligently you can prepare.
• For rapid skill acquisition, skimming is better than deep reading.
• Early research is one of the best ways to identify critical subskills and ideas, but it’s also very likely you won’t know what they mean yet.
• Noticing you’re confused is valuable. Recognizing confusion can help you define exactly what you’re confused about, which helps you figure out what you’ll need to research or do next to resolve that confusion.
• If you’re not confused by at least half of your early research, you’re not learning as quickly as you’re capable of learning.
• If you start to feel intimidated or hesitant about the pace you’re attempting, you’re on the right track.
• Not being willing to jump in over your head is the single biggest emotional barrier to rapid skill acquisition.
• Mental models are the most basic unit of learning: a way of understanding and labeling an object or relationship that exists in the world.
• As you collect accurate mental models, it becomes easier to anticipate what will happen when you take a specific action.
• Mental models also make it much easier to discuss your experiences with others.
• The more mental models and mental hooks you can identify in your early research, the easier it will be to use them while you’re practicing.
• A counter intuitive way to gain insight into a new skill is to contemplate disasters, not perfection.
• By studying the opposite of what you want, you can identify important elements that aren’t immediately obvious.
• Early learning helps you set appropriate expectations.
• When you jump into acquiring a new skill, it’s very common to underestimate the complexity of the task, or the number of elements involved that are required to perform well.
• Talking to people who have acquired the skill before you will help dispel myths and misconceptions before you invest your time and energy.
• Distractions are enemy number one of rapid skill acquisition.
• Distractions kill focused practice, and lack of focused practice leads to slow (or nonexistent) skill acquisition.
• The most significant sources of distraction come in two forms: electronic and biological.
• The fewer distractions you have while practicing, the more quickly you’ll acquire the skill.
• To make use of material you’ve learned while practicing, you have to be able to recall related ideas quickly.
• Many skills require at least some level of memorization.
• Whenever you learn something new, you’ll probably forget it unless you review the concept within a certain period of time. This repetition reinforces the idea, and helps your brain consolidate it into long-term memory.
• Researchers have found that memory follows a decay curve: new concepts need to be reinforced regularly, but the longer you’ve known a concept, the less regularly you need to review it to maintain accurate recall.
• Spaced repetition and recall is a memorization technique that helps you systematically review important concepts and information on a regular basis.
• It's important to note that skill acquisition is usually much more involved than academic learning.
• Checklists are handy for remembering things that must be done every time you practice. They’re a way to systematize the process, which frees your attention to focus on more important matters.
• Scaffolds are structures that ensure you approach the skill the same way every time.
• Creating scaffolds and checklists make your practice more efficient. They also make your practice easier to visualize, which helps you to take advantage of mental rehearsal, which can help with some forms of physical practice.
• Part of skill acquisition involves experimentation: trying new things to see if they work.
• Getting into the habit of making and testing predictions will help you acquire skills more rapidly.
• The optimal learning cycle appears to be approximately ninety minutes of focused concentration. Any more, and your mind and body will naturally need a break.
• Remember: no practice, no skill acquisition.
• Procedural memory is the term cognitive scientists use for motor skills that happen in a certain order.
• Learning the most important subskills first makes it very easy to keep progressing.
• If you want to acquire a new skill, you have to practice. There is no other way.
• Zero-practice shortcuts don’t exist. No practice, no skill acquisition. It’s as simple as that.
• The major barrier to skill acquisition is not physical or intellectual: it’s emotional.
• Doing something new is always uncomfortable at first, and it’s easy to waste a ton of time and energy thinking about practicing instead of practicing.
• The frustration barrier is deceptively easy to break through: skill acquisition always feels bigger than it actually is.
• By creating time for practice, doing a bit of early research, and leaning into the initial discomfort, you will always see major progress in the first ten to twenty hours of practice.
• Pre-commit to practicing that skill for an hour or so a day for the next month.
• Once you start practicing, you’ll always pick it up more quickly than you expect.
• Break it down, make the time, try new things, and your brain will begin picking up the technique automatically: that’s what brains do.
• The only time you can choose to practice is today.