The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast – Josh Kaufman

Thoughts: I had been wanting to read The First 20 Hours for a while, as Josh Kaufman’s experiment in learning to touch-type in Colemak was what prompted me to learn the keyboard layout myself. The first three chapters contained all of the main ideas in the book, while the last six chapters (which I skimmed) were Kaufman applying what he learned to six specific skills he wanted to acquire. There were some useful reminders about best practices in skill acquisition, but I experienced no epiphanies while reading it. Not a bad book.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. I read this as an e-book, so page numbers are as they appear in Libby.)

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

1: A Portrait of the Author as a Learning Junkie

• 23: There’s a difference between learning (i.e. learning discursive facts) and skill acquisition. Learning can be useful for skill acquisition, as it helps in self-correcting while developing the skill, but the two shouldn’t be conflated/confused.
• 28: the Three-Stage model of skill acquisition:
  • 1. Cognitive (Early) Stage: includes preparation stages (learning about the skill) as well as early attempts to acquire it. The brain is actively engaged, focussing on small details/individual components of the skill
  • 2. Associative (Intermediate) Stage: brain is still engaged, but more holistically - includes practicing, noticing feedback/results, and adjusting based on feedback
  • 3. Autonomous (Late) Stage: unconscious mastery
  • cf. the later three steps of the conscious/unconscious competence/incompetence matrix

2: Ten Principles of Rapid Skill Acquisition

• 32: Kaufman notes that in order to acquire new skills, some degree of immersion/time commitment is required - 5 or 10 minutes a day can maintain a skill, but you need to spend a good chunk of time on a skill to properly develop it
• 34: when building a new skill, it’s important to understand the different component sub-skills that make it up. In doing so, you can identify the most important sub-skills and prioritize their development
• 37: fast feedback loops are important: the longer it takes to receive feedback, or the less accurate the feedback, the more difficult it will be to acquire the skill
• 39: Kaufman notes that in early-stage practice, quantity as well as speed are more important than the quality of the output
  • j: this helps maximize the amount of feedback you’ll receive
  • do pay attention to form though, Kaufman notes, particularly when learning physical skills
• 42: “Contrary to popular usage, ‘steep learning curves’ are good, not bad” - where the learning curve is steep, big improvements can be achieved with relatively little input of time and effort

3: Ten Principles of Effective Learning

• 47: when acquiring a new skill, learning can make your practice more efficient
  • 48: a little preliminary research can go a long way when starting to acquire a skill. The purpose of this research is not to become an expert in the field, but to identify critical sub-skills
• 52: Kaufman suggests practicing/rehearsing inversions as a way to overcome hesitancy when learning a skill: what are the worst things that could happen, and if they happen, how am I going to deal with them. These scenarios are a useful way to identify critical sub-skills
  • cf. the pre-mortem
• 56: Kaufman suggests that the ability to make accurate predictions is a good test of useful learning
  • j: I should take a similarly experimental approach to subjects I’m interested in - this could be especially useful in coding

4: Yoga

5: Programming

• 97: “If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” -Edsger Dijkstra
• 114: to check out: Hacker News: “an ideal place to browse for at least semi-informed opinions on new developments in programming”
  • j: to what extent is this still the case, several years later?

6: Touch Typing

• 171: Colemak was only developed in 2006, by a computer programmer named Shai Coleman
• 185: Kaufman would practice touch-typing before bed, noting that acquisition of motor skills is enhanced if followed soon afterwards by sleep, deep sleep being best (but naps are still helpful)
• 186: other Colemak typists have stated that it’s possible to become colemak/QWERTY bilingual
  • j: is it worth trying to do this at some point?
• 189- : after Zipf’s law, which notes that letters, words and n-grams all follow a power law, Kaufman made a point of practicing common words and n-grams

7: Go

• 216: “Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, often called ‘The Yellow Book’, is the book that most advanced players cite as the single text that helped them improve their game most dramatically.”

8: Ukelele

9: Windsurfing