Hey what's going on guys?
So today we are tackling
how you can learn new skills incredibly quickly.
Over the course of this video,
I'm gonna share a four step process
that you can use to take any skill,
whether it's related to school or your future career,
or whether it's just a fun one like guitar or cooking,
and break that skill down
so that you can learn as much as you need to
about the most important parts
and then start practicing them effectively
so you can gain basic proficiency really really fast.
Now this process we're gonna talk about
applies to any skill,
because at its core,
skill development, whether it's really physical
like basketball
or whether it's really mental like mathematics,
it's all learning.
As you intake information about the skill,
and as you practice it,
you're forging new neural pathways in your brain,
you're connecting them with other neural pathways,
and you're strengthening them over time.
As you do this,
you move though what's called the three stage model
or skill acquisition,
which starts with the cognitive stage
where you're just learning about the skill,
and you're just forming those neural pathways.
Then moves into the associative stage
where you're doing a lot more practice,
and now you're able to sort of self reflect
and pick out mistakes and change things
based on those mistakes.
And eventually you move into the autonomous stage.
At that point you have mastered the skill,
and it's basically able to be done automatically.
And this autonomous phase takes
a really long time to get to.
Mastery takes a lot of hours of practice.
But that doesn't mean you're doomed to spend
dozens of hours in the beginning phases,
because if you know how to structure the learning
and the practice processes the right way,
you can make a surprising amount of progress
in a very very short period of time.
In fact, in his book The First 20 Hours,
author Josh Kaufman argues that you can learn
basic proficiency in almost any skill that exists
in under 20 hours of dedicated practice.
And his process for doing this breaks down
to a series of four distinct steps.
And in a second we're gonna go over those steps,
but first I wanna issue you a bit of a challenge.
If you're sitting there watching this video,
and you have a skill you've been wanting to learn,
use this framework to create a plan for doing that.
Once the video's over,
take out a piece of paper and create a plan
going through each of the steps,
and then start putting it into action.
So the first step in Kaufman's process
is to deconstruct the skill.
Basically you break it down into its component parts,
and then you prioritize those parts
based on your particular goals within that skill area.
Now to give you an example
let's talk about playing the guitar.
A lot of people want to play the guitar,
but there are lots of different ways to play the guitar.
There's tons of different musical genres,
you might want to just play a few different songs,
or maybe you want to be like Slash
or like DragonForce guitarists
and be rippin' solos all day long, right?
These are very different skills.
So, by breaking it down into individual sub-skills,
chords, scales, picking technique,
reading tabs, understanding musical intervals,
you end up with a list of building blocks
that you can then prioritize and take action on.
The second step in Kaufman's process
is the education step.
Basically at this point you want to take each sub-skill
that you've prioritized and learn enough about it
that you can practice well
and identify your mistakes and self-correct.
Now notice I said enough about each sub-skill,
not as much as you can about each sub-skill.
Because I know personally I'm the kind of guy
who will walk into Barnes & Noble
and look at every single book on the shelf
related to what I'm interested in,
and think, I should buy every single one here
and read them all before getting started.
And that's just not how good skill development works,
especially if you want to do it quickly.
You need to learn just enough about each sub-skill
so that you can start practicing,
getting your hands dirty, and making mistakes,
because then you're gonna know what you should correct.
Alright, step number three in the process
is to eliminate any potential barriers to success
or barriers to your progress and your practice.
And in my mind,
the most likely thing that's gonna get in the way
of your practice is a lack of motivation in the long-term.
So, find a way to motivate yourself on a constant basis.
Maybe it's having an accountability partner,
maybe it's joining a forum where you can talk
about your interest,
or maybe it's just making a record
of every single day you practice
so you can see a chain developing
that you don't want to break.
Alright, so skill has been deconstructed,
learning has been done,
and barriers have been sliced in half with a samurai sword.
We are now on the fourth and final step of the process
which is simply to practice deliberately.
In The First 20 Hours,
Josh Kaufman's rule is that you should practice deliberately
until you've achieved your goals for each sub-skill
that you prioritized,
or until you've hit 20 hours of dedicated practice.
And what he recommends
is that you actually practice by using a timer or a clock,
and track the amount of hours you put in.
Because when you're practicing something difficult,
it can be really really easy to overestimate
how much time you spend practicing.
Now that we've gotten through the four step process,
I want to give you a few additional tips
you can use to make your skill development journey
even more successful.
And the first one is to identify the work
of somebody who is a master
or somebody who is where you want to be.
Analyze that work as best as you can,
and then try to imitate it.
Now a lot of people are gonna say,
this is copying, this is ripping people off,
but actually as long as you're not passing off
this work as your own,
this is how a lot of people learn their skills.
And in fact in Japanese martial arts,
there's a concept called shuhari
that is exactly this.
And in music, it's the same.
The famous jazz trumpet player Clark Terry
believed that imitation was in fact
an essential part of becoming a great musician.
And he told his students that music learning happens
in a three stage process,
which he called imitate, assimilate, and innovate.
Here's what he said about the role of imitation.
"By imitating the players you love,
"you'll begin to understand the music
"on a deeper level and begin to see a personal sound
"develop in your own approach to improvisation.
"Questions that can't be answered
"by music theory or etude books,
"like how to play longer lines or how to articulate
"and swing, will reveal themselves as you start
"to imitate the masters."
Part of the reason this tactic works so well
is it gives you a method to go way way beyond
your comfort zone and your current level of skill.
Because if you can take something that a master made,
and you can analyze it from every angle,
you can probably recreate certain aspects of it
even if you don't know exactly what you're doing
or why you're doing it.
Then later on as you're kinda backfilling your knowledge
by learning the theory and all the fundamentals,
you're gonna be able to say,
oh that's why I did that, or that's how I did that.
I didn't understand it at first, but now I get it.
And I kind of have like a rung to pull myself up
because I did that work in the first place.
The Stanford mathematics professor Ravi Vakil
called it backfilling.
And here's how he described it in terms of mathematics.
"mathematics is so rich and infinite
"that it is impossible to learn it systematically,
"and if you wait to master one topic
"before moving on to the next,
"you'll never get anywhere.
"Instead, you'll have tendrils of knowledge
"extending far from your comfort zone.
"Then you can later backfill from these tendrils,
"and extend your comfort zone."
Of course, another way to learn from the masters
is to simply be taught by them.
Which is why another way you can really accelerate
your skill development process
is by finding a teacher or a coach or a course
that you can take.
Now I know from personal experience,
having a coach or somebody who can tell you your mistakes
is probably the most valuable thing in the world.
But you don't have to let geography be a limiting factor
in your access to teachers
because there are 100s of 1000s of tutorials
and online courses that you can use for basically
any skill that you're trying to learn.
And one place where you can find those courses
that I wanna let you know about
is Skillshare, who's actually the sponsor of this video.
Now Skillshare is an online learning community
that has over 12,000 courses in a ton of different subjects.
And I've actually been taking a few of those
in After Effects animation,
but they also have courses in photography,
graphic design, logo design,
and things like cooking, guitar, presentation skills.
In fact, they have a presentation skills class
from Simon Sinek who gave probably my favorite
TED talk of all time.
But one of the reasons I really like Skillshare
is that it gives you the ability to get feedback
from both your teacher and from other people
who are taking the same course.
There's two ways it does this.
Number one, below the videos in any course you're taking
there's a comments section.
And if you ask a question, you can get an answer
from the course instructor.
But also, most of the courses on Skillshare
have a participation component.
Basically there is a project section of the course
where you can upload your own work for feedback.
Now a membership to Skillshare
is normally around $8 a month,
which is right around the same price as Netflix,
and potentially a lot more useful.
But, if you wanna get three months
of completely unlimited use on Skillshare,
you can get it for 99 cents by using the link
in the description below,
and I'll have a few more details about that
at the end of the video.
Before we end this video though,
I've got three additional tips for you.
And all three of them
relate to making your practice sessions
more effective and more useful.
The first one is find a way to record
some of the practice you do.
Now you don't have to record all of it,
but recording some of it is gonna allow you
to analyze your performance,
see the mistakes you're making,
and make improvements.
And this is something my skating coach
actually told me to do.
She said bring your iPhone to the rink,
set it up on a tripod,
and film yourself practicing the moves
you have to practice for the competition.
Because if you can't see what you're doing,
you don't really know how to make improvements.
My friend Martin also does this with Spanish practice.
One thing he does is have an impromptu speech
in Spanish with his webcam,
so that way he can go back and analyze his accent,
his rate of speech, if he made any grammatical errors,
et cetera.
Secondly, if you want to accelerate your development process
and actually get good,
you need to make time for hyperfocused
and honestly lengthy practice sessions.
Now I was gonna say when I was writing this script
that you could just do 20 minutes a day
or 10 minutes a day of practice,
as long as it was consistent.
But when I got to thinking,
I couldn't think of a single skill that I have
that I'm proud of, that I think I'm truly good at
where I just put in 10 minutes a day
or 20 minutes a day of practice.
I mean, After Effects, public speaking, skateboarding,
figure skating, all the things I think I'm pretty good at,
I spend hours and hours of practice on.
And each individual session was honestly quite lengthy.
And lastly, as you practice you want to vary up the stakes.
When you're learning a new sub-skill,
you want to start with low stakes
where you're in a very low stress situation,
there's not much of a threat of consequence.
And then move to higher stakes situations
where there is some pressure.
And video game design is a perfect example of this,
because if you analyze almost any video game,
as it teaches the player a new skill,
it usually gives them a space
where there's some isolated practice.
Where you can basically practice the skill
with not much else going on, very little threats,
the opponents aren't hitting back.
And then, once you've gotten it down there,
you move it into an actual situation
where the opponents do hit back
or when things are happening faster
and when there's very low margin for error
or there's some consequences.
If you look at real word skills,
this principle applies just as well.
I mean look at learning a new language.
When you know absolutely nothing,
you need some low stress periods to drill flashcards,
or learn vocabulary,
but then to really up your skills
and solidify what you've learned,
you might do something like scheduling a conversation
with somebody on Skype or even going to a foreign country
and talking with people face-to-face.
Now I know we went over a ton of different tips
in this video,
and because of that there might be a temptation
for you to wait for a perfect moment
to start building your skill
when you can plan everything out,
when you can integrate every single tip,
but if you take nothing else away from this video,
just take this away.
The best time to start learning a skill is now,
even if you have an imperfect implementation plan,
even if you start really slowly.
If you can start making some mistakes,
start learning some initial
foundational pieces of that skill,
that's gonna help you build into the future.
So whatever it is, whatever you want to learn,
something career focused, something totally fun,
make a plan for implementing it,
use that four step process,
and then just get started.
Once again, I want to give a big thank you to Skillshare
for sponsoring this video.
This is actually my first sponsored video,
so let me know what you thought about it
in the comments down below.
But I'm a big fan of Skillshare personally,
so it was a no-brainer for me.
And if you want to try it,
once again you can try that link in the description below
for three months of unlimited use for just 99 cents.
Or if you're on the site,
you can use the promo code beard when you sign up,
because hey it's me.
Beyond that, if you enjoyed this video,
I'd love to hear what you thought about it
in the comments down below.
Definitely ask me questions if you have them,
and I'll try to get 'em answered in future videos
or in the comments themselves.
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