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mistergenest 's review for:
The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast
by Josh Kaufman
Josh Kaufman is the guy you want to find on the seat next to you in a plane trip. Kaufman is a charismatic writer who feels good about himself and can spread that feeling to you, and how you feel about yourself.
He might just be naturally high energy but you can hear the coffee in his delivery, like, he wants to convey this all to you quickly, so he can get back to what he was doing. That sort of brevity had me hanging on every sentence.
He's a story teller: these six episodes could all be on The Moth. He spends a month going from clueless-to-decent in a bunch of seemingly random stuff. (It turns out that he finds the whole world interesting.)
Chapter 5 I liked most: removing the labels from all the keys of his keyboard and learning to type with Colemak by the end of the month (instead of QWERTY).
Second best was the final chapter, Chapter 8: Ukelele. "Definitely giving that a skip", we all say to ourselves.
And yet, after I first avoided that chapter, I later consumed it in one sitting. Until last week, I found myself standing at the reference desk of Madison Public Library, asking them if they had loaner ukeleles.
I forgot to say, this is a how-to book: Kaufman lays out the way to learn anything right up front. He gives some coaching true-isms. And then finishes off with brain science that was only discovered during our lifetimes. He's done with that by Page 35. The whole rest of the book are these entertaining (like This American Life) stories.
The First 20 Hours would be a great book for:
1. someone who needs to learn constantly, for their job (which is any knowledge worker)
2. someone who is about to retire
3. someone who says they love to learn things
4. someone who is a teacher
He might just be naturally high energy but you can hear the coffee in his delivery, like, he wants to convey this all to you quickly, so he can get back to what he was doing. That sort of brevity had me hanging on every sentence.
He's a story teller: these six episodes could all be on The Moth. He spends a month going from clueless-to-decent in a bunch of seemingly random stuff. (It turns out that he finds the whole world interesting.)
Chapter 5 I liked most: removing the labels from all the keys of his keyboard and learning to type with Colemak by the end of the month (instead of QWERTY).
Second best was the final chapter, Chapter 8: Ukelele. "Definitely giving that a skip", we all say to ourselves.
And yet, after I first avoided that chapter, I later consumed it in one sitting. Until last week, I found myself standing at the reference desk of Madison Public Library, asking them if they had loaner ukeleles.
I forgot to say, this is a how-to book: Kaufman lays out the way to learn anything right up front. He gives some coaching true-isms. And then finishes off with brain science that was only discovered during our lifetimes. He's done with that by Page 35. The whole rest of the book are these entertaining (like This American Life) stories.
The First 20 Hours would be a great book for:
1. someone who needs to learn constantly, for their job (which is any knowledge worker)
2. someone who is about to retire
3. someone who says they love to learn things
4. someone who is a teacher