HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO ACQUIRE A NEW SKILL [10000 HOUR RULE]

Friday, August 31, 2018

11:13 PM

One of the things that I enjoy more than anything else is learning new things , getting curious about something and diving in and fiddling around and learning through trials and error and eventually becoming pretty good at something. I am a big geek, I want to keep learning things I want to keep growing . So what I decided to do was go to the library and go to the bookstore and look at what research says about how we learn and how we learn quickly. I read a bunch of books ,a bunch of websites . Trying to answer this question how long does it take to acquire a new skill? You know what I found… 10000 hours ,It takes 10000 hours. If you want to learn something new, if you want to be good at it, it is going to take 10000 hours to get there. I read this in book after book, in website after website . My mental experience of reading all this staff was like NOOO!!! I don't have time, I don't have 10000 hours. I thought I am never going to be able to learn anything new Ever again. But that is not true. 10000 hours, just to give you a rough order of magnitude, is a full time job for five years. That is a long time and we've all had the experience of learning something new  and it didn't take us anywhere close to that amount of time. So what's up? There is something funky going on here . What the research says and what we expect and have experiences they don't match up. What I found here is the wrinkle , the 10000 hour rule came out of studies of expert-level performance . There is a professor at Florida State University his name is K.Anders Ericsson, he is the originator of the 10000 hour rule and where that came from is he studied professional athletes, world class musicians chess grand masters . All of these ultra competitive folks in ultra-high performing fields and he tried to figure out how long does it take to get to the top of those kinds of fields and what he found is the more deliberate practice ,the more time that those individuals spend practicing the elements of whatever it is that they do ,the more time you spend the better you get . The folks  at the tippy top of their fields put in around 10000 hours of practice . An author by the name of Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book in 2007 called " outliers: the story of success" and the central piece of that book was the  10000 hour rule. Practice a lot , practice well and you will be extremely well you will reach the top of your field . So the message what Dr. Ericsson was actually giving is it takes 10000 hours to get at the top of an ultra competitive field in a very narrow subject , that is what that means . But here is what happened , ever since outliers came out , immediately came out reached the top of best seller lists , stayed there for three solid months . All of a sudden the 10000 hour rule  was everywhere and a society -wide game of telephone started to be played . So this message, it takes 10000 hours to reach the top of an ultra competitive field became it takes 10000 hours to become an expert at something, which became it takes 10000 hours to become good at something ,which became it takes 10000 hours to learn something but that last statement it takes 10000 hours to learn something is not true, It is not true at all. What the research actually says, when you actually look at the studies of skill acquisition you see over and over a graph like this .

 Now researchers whether they're studying a motor skill, something you do physically or a mental skill, they like to study things that they can time because you can quantify that. So they'll give research participants a little task something that requires physical arrangement or something that requires learning a little mental trick and they'll time how long a participant takes to complete the skill  and here is what this graph says when you start, so when researchers gave participants a task it took them a really long time because it was new and they were horrible. With a little bit of practice they get better and better and better and the wary part of practice is really efficient . People get good at things with just a little bit of practice. Now what is Interesting to note is that for skill we want to learn for ourselves we don't care so much about time , we just care how good we are whatever good happens to mean. So if we relabel performance time to how good you are ,the graph flips and you get this famous and widely known this is the learning curve . The story of learning curve is when you start your are not good , with a little bit of practice you get really good really quick . So that early level of improvement is really fast then at a certain point you reach a plateau and The subsequent games become much harder to get , they take more time to get. My question is how long does it take from starting something and being grossly incompetent in knowing it  to being reasonably good in hopefully as short period of time as possible. So how long does that take, here is what my research says: 20 hours that is it. You can go from knowing nothing about any skill that you can think of, want to learn a language? want to Learn how to draw? If you put 20 hours of focused deliberate practice into that thing you will be astounded, astounded at how good you are . 20 hours is doable that is about 45 minutes a day for about a month, even skipping a couple of days here and there. 20 hours isn't that hard to accumulate. Now there is a method to doing this. Because it is not like you can just start fiddling around for about 20 hours and expect these massive improvements. There is a way to practice intelligently, there is a way to practice efficiently. That will make sure you invest those 20 hours in the most effective way that you possibly can. Here is the method it applies to anything. The first is to deconstruct the skill ,decide exactly what you want to be able to do when you're done . Then look into the skill and break it down into smaller pieces. Most of the things that we think of as skills are actually big bundles of skills that require all sort of different things. The more you can break apart the skill the more you're able to decide what are the parts of this skill that would actually help me get to what I want and then you can practice those first. If you practice the most important things first you'll be able to improve your performance in the least amount of time possible.

           The second is learn enough to self correct. Get three to five resources about what it is you're trying to learn. It could be books , DVDs , courses it could be anything. But don't use those as a way to  procrastinate on practice. What you want to do is learn enough that you can actually practice and self correct or self edit as you practice. So the learning becomes a way of getting better at noticing when you're making a mistake and then doing something little different.

      The third is to remove barriers to practice. Distractions, television, Internet all of these things that get in the way of you actually sitting down sand doing the work. The more you're able to use just little bit of willpower to remove the distractions that are keeping you from practicing, the more likely you are to actually sit down and practice .

     The fourth is to practice for least 20 hours. Now most skills have what I call a frustration barrier, you know the grossly-incompetent and knowing it part . That is really frustrating . We don't like to feel stupid and feeling stupid is a carrier to us actually sitting down and doing the work. By per-committing to practicing whatever it is that you want to do for at least 20 hours. You will be able to overcome that initial frustration barrier and stick with the practice long enough to actually reap the rewards. That is it ! It is to rocket science . Four very simple steps that you can use to learn anything .

 The major barrier to skill acquisition isn't intellectual, it is not the process of you learning a bunch of little tips or tricks or things,The major barriers are emotional, we're scared feeling stupid doesn't feel good, in the beginning of learning anything new you really feel stupid. So the major barrier is not intellectual it is emotional. But put 20 hours into anything, it doesn't matter what do you want to learn whether it is a language or learn to cook or learn to draw, what turns you on, what lights you up, Go out and do that thing it only takes 20 hours to get it.