You can become very, very good at something in a very short period of time.
So the whole idea of the ten thousand hour rule
came from research by K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University.
And the idea behind that was if you look at the people in ultra competitive,
easily ranked fields, professional golfers, musicians,
all of these folks where you can get an estimate of
who really is the best in the world in an objective level.
But the question that that Dr. Ericson was researching is,
what does it take to get to that level?
On some very narrow thing.
So if you want to step on a golf course and compete with Tiger Woods,
that's about the amount of time it's going to take you to get there.
But the vast majority of us, that's not the goal,
that's not what we're trying to do.
We just may have something in our minds that we want to accomplish
or an area of life we want to explore and it takes a lot less time to get what we
want out of something.
And so let's figure out how to do that, let's figure out how to do it better.
So the first step in this process, and this is something that applies to
every skill, could be a motor skill like learning how to fly an airplane or skateboard
or something like that, could be cognitive skills like language or
programming or something.
So the first step is deciding exactly what it is that you want.
Why are you just about this thing in the first place?
If you're able to really clearly define what it is you're trying to get,
it's called setting a target performance level, the more clearly that level of performance,
the more clearly you can define that, the easier it is for you to look out into
the world and find ways to get there in the most direct way possible.
So, what's an example of that?
So, for example, instead of saying, “I want to be a programmer”.
Doesn't give you any information or whatsoever.
It's here is this idea of a program that I would like to sit down and create from nothing
and it looks like abcdefg.
When I make this thing, I'll have developed the skills that are necessary
in order to get particular results.
So instead of learning everything in the world about programming,
I decided this is the sub-segment of that skill I'm interested in learning first
so that's what I'm going to focus on.
And it's important to understand that the first couple of hours of practicing something
new are frustrating for everyone,
everybody's terrible at the beginning.
And so, if you can push through those early few hours
the practice itself becomes fun and becomes way easier to continue to improve.
So after you decide what you want, you do what's called deconstructing the skill.
And the idea behind that is a lot of the things that we think of as skills
like, for example, playing golf or speaking French or
learning how to program, those aren't exactly skills,
they're really kind of general topics that contain lots of smaller sub skills.
So it's really hard to practice being a good golfer,
it's way easier to practice hitting off of the tee with a driver.
So you take the global skill and you break it up into much smaller parts.
And if you're clear about what you want, it becomes very easy to find.
What are those sub skills?
What are the smaller parts that are actually going to help you get to
that target performance level as quickly as possible?
So it's just breaking it down into small enough chunks.
If you do just a little bit of research, which is actually step three.
You go out into the world, you find sources of information
that help you do this deconstruction.
If you look at, say, for example, pick up five books on whatever it is that
you're trying to learn how to do, you don't read them cover to cover,
skim all of them, one right after the other.
And what you'll see is the two or three sub skills that you're going
to use most of the time are the ones that come up
over and over again, so practice those first.
Some of the actual practice techniques can be different.
So, for example, one of the things that you can do when you're
practicing a motor skill, which works really well,
is practice it within a couple hours of going to sleep.
Either taking a nap or going to bed for the night.
There's a lot of research around the idea of what's called a consolidation.
So your brain translates the practice and experience you had
and encodes neural connections to help you do it better.
That practice or that process is way more efficient if you practice within
about four hours of going to sleep.
Step number four is removing barriers to practice.
So things that are preventing you from actually sitting down
and doing the work.
Sometimes those things are environmental distractions like,
turning off the TV or blocking the internet or closing the door.
All of the things that you can do to make sure in those early hours of practice,
which are frustrating, you don't get so frustrated that it's easy
to stop focusing on whatever it is that you're
doing and start paying attention to something else.
Likewise, anything that you can do to make sure it takes as little energy as
possible to start practicing is super helpful at that point.
So instead of keeping your guitar in the case in the back of the closet on the other side
of your house, take the guitar out of the case, get a stand,
put it right next to your next to your couch.
And anything that you can do to make it easier on yourself
to get those early hours of practice better.
This is where the behavioral psychology elements of this come in,
it's how can you make it easier to do the thing
you want to be doing instead of getting distracted by some shiny
object and then going and doing something else.
So instead of relying on exerting a lot of willpower
to force yourself to do this thing that you've decided you want to do,
you spend a little bit of willpower, a little bit of time and energy
altering the structure of the environment around you.
Pre-commit to practicing at least 20 hours.
And this is the big one.
So all the things that we've talked and talked about so far is getting set up
to sit down and do the work of actually practicing.
The pre-commitment and the idea of practicing at least 20 hours,
there's a lot of behavioral psychology behind that.
The two big things, first, it's a really important check
on your reasons for learning this thing in the first place.
Is this worth?
Is it worthwhile for me to rearrange my schedule and stop doing other things?
Is this something that I'm expecting to get enough benefit from
to make the effort worth it?
If it is not, don't do it.
Life is short, go do something else that you will get more benefit out of or you are
more excited about.
So if you're willing to set aside at least 20 hours,
what the pre-commitment does is make sure that you practice long enough
to push through that early frustration and actually start seeing results.
And I think a lot of us really seriously overestimate just
how long it takes to become good at something.
You can become a really, really good at something surprisingly good at something in as little
as 20 hours.
So 20 hours roughly is about 40 minutes a day for a month.
So if you practice that long, you're going to be way better
at the end of that than you were at the beginning.
So the five steps in order, step one, decide what you want.
What's your target performance level?
Step two is deconstruct the skill.
Separate it into smaller sub skills practice the most important ones first.
Number three is research the skill just enough to do the deconstruction and choose the most
important sub skills, but not so much that it becomes a barrier
to practice itself.
Number four is eliminate the barriers to practice.
Make it easy to do what you want to do.
And number five is pre commit to practicing whatever it is that you want to be able to
do for at least 20 hours.