10 ms·

Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

98 points by sesellis 8y ago

mossplix 8y ago
10,000 hours is for mastery not just learning
- faceplanted 8y ago
  That's pretty much the first thing he says in the TED talk.
  - jazzyjackson 8y ago
    to be fair he takes about 10 minutes to say it
- karmakaze 8y ago
  10,000 hours checks out. At 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that's 4.8 years to master say a technology, language, or software stack.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    Very convenient that it’s a nice round number.
    - randomsearch 8y ago
      Indeed. “10000 hours” rings as true as your average Ted Talk.
    - jammygit 8y ago
      Erickssons original number was more like 10 years of daily deliberate practice increasing drom 0.5 to a max of 4/hours per day iirc for experienced people. It was roughly observational based on violinists and pianists. The original paper was interesting.
      - paulcole 8y ago
        Yeah I think it was Gladwell (shocker) who shoehorned himself into the concept and made up the 10,000 hour rule.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Well it's likely a little more complicated than that. Either way my model is 20, 200, 2000. Those are 3 milestones (roughly) where you progress through different phases. Going on about 10,000 hours for skills isn't meaningful for most people because almost no one will use that info to decide "this only takes 10,000 hours I think I'll master it." It only applies to the people who don't need the advice because they're naturally on the path of doing it anyway. But 2000 hours you can sit down and have a real think about. After that it's diminishing returns for that last 5%~10% that will take 5x as long.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    2000 / 20/WK = 100 weeks, or approx 2 years of part time hobby work. That's not too bad. Where does the 2000 hour number come from BTW? I haven't seen it before.
    - james_s_tayler 8y ago
      Yeah, roughly 2 ~ 4 years. Call it 3. That's how I tend to think about skill acquisition. Just personal experience of getting good at things over the years. It's a rough model and I'm happy for people to disagree if they want but the numbers aren't hard and fast they're more of a ballpark hueristic. It's sort of a 4-tier order-of-magnitude pattern I suppose. X0 hours (low hanging fruit) X00 hours (pain period) X000 hours (personal mastery) X0,000 hours (world-class mastery)
cherrygarcia 8y ago
Don't have 20 hours to learn something new? That's fine - all you need is 20 minutes to watch this video on your phone.
drivers99 8y ago
I enjoyed his book "The First 20 Hours". Most of the content is how he specifically applied it to learn certain skills: Switching from Qwerty to Colemak keyboards, and learning to play Go were interesting. He also had a chapter of learning to program in 20 hours.
baxtr 8y ago
There was a time when I just loved TED talks. That has changed. I am not so sure why. But I think I got the feeling the insights I’m getting are not worth the time spent.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  They've over-done it, especially with the TEDx content. As a result the quality has declined dramatically.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  TED talks are infotainment. Pornography for people whose vice is feeling like they've been inspired and gotten smarter. In short, they ring false. It feels like you're learning something, but the lesson plan was devised by a marketing department for the idea. It feels like the primary motivation is how good of a story can be told, and not the actual truth. "Popular science" in all its forms – sucks. Leading people to believe things because they're told in a certain way that makes them feel good. The problem is you don't get to truth because the explanation is easy to understand and intuitive. Lies are easy when that kind of explanation is common. When you're actually learning things, you need to be able to substantiate the facts, not just have statistics and study results thrown at you by an engaging speaker. In real science classes they make you drop balls and measure currents and synthesize chemicals and do calculations. I also loved TED talks when I was younger.
  - FiveSquared 8y ago
    TED talks can help inspire a sense of wanting to learn more, a sort of lie-to-children method (like in HS physics). Also, how you measure psychology as a layperson?
  - fidla 8y ago
    There are still interesting talks...you have to weed through them though. David Byrne gave a talk about the history of acoustics which I found fascinating.
    - 8y ago
ArcMex 8y ago
I learned to recognize hiragana and katakana like this. But learning the language itself took me a lot more time and effort. Had to practically immerse myself in Japanese 24/7.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  I smashed out Hiragana in 4 hours flat. Learning the rest of the language took 3 years. I do love the obvious wisdom that if you put a little bit of active effort as opposed to just passive consumption that you can build a skill and not just consume things. It's like those low hanging fruit are good but you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start to get sustainably enjoyable because you know enough to not be constantly frustrated and can actually have fun no matter the remaining difficulty. Then once you hit the 2000 hour mark you're pretty much good.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    > you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start to get sustainably enjoyable because you know enough to not be constantly frustrated and can actually have fun no matter the remaining difficulty. You can get there a bit earlier by carefully adjusting your practice difficulty to be closer to your comfort zone than the "real" skill you want to tackle and then slowly raising the bar as you get better. For example, I wouldn't be able to understand any random Japanese sentence someone could throw at me right now, but I built a system to pick sentences from https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org that I should be able to understand based on the words they contain, and it's been very encouraging to notice how much I can understand already. The only problem being that I haven't found a good selection criterion yet. Optimizing for highest probability that I need to refresh at least one of the words in a sentence tends to produce very long "sentences", e.g. https://tatoeba.org/sentences/show/4752008 https://tatoeba.org/sentences/show/4752008
    - btown 8y ago
      Is the system you wrote for this open-source? Sounds really really interesting.
backpropaganda 8y ago
The main bottleneck to learning new skills is access to good feedback from experts or coaches, not time.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  This is why I am learning tech stuff at light speed but music theory is painfully slow. I have experts everywhere at work who can point me in the right direction and give feedback but when learning stuff totally on my own it can be hard to work out what I should even work on or if I am aproching something in the right way. When I first started teaching myself programming I wasted ages on pointless things that didn't get me anywhere. Makes me wonder if there would be value in a cheaper form of university where instead of going through the whole process you just get access to experts you can talk to and ask your dumb questions. I know there are a lot of places on the internet where you can ask questions but they tend to cater to experts only because most people don't like answering beginner questions that get asked 100 times unless they are paid to.
  - backpropaganda 8y ago
    I really wish there was a platform to find top experts and ask them questions. Surprisingly enough, Twitch is one such channel. Jonathan Blow streams there some times, and I've asked him a lot of questions to which he gives detailed responses, because the question and answer is useful for all the viewers, and not a waste of his time, because it gives them a way to connect to their fans. Twitch is not meant for this though, and for instance, has no easy way to refer people to questions already answered, etc. But I think such a platform (video stream + text questions) with some modifications can provide this type of platform we're looking for.
jammygit 8y ago
I find it takes 45 minutes to really get into some dense subjects. Without putting in the second, third, or fourth 45 min chunk that same evening, I'd personally have a hard time unless it was an easy task/subject.
fidla 8y ago
This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument. It takes way more than 20 hours because much of what you do when you play say the mandolin has to become automatic in order for you to do it well. There are no shortcuts.
- sreyaNotfilc 8y ago
  I think every advice can be malleable. Just getting started and seeing some results (whether its 20 hours, or 2000 hours) is what matters. I would say after 20 hours is a good sample size and that you should have a good indication on - 1. Where your skill level really is 2. What your current aptitude for learning said skill 3. How you feel about learning the skill and potentially going forward 4. Where you would like to go next to further push that skill From there you may revise the course that you're on (add or reduce the time invested). For me, I do like having 45 mins chunk of time to work through a problem. Its give me time to understand the goal, and get invested. 45 mins tends to fly by so you're not fatigued afterwards. Then you can rest and reflect. That's how I'm handling my trumpet work (learning scales and songs).
- mikestew 8y ago
  This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument This is amazingly good advice for those learning their first musical instrument. Because casual observation tells me that nearly no one spends that kind of time on an instrument starting out. If one spends 45 minutes a day practicing (not noodling) on an instrument for a month, I don’t think sounding reasonably decent on a tiny set of tunes can be avoided. Rhonda Vincent won’t be inviting you on stage for a mandolin duet, but you won’t embarrass yourself in front of friends. Now, getting good? Well, yeah, that’s going to be that same 45 minutes a day for the next ten years. But after twenty hours I think one would earn the right to call themselves a mandolin player.
- imtringued 8y ago
  Nobody who wants to learn a skill wants to master it in 20 hours. The entire point of this article is that the 10000 hours number is a red herring. Spending every single day learning something is the exact opposite of a shortcut, it requires a huge amount of discipline. 20 hours spread over 30 days should be more than enough to turn someone who doesn't know what a mandolin is into a novice mandolinist who knows what further steps he has to take to get better.

98 points by sesellis 8y ago

mossplix 8y ago

10,000 hours is for mastery not just learning

faceplanted 8y ago
That's pretty much the first thing he says in the TED talk.
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  to be fair he takes about 10 minutes to say it
karmakaze 8y ago
10,000 hours checks out. At 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that's 4.8 years to master say a technology, language, or software stack.
- paulcole 8y ago
  Very convenient that it’s a nice round number.
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    Indeed. “10000 hours” rings as true as your average Ted Talk.
  - jammygit 8y ago
    Erickssons original number was more like 10 years of daily deliberate practice increasing drom 0.5 to a max of 4/hours per day iirc for experienced people. It was roughly observational based on violinists and pianists. The original paper was interesting.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      Yeah I think it was Gladwell (shocker) who shoehorned himself into the concept and made up the 10,000 hour rule.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
Well it's likely a little more complicated than that. Either way my model is 20, 200, 2000. Those are 3 milestones (roughly) where you progress through different phases. Going on about 10,000 hours for skills isn't meaningful for most people because almost no one will use that info to decide "this only takes 10,000 hours I think I'll master it." It only applies to the people who don't need the advice because they're naturally on the path of doing it anyway. But 2000 hours you can sit down and have a real think about. After that it's diminishing returns for that last 5%~10% that will take 5x as long.
- jammygit 8y ago
  2000 / 20/WK = 100 weeks, or approx 2 years of part time hobby work. That's not too bad. Where does the 2000 hour number come from BTW? I haven't seen it before.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    Yeah, roughly 2 ~ 4 years. Call it 3. That's how I tend to think about skill acquisition. Just personal experience of getting good at things over the years. It's a rough model and I'm happy for people to disagree if they want but the numbers aren't hard and fast they're more of a ballpark hueristic. It's sort of a 4-tier order-of-magnitude pattern I suppose. X0 hours (low hanging fruit) X00 hours (pain period) X000 hours (personal mastery) X0,000 hours (world-class mastery)

cherrygarcia 8y ago

Don't have 20 hours to learn something new? That's fine - all you need is 20 minutes to watch this video on your phone.

drivers99 8y ago

I enjoyed his book "The First 20 Hours". Most of the content is how he specifically applied it to learn certain skills: Switching from Qwerty to Colemak keyboards, and learning to play Go were interesting. He also had a chapter of learning to program in 20 hours.

baxtr 8y ago

There was a time when I just loved TED talks. That has changed. I am not so sure why. But I think I got the feeling the insights I’m getting are not worth the time spent.

xenadu02 8y ago
They've over-done it, especially with the TEDx content. As a result the quality has declined dramatically.
colechristensen 8y ago
TED talks are infotainment. Pornography for people whose vice is feeling like they've been inspired and gotten smarter. In short, they ring false. It feels like you're learning something, but the lesson plan was devised by a marketing department for the idea. It feels like the primary motivation is how good of a story can be told, and not the actual truth. "Popular science" in all its forms – sucks. Leading people to believe things because they're told in a certain way that makes them feel good. The problem is you don't get to truth because the explanation is easy to understand and intuitive. Lies are easy when that kind of explanation is common. When you're actually learning things, you need to be able to substantiate the facts, not just have statistics and study results thrown at you by an engaging speaker. In real science classes they make you drop balls and measure currents and synthesize chemicals and do calculations. I also loved TED talks when I was younger.
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  TED talks can help inspire a sense of wanting to learn more, a sort of lie-to-children method (like in HS physics). Also, how you measure psychology as a layperson?
- fidla 8y ago
  There are still interesting talks...you have to weed through them though. David Byrne gave a talk about the history of acoustics which I found fascinating.
  - 8y ago

ArcMex 8y ago

I learned to recognize hiragana and katakana like this. But learning the language itself took me a lot more time and effort. Had to practically immerse myself in Japanese 24/7.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
I smashed out Hiragana in 4 hours flat. Learning the rest of the language took 3 years. I do love the obvious wisdom that if you put a little bit of active effort as opposed to just passive consumption that you can build a skill and not just consume things. It's like those low hanging fruit are good but you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start to get sustainably enjoyable because you know enough to not be constantly frustrated and can actually have fun no matter the remaining difficulty. Then once you hit the 2000 hour mark you're pretty much good.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start to get sustainably enjoyable because you know enough to not be constantly frustrated and can actually have fun no matter the remaining difficulty. You can get there a bit earlier by carefully adjusting your practice difficulty to be closer to your comfort zone than the "real" skill you want to tackle and then slowly raising the bar as you get better. For example, I wouldn't be able to understand any random Japanese sentence someone could throw at me right now, but I built a system to pick sentences from https://tatoeba.org https://tatoeba.org that I should be able to understand based on the words they contain, and it's been very encouraging to notice how much I can understand already. The only problem being that I haven't found a good selection criterion yet. Optimizing for highest probability that I need to refresh at least one of the words in a sentence tends to produce very long "sentences", e.g. https://tatoeba.org/sentences/show/4752008 https://tatoeba.org/sentences/show/4752008
  - btown 8y ago
    Is the system you wrote for this open-source? Sounds really really interesting.

backpropaganda 8y ago

The main bottleneck to learning new skills is access to good feedback from experts or coaches, not time.

ndnxhs 8y ago
This is why I am learning tech stuff at light speed but music theory is painfully slow. I have experts everywhere at work who can point me in the right direction and give feedback but when learning stuff totally on my own it can be hard to work out what I should even work on or if I am aproching something in the right way. When I first started teaching myself programming I wasted ages on pointless things that didn't get me anywhere. Makes me wonder if there would be value in a cheaper form of university where instead of going through the whole process you just get access to experts you can talk to and ask your dumb questions. I know there are a lot of places on the internet where you can ask questions but they tend to cater to experts only because most people don't like answering beginner questions that get asked 100 times unless they are paid to.
- backpropaganda 8y ago
  I really wish there was a platform to find top experts and ask them questions. Surprisingly enough, Twitch is one such channel. Jonathan Blow streams there some times, and I've asked him a lot of questions to which he gives detailed responses, because the question and answer is useful for all the viewers, and not a waste of his time, because it gives them a way to connect to their fans. Twitch is not meant for this though, and for instance, has no easy way to refer people to questions already answered, etc. But I think such a platform (video stream + text questions) with some modifications can provide this type of platform we're looking for.

jammygit 8y ago

I find it takes 45 minutes to really get into some dense subjects. Without putting in the second, third, or fourth 45 min chunk that same evening, I'd personally have a hard time unless it was an easy task/subject.

fidla 8y ago

This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument. It takes way more than 20 hours because much of what you do when you play say the mandolin has to become automatic in order for you to do it well. There are no shortcuts.

sreyaNotfilc 8y ago
I think every advice can be malleable. Just getting started and seeing some results (whether its 20 hours, or 2000 hours) is what matters. I would say after 20 hours is a good sample size and that you should have a good indication on - 1. Where your skill level really is 2. What your current aptitude for learning said skill 3. How you feel about learning the skill and potentially going forward 4. Where you would like to go next to further push that skill From there you may revise the course that you're on (add or reduce the time invested). For me, I do like having 45 mins chunk of time to work through a problem. Its give me time to understand the goal, and get invested. 45 mins tends to fly by so you're not fatigued afterwards. Then you can rest and reflect. That's how I'm handling my trumpet work (learning scales and songs).
mikestew 8y ago
This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument This is amazingly good advice for those learning their first musical instrument. Because casual observation tells me that nearly no one spends that kind of time on an instrument starting out. If one spends 45 minutes a day practicing (not noodling) on an instrument for a month, I don’t think sounding reasonably decent on a tiny set of tunes can be avoided. Rhonda Vincent won’t be inviting you on stage for a mandolin duet, but you won’t embarrass yourself in front of friends. Now, getting good? Well, yeah, that’s going to be that same 45 minutes a day for the next ten years. But after twenty hours I think one would earn the right to call themselves a mandolin player.
imtringued 8y ago
Nobody who wants to learn a skill wants to master it in 20 hours. The entire point of this article is that the 10000 hours number is a red herring. Spending every single day learning something is the exact opposite of a shortcut, it requires a huge amount of discipline. 20 hours spread over 30 days should be more than enough to turn someone who doesn't know what a mandolin is into a novice mandolinist who knows what further steps he has to take to get better.