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A review by al13ex
The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast by Josh Kaufman
3.0
I've been waiting for a long time to read this book and it turned out to be as inspiring as I was hoping it would be. Learning something new can take about 20 hours, as long as you do some research before starting and you don't have the expectation of mastering that skill when the 20 hours are gone. The idea is to try and learn something you're interested in and you can do this in a methodical and organized way, so in the end you don't just waste your time.
I liked the first few chapters where the author presents the principles of rapid skill acquisition. I thought they make sense and it's a good place to start thinking about the learning process. However, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, the main block of the book consists of skills the author learned in this way: yoga, programming, touch typing, Go, playing the ukulele and windsurfing. Seeing the method in action is a very good exercise, especially if the reader can relate to the subject. What I didn't like was the amount of technical detail and explanation that was put into each skill. These details were not relevant for this discussion, because anyone who wants to pick up the skill will use books and sources strictly concerned with that particular skill. It felt like reading the journal of each experience, where the learner was using writing as a way to memorize and check their own progress. Of course, readers can skip the parts they are not interested in, but I was never very comfortable with doing that...
Nonetheless, investing 20 hours to try a new thing is a good idea and it might give someone the right motivation to keep practicing, with an end in mind. One of the things that I found to be most helpful was about deliberate practice. The author was trying to learn touch typing with a different keyboard layout. At first, his practice was methodical and intentional, to learn the place of each key and to get used to typing faster. Because he had to use the same layout for his regular work, he tried to rely on the fact that he's using it either way for work and he should be learning at the same time. What he discovered was that using the keyboard layout on a daily basis, without deliberate practice to improve, got him nowhere near to reaching his goal. This also reminded me about a TED Talk by Eduardo Briceño about the learning zone versus performance zone. Just doing something without actually working on getting better at it will not yield any results.
I liked the first few chapters where the author presents the principles of rapid skill acquisition. I thought they make sense and it's a good place to start thinking about the learning process. However, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, the main block of the book consists of skills the author learned in this way: yoga, programming, touch typing, Go, playing the ukulele and windsurfing. Seeing the method in action is a very good exercise, especially if the reader can relate to the subject. What I didn't like was the amount of technical detail and explanation that was put into each skill. These details were not relevant for this discussion, because anyone who wants to pick up the skill will use books and sources strictly concerned with that particular skill. It felt like reading the journal of each experience, where the learner was using writing as a way to memorize and check their own progress. Of course, readers can skip the parts they are not interested in, but I was never very comfortable with doing that...
Nonetheless, investing 20 hours to try a new thing is a good idea and it might give someone the right motivation to keep practicing, with an end in mind. One of the things that I found to be most helpful was about deliberate practice. The author was trying to learn touch typing with a different keyboard layout. At first, his practice was methodical and intentional, to learn the place of each key and to get used to typing faster. Because he had to use the same layout for his regular work, he tried to rely on the fact that he's using it either way for work and he should be learning at the same time. What he discovered was that using the keyboard layout on a daily basis, without deliberate practice to improve, got him nowhere near to reaching his goal. This also reminded me about a TED Talk by Eduardo Briceño about the learning zone versus performance zone. Just doing something without actually working on getting better at it will not yield any results.