The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!

I guess this book may have been the result of Kaufman applying his skill acquisition methods to writing!

All snark aside, this book fell short of what I expected. The first part of the book goes over the theory of skill acquisition that he has researched. It's very short, which is unfortunate, as he does a good job of putting things together in a nice arc. But the section is so short that it feels like a top ten list rather than an actual fleshed out theory.

Then the majority of the book is taken up by rather lengthy descriptions of how he went about learning a few different skills. I found this section too focused on the particulars of each skill; and there was little to no explicit mention of how he actually applied his theory to learning new skills. I can see how some elements were in play, but it would have been nice to see more in depth analysis of how each point on his checklists matters, rather than 20 stick figure drawings of yoga poses. It's to bad, I really wanted to like this book, and many of the skills Kaufman pursues are interests of mine, but a lot of the passages just seem to be edited versions of his personal learning journal of what yoga poses or ruby commands worked, rather than an analysis of how learning skills is itself a skill.

In short, don't get burned like me, wait for this one to go on sale, get it at the library, or just watch his YouTube videos and read his blog.

I enjoyed Kaufman's first book and was looking forward to this one, especially since it deals with rapid learning.

Unfortunately, "The First 20 Hours" is disappointing. The initial 20% of the book describes some general and fairly superficial principles for rapid learning. The remaining 80% provides an amateur's description of six topics of personal interest. If you're interested in Yoga, ukulele, web programming, wind surfing, touch typing, or the game "Go", and further want to know what an admitted amateur has discovered for himself about these topics, then you may find this book worthwhile. Otherwise I fear you will find it just a waste of time and money.

You might assume I'm judging the book unfairly, and that the specific skills are actually being used to illustrate the application of the rapid learning principles. Oddly that is not the case. There's relatively little connection between what he writes about (say) the history and practice of Yoga and the principles expounded in the first few chapters. What you are left with is an odd "Wikipedia-grade" description of an eclectic handful of subjects. Like ... who cares?

I'm sorry for the negative tone of this review, but I was disappointed. "The First 20 Hours" was not a good purchase for me and I do not recommend it.

Assuming this book was already in the works last November, then there must have been a serious "Oh s@!t!" moment for the author when Tim Ferriss' book, "The 4 Hour Chef" was released and he realized, "We're saying the same thing. Mine's just not as good!" If this book wasn't already underway, then someone should call foul-play because the similarities are conspicuous: An approach to rapid skill acquisition that involves deconstructing something into its most basic components and a focus on the highest value activities, an emphasis on language-acquisition, a Tiger Woods comparison and a semi-rebuttal to Malcolm Gladwell and the "10,000 Rule." That's just the beginning.

(Josh goes beyond Tim here and includes the tasteless subtitle, "Damn You, Malcolm Gladwell", calling out a man who has written three of the most influential books of the 21st century. Ballsy, to start. Besides that, the bone with Gladwell seems misguided as he was evaluating what accounted for the humongous gap of success between the likes of The Beatles ["Bigger than Jesus"] or Bill Gates [one of the wealthiest men...ever!], and their contemporaries. The theory was about lopsided success at the most extreme levels not general skill acquisition. Finally, it's just poor form. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Gladwell's conclusions were way more influential and compelling than anything you're going to find here).

But I digress.

My disappointment with this book isn't so much that this approach wouldn't, or doesn't, work, it's that the book is incredibly underwhelming, skimpy at best, and none of the author's results or conclusions are all that striking, rapid, or convincing.

The introduction can be summed up like this: Pick a skill you're interested in, break it down, buy some books or watch some hi-res Youtube videos on the topic, practice for about 20 hours, and you can become... mediocre. The next six chapters attempt to demonstrate this through some of Josh's own projects.

Some examples of skimpiness and advice on what's to come:
- Two checklists that sum up the entire process.
- Explanations of the learning curve. Thank you. God, I've been wondering about this. Glad to have it finally broken down for me! (Oh yeah, Tim's book had this too).
- 6 pages of stick figures doing yoga poses.
- A chapter on computer programming, with pages of irrelevant code that you should skip entirely, unless you're really lost and in need of direction such as, "I already have a computer, which is a start: You can't program without one" (pg 89). Now that you've got that covered...
- A chapter on touch typing that you should also skip entirely.
- A chapter on the board game Go, which I'd never heard of, and that was moderately interesting, but again, pages and pages of diagrams, skimming, and more gems like, "Mind = Blown. This game is huge."
- Ukelele and windsurfing.

Aside from the annoying, self-congratulatory tone throughout ("I'm effectively a business professor, but I don't work for a university" [pg 70]), probably the saddest part of this book is that the author's conclusions about acquiring new skills don't actually match what his experiences testing these theories are telling us. At the end of 20 hours of yoga practice, he concludes that it has some benefits, he likes it, and he'll keep doing it at home. After 20 hours of practicing Go (or writing and programming), he concludes, "I have mixed feelings about Go... my leisure time is limited, and Go seems to require the same sort of intense, focused concentration that writing and programming demand. While Go can be fun, at the end of a long day, Go feels a bit too much like work." In other words, he's getting his ass kicked by people online, and realizing it takes more than 20 hours to get to the point where it doesn't feel like work, i.e. The steep part of the learning curve. He'll come back to this one later, when he has more time to devote to it. He's learned to play some basic songs on the ukulele and has completed a live performance (Kudos. Seriously, Kudos), and will continue to sing and play for/with his daughter, which is sweet, but we've also heard quite a lot about her by this point... As for wind-surfing, not so much: "I tally up my total practice hours, and come up short of my goal: nine hours of practice total, far less than the twenty I wanted to spend by this point. I spent more time than that on the water paddleboarding." But at least we get a nice promise: "By the time you read this, it will once again be windsurfing season... I'll reacquire the basic level of skill quickly." Meaning, like, the ability to stand up on the board.

So, self-admittedly, he didn't really learn each of these skills. He just dabbled in them and scratched some curiosity itches. Three of six would be generous. One of them he's giving up on completely because progressing any further will take more time, and another he only did for 9 hours. Yet despite all of this, he feels justified in saying, "In less than a year, I learned six complex skills." He finishes with the sage advice that, "If you want to acquire a new skills, you have to practice. There is no other way." Gold.

So, what to make of "The First 20 Hours"?

Well, if you're the type who equates trying windsurfing a few times with actually possessing the skill of windsurfing, or considers it remarkable and rapid progress to have gotten better at a complex board game by having read a few books and played the game online 33 times, or if you're just the type that likes to have stories on-hand of all the cool feats you're accomplishing so that you can tell people all about them at your next party (when you really only know OF them, or have tried them for maybe a few hours), then you'll probably like this book. (Note: Even if you're good, don't mention the online gaming. Just don't).

Personally, this isn't the type of "learning" or "skill acquisition" that I'm particularly interested in. This is poseurism. This is gathering stones (not conquering territory) exemplified, and if "The Personal MBA" is the result of 10,000 hours, then this book is what you get from the first 20.

I'll make it quick. Read Chapters 1-3 and you are basically done. Teaches you what you need.
Chapter 6 skip through it and read Interference and Consolidation.
Chapter 7 read the Inversion example and portion on behaviour fixing.
The rest of the book are just examples. If you want to read the examples they will serve as examples of deconstructing but you can just go to the end of the example chapters and read the review portion which clearly lists how he deconstructed the skill.

Follow this and you will will end up finishing fast and be able to start your next project.

I'm still on this subject. I will re-read 4 Hour Chef. The book is based on Meta Learning at the 10k rule. After that Solomon's book. All 3 books have lots of similar patterns. This time around I'm taking serious notes.

Cool thing about this book is that you realized that all it takes is 20 hrs to be pretty good at something. ie. Chapter 6 who can type at 60wpm per min with a 2% error rate. Not me or anyone I know. This book basically teaches you that all you need is 20 hrs on 1 subject to be better at something that the people around you are not good at. With 20 hrs you are ahead of the curve. 20 hrs could be the difference between you getting a promotion or someone else. Who cares about 10k hrs of deliberate practice. 20 hrs is all you need to be better than the person next to you.

Before you buy this book you have to ask yourself this basic question: do you want the be a Jack of all trades or the master of some? Then, you may ponder about the "self-help-ish" or "magic number-ish" 20 hours issue (you will learn that this is the personal experience of the author). But, the title sounds too good to ignore, too enticing to leave, so you still buy the book. You will be disappointed.

You will find that the author wants to do soooooo many things, but there is never enough time to do them all. (Aren't we all staring at our bucket lists with the same quiet desperation?) But, here is a method that allows you to beat the confining principles of being realistic, prioritization AND focusing. It contains 10 principles of rapid skill acquisition (1, love the stuff; 2, focus on the stuff; 3, decide how good you really want to be; 4 through 9 are really no brainers and 10, emphasize quantity and speed) and 10 principles of effective learning (1, research the stuff; 2, just do it; 3, identify mental models, etc.). The method is then demonstrated using the author's preferred random skills: yoga, programming, typing, go, ukulele, windsurfing.

So, why will you be disappointed? Because most of us have only a few "dream skills", but would like to do them at a higher level than many disconnected things at an average/below average level. It may be the question of a high enough dose of Ritalin, but an average adult does not dream to do a periodization of 20 hour cycles of random skills. If one jumps from one skill to the next, what becomes of the necessary practice time of the earlier skill? I understand that the author simply wanted to demonstrate how well his method applies to unrelated "arts", but here is where the book falls short. Instead of demonstrating how generally applicable the method is, I would much rather get into the method itself through the acquisition of a single skill (not to forget the difference in between learning unicycling or playing the piano, doing karate or breeding Saint Bernards). Some demands extensive knowledge of theory, while others based on mostly practice. (There is also no breakdown of how the 20 hours was spent, say, while learning yoga. At one point a 90 minute instruction is mentioned, then a 3 hours instruction. How much time was spent with researching the basic theory?) Mental scaffolding or mental models/lattice work could have been used to demonstrate applicability of this single skill, instead of creating an easy target for criticism by rushing through eclectic ventures. I would have expected more learning about learning itself and how elements of knowledge/skill aquisition are similar (but not the same) in between widely varied topics. But it is questionable, if there is one general "learning DNA" that could generate both flea an and elephant skills.

Principle 3 of rapid skill acquisition "Define your target performance level" is why most of us will give up on this book. At the end it is not about frustration barriers, 20 hours, methods or skill acquisition, but dealing with plateaus. George Leonard in his excellent book "Mastery" describes exactly the type of path this author wanders upon. It is the "Dabbler", the eternal kid. The end of the first 20 hours may actually signify the first inevitable plateau, where admitting how demanding something can be and how much more effort and commitment it requires to move on to the next level is simply dismissed by moving on to a brand new project. I may be wrong, but the "target performance level" is much more of the journey itself than a destination.

Most of the book is about how to learn to do things I either already know how to do (and teaching how to do them wrong) or how to learn how to do things I do not want to learn about. Is is even worse when the first lesson is "only learn what you love to learn, what you can fall in love with". Well, I don't want to learn Yoga so why waste my time with half the book being on it?

Basically only one chapter is valuable; and it reads like a collage student plagerized everything from a shallowly written ehow blog post and then did everything they could to make it read longer.

Bad news for me as I paid for this craptastic book, but good news for you because that one chapter has already been summarized by multiple people and is freely available on the internet.

First, this information is so basic and out there in so many other places that at best, this should have been a blog posting or an article, not a book. Second The First Twenty Hours smacks of a guy just trying to get a book published, any book published. The title is trying to show contrast to Gladwell's work simply as a way to get you to pick it up. In fact he mentions Mr. Gladwell at the beginning and points out that the 10,000 hour rule is about mastering something and in 20 hours he is just going for competency. I am amazed that the people at Pinguin thought this worthy of firing up the presses.

Other's have summarized The First 20 Hours in a sentence or two so I will discuss how he disproves his own theory. Kaufman's thesis is that you can become competent (the skill becomes functional or fun) at anything in 20 hours of intentional, focused practice. He even suggests this is possible with academic skills like languages. He cites an example of a friend who taught himself English by interacting with English speakers..... but Kaufman fails to point out how long it took his friend to become competent. Here is the crux of the issue. Kaufman succeeded in getting to a basic level of skill in about 20 hours with things that were primarily physical activities if you only count physical practice time and not time spent researching and learning about the activity. Only actual, physical practice of the skill is counted in his 20 hours, no research or knowledge acquisition.

Where he fails miserably is with anything more academic; as demonstrated in the chapter where he tries to learn the game Go. He does research and learns a great deal about Go and the strategy of the game (this doesn't count in his 20 hours) and at the end of 20 hours of focused practice he really can only play Go based puzzles on his iPhone or small games against the computer. 20 hours is not nearly enough practice to play in a competent way against a real opponent. He sums up the chapter on Go with a straw-man argument so obvious as to be sad.

"There is no universal law that says you have to master everything you ever learn..... you don't have to be a black belt in everything to have a satisfying life."

The problem here is that mastery isn't the premise of the book, basic competency is the premise of the book. Kaufman tries to explain away the failure of 20 hours to give him competency in Go by saying that it's ok not to master everything. I actually said "logical fallacy!" out loud while reading. Glad I wasn't in a coffee shop.

Intentional, concentrated practice will get you far in learning something new. He is right there. But if anything, this book proves that the number of hours needed to gain a functional level of skill varies widely by the skill you are trying to acquire, with academic disciplines requiring a great deal more time than more physical skills like typing.

There you go, a book that disproves it's own thesis and yet somehow got published. With that, I think Josh Kaufman met his real goal.

I gave the book four stars. I like John Locke's observation that the star system merely communicates whether the reviewer is the target audience. A five-star is somebody who is in the target audience (or a paid reviewer). A four-star is somebody "near" the target audience. Three or less the reviewer is not the target audience (or a troll). When reading reviews, I like to read the fives to see what the target thinks, and find out if I'm in that target. then I read other reviews to find the boundaries of said audience. I consider myself just outside the target audience...but the book I anticipate my kids may read in the next few years.

I consider myself a journeyman skill acquirer. I'm a jack-of-all-trades, pushing the boundaries of my ignorance is my hobby. I've been at it since the 70s. This book's target appears to be the novice to apprentice level; somebody about a decade younger than me...who wasn't alive in the 70s.

Fast read? I read it during a one-day conference while taking notes on the lecture. Either that speaks to how clearly he writes or there's not a lot of content. I'd seen his YouTube video so some of the material was familiar, but there's enough in the book to be distinctive.

What I like about Josh is that he comes across as a man who genuinely wants to help his fellow layman overcome the fear and trepidation of learning. In pMBA, he shows the rift between learning and credentialing. It inspired me to do a personal reading in theology which was difficult at times. He's good at motivating and this book encouraged me to put together a Someday list of skills and start ticking them off.

20 Hours is an extension of that meme. Skill acquisition, learning, education...they are distinct. His book does a sufficient job...you may not need to read further than his first few chapters to understand the structure of skill acquisition. If you've been at it for a while, then it might seem a little elementary. What this book did was essentially confirm what I have learned by trial-and-error over these many decades. I still picked up a tip or two.

The six anecdotal chapters are themselves interesting. I have no desire to learn or practice Yoga; and I've always wanted to pick up Go. He gives enough information on each to either satisfy your interest or goad it. Now I understand why I lost that one game of go I played in 1991. The point of his chapters was to show what it looked like to pick up a skill. If you were to write a list of six things you always wanted to learn to do that have a short cycle to basic competence, then he shows that you can pick up those skills in a year. I'm tempted to complain that the chapters were a bit longer. I think it would have helped if he had better mapped the relationship between his theory chapters to his practice chapters. I read two and skimmed another...he does at least show the relationship adequately.

One thing his last chapter made me think about was skill capacitance. What happens when you start learning perishable skills (e.g. guitar playing) and step away from it? George Harrison could walk away from the guitar for five years and resume with little difficulty. But he has the 10K hours. After only 20-odd hours, those skills that perish need maintenance. What happens when you have enough of those skills that you can't maintain them all?

I have followed Josh Kaufman since reading [[ASIN:1591845572 The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business]], one of the best books on business that I've ever read. I was really excited to pick this book up at first, but after glancing through the table of contents and flipping through the chapters, I was pretty sure it was not going to be my favorite book on learning. The problem, in my mind, was that the bulk of the book was simply anecdotal, and the meat of the book was thin - really only two chapters at the beginning. I also recently picked up two excellent books on learning, [[ASIN:0547884591 The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life]] and [[ASIN:0670024961 Mastery]], and did not see how this could compare.

Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised after reading it. The 10 Principles of Rapid Skill Acquisition and the 10 Principles of Effective Learning may be short chapters and seem simple, but they contain valuable advice. They will help you sort through what you should be learning and how to pick it up quickly. I thought that this would be the most interesting part of the book, but it turns out the case studies included were much more rewarding.

Yoga: Kaufman explains his method for learning yoga quickly. This is a good example of learning, but also a great example of teaching - I learned more about yoga then I ever cared to know and it was actually interesting.

Programming: This is easily the most technical chapter and the hardest to understand, but also the most inspiring. Seeing something as daunting as learning a computer language from scratch broken down so quickly was pretty amazing. I added learning Ruby to my list.

Touch-Typing: Interesting study about typing and switching to a more efficient keyboard. One tip from this chapter that is worth the price of the book: Practice skill acquisition and sleep within four hours. Sleep helps cement new skills (especially motor skills) into your long term memory.

Go: Again, knew nothing about this, interesting to read about a history of a board game.

Ukelele: Learning to play a ukelele in 10 days . . . pretty amazing case study. This has gone onto my list as well, though I'm not sold on a ukelele over a guitar.

Windsurfing: Interesting chapter on learning a very physical skill.

The case studies will help you craft and break down your own learning projects. They are great, and will be immensely helpful for me as I choose what and how to study.

If you are really interested in learning skills quickly, I would highly recommend picking up [[ASIN:0547884591 The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life]] and using the DiSSS CaFE learning method in conjunction with this book. Using the techniques and seeing the examples from both books will help you start learning on your own very quickly. Honestly, it would be hard to invest your $40 on two better books . . . if you want to learn, start here. Highly Recommended.

This book is simply 5 parts poorly introducing 5 different skills: yoga, languages, web programming, playing a board game, playing ukulele, whatever... I tried going through the boring read, and it really didn't help me in any way.