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Monday Matinee: How to learn anything

Don’t have 10,000 hours to learn something? Josh Kaufman has good news for you!

By Kathyrn Leroux, Manager, Corporate Training | Jun 1, 2020

Here’s a good one for the working-from-home crowd! Author Josh Kaufman shares some insights from becoming a new parent while he and his wife continued to run their home-based businesses.

The experience forced the sleep-deprived couple to find quicker ways to do what they enjoy. For Kaufman, that was learning. But of course, he didn’t have a lot of time for it. So, he researched how we learn quickly.

Here’s what he found:

• If you want to be a world leading expert, it might take 10,000 hours. You’ve probably heard (or misheard) this bit of pop culture wisdom from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Ten thousand hours might be needed if you want to be a high-performing athlete, for example. But, for those with more modest ambitions, you can achieve a lot in much less time. How much less?
• If you want to be competent, it takes one five-hundredth of that. Your early level of improvement at a task is really fast — what’s known as the learning curve. According to Kaufman’s research, you start to experience significant diminishing returns on your learning after 20 hours, which works out to about 45 minutes a day for a month.
• There’s a way to practise intelligently and efficiently. The three-step process includes breaking down the skill into its components, obtaining the supporting resources you need to help you notice mistakes, and removing barriers to practice.

Want to learn what skill Kaufman set his mind to? Check out the full video on the TEDx Talks YouTube channel.

What skills would you like to take from “unconsciously competent” to “consciously competent”? Send us a note anytime!