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TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-03-14
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY
like everyone two years ago my life changed forever my wife Kelsey and I welcome to our daughter Leila now becoming a pair experience your whole world changes overnight and all of your priorities change immediately so fast but it makes it really difficult process sometimes now you also have to learn and it's a tremendous amount about being a parent like for example how to dress your child
this was new to me I I I think this is an actual outfit I thought this was good idea and even Leila knows that is not a good idea so there is so much to learn and so much craziness all at once and to add to the craziness Kelsey and I both work from home where entrepreneurs we run our own businesses so Kelsey is a %HESITATION
that develops courses online for you good teachers I'm an author and so I'm working for home kills he's working for home we have an infant and we're trying to to make sure that everything gets done that that needs done and life is really really really busy and a couple weeks into this amazing experience when the sleep deprivation really kicked in like around a week eight I
had those thoughts and it was the same thought that parents across the ages internationally there everybody has had this thought which is I am never going to have free time ever again and this is a disease it simply said it's true yeah it's it's not exactly true but it feels read the really true in that moment and this this was really disconcerting to me because one
of the things that I enjoy more than anything else is learning new things getting curious about something and diving in and fiddling around and learn through trial and error and eventually becoming pretty good at something and with out this this free time I didn't know how I was ever going to do that ever again and so I'm a big geek I want to keep learning things
I want to keep growing and so what I decided to do was go to the library and go to the bookstore and look at what research says about how we learn and how we learn quickly and I read a bunch of books I read a bunch of websites and trying to answer this question how long does it take to acquire new skills you what I found
ten thousand hours nobody ever heard this ten dollars takes ten thousand hours you if you want to learn something new if you would be good at it static ten thousand hours to get there and I read this in book after book and website after website and the I it might might mental experience of of reading all of the stuff Zac who own I don't have time
I don't have I don't have ten thousand hours I am never going to be able to learn anything new ever again but that's not true so ten thousand hours just to give you a rough order of magnitude ten thousand hours is a full time job five years it's a long time and we've all had the experience of learning something new and it didn't take us anywhere
close to that amount of time right sort of there's there's something kind of funky going on here with the research says in and what we expect to have experiences they they don't match up and what I found here's the wrinkle the ten thousand our rule came out of studies of spurt level performance there is a professor at Florida State University his name is K. Anders Eriksson
he's the originator of the ten thousand hour rule and where that came from is he studied professional athletes world class musicians chess grandmaster all of these are all true competitive folks in ultrahigh performing fields and he tried to figure out how long does it take to get to the top of those kinds fields and what he found is the more deliberate practice the more time but
those individuals spent practicing the elements whatever it is that they do the more time you spend the better you get and the folks at the Tippy top of their fields put in around ten thousand hours now talking about the game of telephone little bit earlier here's what happened and other by the name of Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book %HESITATION into dozens of them called out liars
this story of success and the centerpiece of that book was the ten thousand hour rule practice a lot practice well and you will do extremely well you reach the top of your field so the message what doctor entered a Ericsson was actually saying is it takes ten thousand hours to get the top of an ultra competitive field in a very narrow subjects what that means but
here's what happened ever since out lawyers came out immediately came out reach a top of the bestseller list stayed there for three solid months all of a sudden the ten thousand hour rule was everywhere and a society wide the game of telephone started to be plucked so this message it takes ten thousand hours to reach the top of an ultra competitive field became it takes ten
thousand hours to become an X. at some which became it takes ten thousand hours to become good something which became it takes ten thousand hours to learn but that last statement it takes ten thousand hours to learn something true it's not true so what the research actually says if if I I spent a lot of time here at the CSU library in the cognitive psychology stacks
because I'm a geek and when you actually look at the studies of skill acquisition you see over and over and over a graph like this now researchers whether they're studying a motor skill %HESITATION something you do physically or a mental skill they like to study things that they can time can quantify that right still though give research participants a out a little tap something that requires
physical arrangement or something that requires learn a learning a little %HESITATION mental track and all time how long a process that takes a complete skill and here's what this graph says when you start soon researchers gave up just for the task it took them a really long time because it was new when they were horrible with a little bit of practice we get better and better
and better and that early part of practice is really really efficient people get good at things just a little bit of practice now what's interesting to note is that if you know we don't really for skills that we want to learn for ourselves we don't care so much about time right which care about how good we are whatever good happens to me so if we re
label performance time to how good you are the graph flips and you get this famous and widely known this is the learning curve and the story of the learning curve is when you start you're grossly incompetent and you know it right with a little bit of practice you get really good really quick so that early a level of improvement it's really fast and then at a
certain point you reach a plateau and the subsequent games become much harder to get to take more time to that to get now my question is I want that right how long does it take from the starting something and being grossly incompetent and knowing it to being a reasonably good and hopefully as short a period of time as possible so how long does that take here's
my research sense twenty hours that's it you can go from knowing nothing about any skill that you can think of wanna learn language we learn how to draw once you learn how to juggle flaming chainsaws if you put twenty hours of focused deliberate practice into that thing you will be astounded sounded that's how good you are twenty hours is doable it's about forty five minutes a
day for about a month even skipping a couple days here and there twenty hours isn't that hard to accumulate now there's a method to doing this because it's not like you can just start feeling around for about twenty hours and expect these massive improvements there's a way to practice intelligently there's a way to practice sufficiently that will make sure that you invest those twenty hour in
the most effective way that you possibly can and here's the method it applies anything first is to deconstruct the skill decide exactly what you want to be able to do when you're done and then look into the skill and break it down into smaller and smaller pieces most of the things that we think of as skills actually big bundles of skills that that require all sorts
of different things the more you can break apart the skill the more you're able to decide what are the parts of the skilled at what actually helped me get what I want and then you can practice those first if you practice the most important things first you'll be able to improve your performance and the least amount of time the second is learn enough to self correct
so get three to five resources about what it is you're trying to learn to be books could be DVDs could be courses could be anything but don't use those as if as a way to procrastinate on practice I I I know I do this right get like twenty books about topics like I'm gonna start learning how to program I'm Peter when I complete these twenty Bucks
now procrastination what you want to do is learn just enough that you can actually practiced in self correct or self edit as you practice so the learning becomes a way of getting better at noticing when you're making a mistake and doing something a little different the third is to remove barriers to practice distractions television internet all of these things that get in the way of you
actually sitting down and doing the work and the more you're able to use just a little bit of will power to remove the distractions that are keeping you from practice the more like you like likely you are to actually sit down right and force is to practice for at least twenty hours now most skills have what I call a frustration barrier you know the grossly incompetent
knowing it part that's really really frustrating we don't like to feel stupid and feeling stupid as a barrier to us actually sitting down and doing the work so by pre committing to practicing whatever it is that you want to do for at least yeah orders you will be able to overcome that initial frustration barrier and still with the practice long enough to actually reap the rewards
right that's it it's not rocket science for very simple steps that you can use to learn anything it's easy to talk about in theory it is more fun to talk about practice so one of the things that I've wanted to learn how to for a long time is played it lately as anybody I've seen Jake Shimabukuro so %HESITATION Ted talk where he plays the loop lately
makes it sound like he's like a Google really died it's it's amazing it's like I saw I saw this like that is so cool such a neat instrument I would I would really like to learn how to play and so I decided that to test this theory I wanted to %HESITATION put twenty hours and practicing who clearly and see see %HESITATION where we got and so
the first thing are about playing that clearly is in order to practice you have to have one right so I got it and who clearly and mice my lovely assistant thank you Sir I think any DHEA court here it's not just me lately it's an electric stove ADN here so the first couple hours are just like the first couple hours of it anything you have to
get the tools but you're using to practice you have to make sure that they're available Michael really didn't come with strings attached I had to figure out how to put those on like that's kind of important right and learning how to learn how to make sure that all of the things that need to be done in order to start practicing get to right now one of
the things when I was ready to actually start practicing was I I looked in on line to the bases and songbooks for how to play songs they say okay who clearly you can play more than one string at a time to complete course that's cool your company yourself you and when I started looking at songs I I had I haven't who clearly chord book hundreds of
course looking at the same I whoa that's intimidating but when you look at the actual songs see this pain courts over and over right as it turns out play nucleus is kind of like doing anything there's a very small set of things that are really important and techniques that you use all the time and so the so in most songs you would use for maybe five
chords and that's it that's the song you have to know the hundreds as long as you know the four for the five so while I was doing my research I found a are a wonderful little medley of of pop songs by a band called axis of awesome and somebody if some of you know that %HESITATION and what what axis of awesome says is that you can
learn or you can play pretty much any pop song of the past five decades but if you know four chords and those chords are G. D. C. minor scene for boards pump out every pop song after right so I thought this is cool I don't like to play every pop song ever so that was the first song I decided to learn and I would like to
actually I share it with you ready just a small town girl any man a lonely world midnight shrinking though in you wear hi settle down found %HESITATION you married now Henry nights in my jury I think we really knew that this is how I know real all I'll hit zero three no no more it's your own words we're in the eighties there and because of the
I would gold wherever win the chat real love with all without trouble mother Mary comes times I feel like I no the old woman shortly is a dream come from the land down under once a jolly swagman buy a billabong Hey I and this is crazy if I compare call me page nnst well what what what what hoodlum back in style rendezvous Syria mood volatile losing
every new beginning Saddam bother you came a I love that song and I have a secret to share with you thought so by playing that song for you I just hit my twentieth hour of practicing the ukulele and so it's amazing pretty much anything that you can think of what do you want to do the majors barrier to learning something new is not intellectual it's not
the process of you learning a bunch of little to tips or tricks or things the major barriers emotional we're scared feeling stupid doesn't feel good in the beginning of learning anything new you feel really stupid so the major barriers not intellectual it's emotional but twenty hours and anything doesn't matter what do you want to learn to learn language learn how to cook to learn how to
