Original subtitles

hi everyone

two years ago

my life changed forever

my wife kelsey and i

welcomed our daughter leela into the

world

now becoming a parent is an amazing

amazing experience your whole world

changes

overnight and all of your priorities

change immediately so fast

that it makes it really difficult to

process

sometimes

now

you also have to learn a tremendous

amount about being a parent like for

example

how to dress your child

this was new to me i i this is an actual

outfit i thought this was a good idea

and even leela knows that it's not a

good idea

so there was so much to learn and so

much craziness all at once

and to add to the craziness kelsey and i

both work from home we're entrepreneurs

we run our own businesses

so kelsey is a uh

develops courses online for yoga

teachers i'm an author and so i'm

working for home kelsey'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 week eight

i had this thought

and it was the same thought that parents

across the ages internationally

everybody has had this thought which is

i am never going to have free time

ever again

and this is

somebody said it's true yeah it's it's

not exactly true

but it feels really 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

learning through trial and error and

eventually becoming pretty good at

something

and

without 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 a new skill

you know what i found

10

000 hours

[Music]

anybody ever heard this

10 it takes 10 000 hours if you want if

you want to learn something new if you

want to be good at it it's going to take

10 000 hours to get there

and i read this in book after book and

website after a website and the

uh my mental experience of of reading

all of this stuff was like no

i don't have time i don't have to i

don't have 10 000 hours i am never going

to be able to learn anything new

ever again

but that's not true so 10 000 hours just

to give you a rough order of magnitude

ten thousand hours is a full-time job

for five years

that'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 so what's up

there's there's something kind of funky

going on here what the research says and

and what we expect and have experiences

they don't match up

and what i found

here's the wrinkle

the ten thousand hour rule came out of

studies of expert

level performance

there was a professor at florida state

university his name is kay anders

erickson he's the originator of the ten

thousand hour rule

and where that came from is he studied

professional athletes

world-class musicians

chess grand masters all of these ultra

competitive folks in ultra high

performing fields

and he tried to figure out how long does

it take to get to the top

of those kinds of fields and what he

found is the more deliberate practice

the more time that 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 10 000 hours of practice

now we're talking about the game of

telephone a little bit earlier

here's what happened

an author by the name of malcolm

gladwell

wrote a book

in 2007 called outliers the 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 dr ander erickson was

actually saying is

it takes ten thousand hours to get the

top of an ultra competitive field in a

very narrow subject

that's what that means

but here's what happened ever since

outliers came out

immediately came out reached the 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 game of telephone

started to be played

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 expert at something

which became it takes ten thousand hours

to become

good at something which became

it takes ten thousand hours to learn

something

but that last statement it takes ten

thousand hours to learn something

it's not true

it's not true

so

what the research actually says 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

uh something you do physically or a

mental skill

they like to study things that they can

time

because you can quantify that right

so they'll give research participants a

a little task something that requires

physical arrangement or something that

requires

learning a little

uh mental trick

and they'll time how long a participant

takes

to complete the skill

and here's what this graph says when you

start so when researchers gave

participants a task it took them a

really long time because it was new and

they were horrible

with a little bit of practice they get

better and better and better and that

early part of practice is really really

efficient people get good at things

with 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 we just 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

level of improvement is really fast

and then at a certain point you reach a

plateau

and the subsequent gains become

much harder to get they take more time

to get now

my question is

i want that

right how long does it take

from starting something and being

grossly incompetent and knowing it

to being reasonably good

in hopefully a a period of time as

possible

so how long does that take here's what

my research says

20 hours

that's it

you can go from knowing nothing

about any skill that you can think of

want to learn a language

want to learn how to draw

want to learn how to juggle flaming

chainsaws

if you put 20 hours of focused

deliberate practice into that thing you

will be astounded astounded

at how good you are

20 hours is doable that's about 45

minutes a day

for about a month

even skipping a couple days here and

there 20 hours isn't that hard to

accumulate

now

there's a method to doing this because

it's not like you can just start

fiddling around for about 20 hours and

expect these massive improvements

there's a way to practice intelligently

there's a way to practice efficiently

that will make sure that you invest

those 20 hours

in the most effective way that you

possibly can

and here's the method it applies to

anything

the 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

are actually big bundles of skills 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 skill that will

actually help me get to what i want

and then you can practice those first

and if you practice the most important

things first you'll be able to improve

your performance in the least amount of

time possible

the second is learn enough to

self-correct

so

get three to five resources about what

it is you're trying to learn could be

books it could be dvds could be courses

could be anything

but

don't use those as a as a way to

procrastinate on practice i i know i do

this right get like 20 books about the

topics like i'm gonna start learning how

to program a computer when i complete

these 20 books no

that's procrastination what you want to

do is learn just enough

that you can actually practice and

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 then 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 willpower

to remove the distractions that are

keeping you from practicing

the more likely likely you are to

actually sit down

and practice right

and the fourth is to practice for at

least 20 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 is 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

20 hours

you will be able to overcome that

initial frustration barrier and stick

with the practice long enough to

actually reap the rewards

all right that's it it's not rocket

science four

very simple steps that you can use to

learn

anything

now

this is easy to talk about in theory

but it's more fun to talk about in

practice so one of the things that i've

wanted to learn how to do for a long

time

is play the ukulele

has anybody seen jake shimabukuro's

ted talk where he plays the ukulele and

makes it sound like he's like an ukulele

god it's it's amazing

it's like i saw that it's like that is

so cool it's 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 uh

put 20 hours into practicing the ukulele

and see where we got

and so

the first thing

about playing the ukulele is in order to

practice

you have to have one

right

so i got an ukulele and

my my lovely assistant

thank you sir

i think i need the uh

cord here

it's not just an ukulele it's an

electric ukulele

so

the first couple hours are just like the

first couple hours of it anything you

have to get the tools

that you're using to practice you have

to make sure that they're available my

ukulele 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 tune and learning

how to make sure that all of the things

that need to be done in order to start

practicing get done right

now

one of the things when i was ready to

actually start practicing

was i i looked in online databases and

song books for

how to play songs and they say okay

ukuleles you can play more than one

string at a time so you can play chords

that's cool you're accompanying yourself

yay you

and when i started looking at songs

i i had i had an ukulele chord book that

had like hundreds of chords looking at

this thing like whoa that's intimidating

but when you look at the actual songs

you see the same chords over and over

right

as it turns out playing the ukulele is

kind of like doing anything there's a

very small set of things that are really

important and techniques that you'll use

all the time

and some so

in most songs you'll use four

maybe five chords and that's it that's

the song you don't have to know the

hundreds

as long as you know the four

or the five

so while i was doing my research i found

a a wonderful little medley of of pop

songs by a band

called axis of awesome

and

somebody somebody knows it

uh 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

uh if you know four chords and those

chords are g d e minor c

four chords pump out every pop song

ever right

so i thought this is cool i would like

to play every pop song ever so

that was the first song i decided to

learn and i would like to actually uh

share it with you ready

just a small town girl

living in a lonely world

she took the midnight train going

anywhere

i heard that you

settled down that you

found the girl that you're

married now

every night in my dreams i see you

i feel you that is how i know will

go on

i won't hesitate no more no more it's

cannot wait i'm yours cause you were

amazing

we did amazing things if i could than i

would

go wherever you will and can

you feel the love

tonight

and live

with or without you

when i find myself finding myself in

times of trouble mother mary comes to me

sometimes i feel like i don't have a

partner

no woman no cry i mama the showy is a

dream i come from a london under

once a jolly swag man camped by a

billabong hey i just met you and this is

crazy

now here's my number so call me hey

sexy ladies

gangnam

style say goodbye

closing time

every new beginning comes from some

other beginnings

[Music]

thank you

i love that song

and uh i have a secret to share with you

uh so by playing that song for you

i just hit my 20th 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 major barrier to learning something

new is not intellectual

it's not

the process of you learning a bunch of

little tips or tricks or things the

major barrier's emotional

we're scared

feeling stupid doesn't feel good in the

beginning of learning anything new you

feel really stupid

so the major barrier is not intellectual

it's emotional

but

put 20 hours into anything

it doesn't matter what do you want to

learn

you want to learn a language

and learn how to cook

you want to learn how to draw

what turns you on what lights you up

go out and do that thing

it only takes 20 hours

have fun

great job