Master Any Skill in 30 Minutes|Top 4 Proven Steps

Good morning, Believe Nation! Today we're going to talk about how to master any skill. Rule number 5 is my personal favorite. I make sure to stick around all the way to the end for my take as well as some bonus clips. And as always, if someone says something that really resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below and put quotes around it so others can be inspired as well. Enjoy!

You're going to spend thousands and thousands of hours learning over the course of your life, and what's crazy is that despite all that time in the classroom learning languages, music, whatever it might be, you might be learning in one of the slowest ways possible. Not because your teachers didn't have good intentions, but because they did not know how to teach you to optimize that learning experience. The good news is this: there are ways, principles that you can apply to everything from martial arts to business that are going to help you lap the competition. You can learn much faster than you are.

Again, I think lifelong learning is one of the most important things in the world, and maybe I'm gonna just— I'm gonna quickly go through a couple of things that happen in my brain when I'm learning. I think the first thing is actually just getting started, doing something instead of nothing, and that happens Get started. I think that happens through a couple of things. The first thing is like curiosity. So you see something, it inspires you. Let's say you're interested in learning how to play the guitar or you're interested in photography. We'll go back to my roots. That usually comes around by seeing pictures in a magazine or seeing a friend who's a great photographer. There's just, there's a little bit of a thing, a curiosity and a passion. What I encourage you to do is to step into that. Lean in and say, okay, what is it that's interesting about this and how can I do it? So the first thing is curiosity, my outline here. And then thing 2, B here, is actually start doing it. Let's go back to the photography example. You saw some cool pictures, you say, wow, my friends are taking up photography, I wonder what I can do. You don't need a lot of equipment in this stage. You can take out just your phone, for example, and start taking pictures. The doing part is actually one of the most important things. You could sit back and pontificate for a long time, but step into it. You don't have to love photography. You can step into it, take some pictures, realize, "Oh, that's kind of not that exciting." Or you can step into 4 or 5 or 6 other things. I think the important thing is doing something rather than nothing. So let's follow the thread here. We're gonna step in it. We started taking pictures with our iPhone, and we loved it. We were like, "Oh, this is kind of interesting." I wonder what else there is. So that's when you lean further in, you get inspired. This phase is really important because this is where you decide to go deeper. You may invest in some gear, or you may rent something, or borrow a friend's camera, and you sort of lean into the thing at a deeper level. I think this is huge. Most real learning doesn't happen without some genuine spark, some point of inflection where you really were motivated, because without motivation, you're not gonna get anywhere. Pay attention to those things in life that motivate you and lean into 'em.

As an adult or somebody who's probably trying to build your target skill outside of the classroom, you have to build your curriculum. And to help you actually build that curriculum, I wanna go over a 4-step process created by the author Josh Kaufman in his book, The First 20 Hours. Kaufman is a fantastically insightful author, and this book of his is about rapid skill acquisition. And as the title suggests, he posits that you can build the bulk of any skill within 20 hours of practice. In the book, he breaks down the process of skill acquisition into 4 distinct steps, and to show you how these steps cover almost any skill you'd wanna learn, I wanna use 2 different, very diverse examples. For each step, we'll look at both skateboarding, which is a very physical skill that requires building lots of muscle memory, and also web development, which is a much more cerebral activity that requires learning several coding languages. So the first step is to deconstruct the skill into smaller sub-skills. In the case of skateboarding, you'd wanna deconstruct it into actually balancing on the board, learning how to turn and carve, tic-tac, turn around on ramps, and do basic tricks. When it comes to web development, those skills have actually been broken down pretty well for you already. The basic structure of the web is coded in HTML, the presentation and design is done in CSS, and a lot of the other coding aspects are done in JavaScript or other languages. As a budding web developer, all you have to do to start is basically make a list of the languages you'd wanna learn and in what order. The second step is to identify the subskills you wanna practice and learn enough about each one that you can effectively practice on your own and also self-correct. In both the case of skateboarding or web development, there are hundreds of online resources that can effectively teach you, or you could even find a human teacher. All right, step number 1, you're gonna wanna write this down, step on the board. Once you've done your initial learning and you're ready to start practicing, the third step is to remove any barriers to that practice, whether they be physical, mental, or emotional. This means making sure you have access to the equipment you need to learn the skill, like you probably need a skateboard if you wanna learn how to skateboard, Probably you're gonna need a computer if you wanna learn how to web develop, but also you're gonna wanna break down your tasks into manageable chunks that you believe you can achieve. And on the emotional side, you're gonna wanna make sure you surround yourself with people who are positive and encouraging about this experience rather than toxic people who only say negative things. And finally, we come to the fourth step, which is simply to practice that skill deliberately. Now, one additional tip I can give you when it comes to practicing is to interleave your practice. That means taking multiple subskills and jumping back and forth between them. For instance, if you spend an hour trying to learn how to ollie and you're stuck at this point, it doesn't really do you any good to keep hammering away at it. Instead, you should go try to do something else, maybe try dropping in on the ramp, and later on come back to ollieing. By doing this, you're giving your brain a little bit of time to relax and step back from that very focused, concentrated session of practicing that one subskill, and coming back later, you're gonna be able to look at it with a more fresh perspective, and you'll ultimately be more successful at it.

Third tip. People get this one wrong, I think, from college, and it's that if you have a set amount of time to dedicate to any sort of learning endeavor, you are much you're much better off spending that time a little bit every day than you are in one batched process. There's some things in life that do better in batching; learning is not one of them because learning comes from repetition, right? I see people in college, they go, "But wait a second, I crammed for my last test. I did fine. 8 hours straight I studied." Yes, but how much did you remember 3 days later? If you're trying to build a skill, you're trying to rewire your brain, create new neural pathways. Say you're playing the piano. If you sit down for 3 hours and play, play, play, play, play, play, play, and then come back a week later, you're not going to have it. But if you sit down for a half hour a day, walk away, come back the next day, half hour, you're getting to review what you did in a much shorter time span. That's going to help you learn faster. So keep in mind, when you have something, this consistency every single day, with the exception of things that require rest like weight training, you want to keep that up. Now, a couple of caveats here. First thing is this takes much more willpower. It's a lot easier for people to go, "I'm gonna run really hard for one day," than it is to do it for a year, a little bit every day. So if you're working on willpower, you haven't mastered that, check out our video on willpower. It's gonna help you with that. And the second thing is that this is true of learning and practicing, though not necessarily of production. I'm a writer, and if you're learning to write, I recommend you read and write every day, but if you're writing your masterpiece, some people, myself included, do better to have these just complete flow experiences of 6 hours at a time. You write, write, write, write, write, walk away for a week, and then come back to it. So learning and production, not necessarily the same mechanics going on here.

There are 4 levels of learning. Okay, let me tell you what the levels are. Some of you might know this if you've been through any self-development. This is some very basic stuff, but it's important here. The first level is called being unconsciously incompetent. And what that means is this. When you first start doing something, you know so little about it, you basically know nothing. You don't know what you don't know. This is a very scary spot to be in when you're thrown into a situation and you're a complete novice. You say, geez, I'd love to get better at this, but I haven't the slightest idea what I don't know. Everyone follow that concept?

This is where most people start off.

Okay. The next level is becoming consciously incompetent. That means that you're like, Jesus Christ, I don't know anything.

You're like, I—

there's this, there's that, there's that. There's all these strategies, they all sound great, I don't know them. That's the next level. Next level above that is called being consciously competent. Consciously competent means that you're good at something, but you can't really do it with your eyes closed yet. You're good, but it requires all your focus and your mental energy. Like, remember when we were kids growing up, you learned to tie your shoe. In the beginning, you like tie your shoe like you're putting your fingers across and someone says, excuse me, like, don't interrupt me. You can't tie your shoe and have a conversation at the same time, right? That's when you're consciously competent in something. It requires all your conscious focus. The next level above that is called being unconscious competence. And that means when you're really, really great at something, you can do it without thinking about it. And the only way to get from conscious competence to unconscious competence is through practice. There's no other way. By drilling it into your head again and again and again and again and again until your brain just clicks and all of a sudden using the unconscious part of your mind which is infinitely more powerful than your conscious mind.

The method that I have arrived at after 15, 20 years of testing, looking for a method, a framework that could be applied to everything from language learning to sports, is this up here, DISC. And it's an acronym, with the exception of I, and we'll go through each in turn. The first step is deconstruction. Deconstruction means taking something very, very large and breaking it down into smaller pieces. It also means identifying why you might fail before you start. What are the reasons that you've quit? What are the reasons other people have failed? And the goal— we'll look at swimming— the goal is to avoid those problems for at least the first 5 sessions. That's it. And this is based on Nike+ data. Once you log your data, or just practice in this case, for 5 sessions, they can be very short, you can establish that as a habit. That's your goal. Avoid these failure points for the first 5 sessions. So for swimming, in my case, I didn't learn to swim until a few years ago, which is very embarrassing for someone who grew up on Long Island with a rat tail. It was always due to difficulty breathing and exhaustion from kicking. All of the lessons I tried, focused on those things, and I failed. So I found a method, which is called total immersion swimming, that completely avoids it. And you practice by practicing in shallow water and then kicking off from the wall. You don't have to worry about breathing, you don't have to worry about kicking. It looks like this. Streamline left to streamline right and repeat. Almost no kicking involved. Now I can go swimming for an hour in the ocean to relax. It's crazy. You can apply this everywhere. In cooking, for instance, it could be too much gear, too much expense, too much time, and it's also a matter of realizing that cooking as we think of it is not just one skill. For most people, it's shopping, prep, cooking, cleanup. So you need to take those away so you're only focusing on the cooking in the beginning. The next is selection, and selection is, in effect, the 80/20 principle, or Pareto's Law. Where you're trying to identify the 20% or fewer of activities, tools, et cetera, that produce 80% or more of the results. And you can determine this pretty easily. There's a lot of research looking at different fields searching for exactly this. The Axis of Awesome, some of you may know, the awesomest band in Australia perhaps. If you've ever wanted to learn to play the guitar, as I had for a very, very long time, found it intimidating for whatever number of of reasons. The Axis of Awesome has a video online, you can find it on YouTube very easily, where they use 4 or 5 chords to play almost every pop song you've ever heard. All the most popular pop songs you can imagine, and they play them with 4 or 5 chords. That is an example of minimalism. Another example of minimalism would be language learning. So to become really functionally fluent in almost any language, you really only need 1,200 to 2,000 words. To express any concept and to understand most concepts communicated to you. This is Cardinal Mezzofanti, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, born 1774, and he was an incredible guy, one of the most famous polyglots in the world. He'd been tested in 29 languages, fluent in 29, and was purported to speak as many as 72. How did he do it? You can't exactly go to Amazon.com and 1774 in biomaterials. He did it by using the Lord's Prayer. He had the Lord's Prayer, and that to him in one page encapsulated all the fundamental grammar in any language, and he would have native speakers simply translate that for him. And I took a very similar approach with languages in these 12 or 13 sentences. I've applied this to Spanish, to German, to Gaelic, and I don't necessarily recall and retain all these languages, but I have done it with 4 or 5 that I've wanted to pursue to fluency. This encapsulates all the most important grammar. Is it subject-object-verb, subject-verb-object, indirect object, treatments, and so on? And you can completely deconstruct and select, in effect, the grammar of a given language in, let's say, 1 to 2 hours. Here, these are from flights with Arabic. Russian, including the Cyrillic alphabet. It's very straightforward. Keeping in mind also that I had actually failed effectively Spanish when I had to take it in junior high and high school. I'd concluded that I was bad at languages. I wasn't bad at languages, I just had a bad method. So the minimalism, the 80/20 approach, can be applied to gear as well, as it applies to cooking. And I chose cooking, by the way, to explore accelerated learning in the The 4-Hour Chef, because it had beaten me many times before. It's something I quit many times. So I wanted to take that on as a challenge. You don't need an entire set of 12, 15 pots or pans to cook effectively. And in fact, when I was doing research for this book, which took me from Tokyo to Silicon Valley to India and elsewhere, in the best Thai restaurant in India, the executive chef uses 2 stainless steel skillets and a chef's knife, a Victorinox chef's knife that you could buy at Walmart for $20. That's it. You don't need a lot. Cast iron skillet, basic knife, you're set. In terms of coffee, just for those people who might like coffee, you see a number of tools here that I've used. I recommend the AeroPress, and all you need to remember is that you're grinding each serving, not grinding in advance, and then using water that is 180 degrees Fahrenheit or less, so that's about 82 degrees Celsius, I believe. Someone else can check that, I'm sure. And you won't ever have bitter coffee again. The next is sequencing. This is the secret sauce in a lot of ways. And the question you ask here is, what if I did things in the opposite order? What if I omitted what people tell me are best practices? And this has been applied elsewhere in manufacturing, for instance, with Lean Manufacturing with Toyota. This is Josh Waitzkin, one of my favorite people. Josh, if you've ever seen the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer or read the book, is the chess prodigy from that book. He's the little kid. Turns out that he has a framework. It's not that he has the inherent skills, although he's a smart guy. He has a framework that he can apply to many, many skills, and he's since has, from being one of the world's best chess players, applied it to tai chi push hands to become national and world champion. He's applied it to Brazilian jiu-jitsu to become the first black belt under Marcelo Garcia, who's like the Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods combined of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. In the case of chess, what he did is he learned how to do it completely backwards. His first coach took him and said, "Rather than starting with openings that are very seductive and will lead you to memorize things," much like stealing the answers from the teacher for a math test, we're gonna start with board control, which means you're gonna have pawn and a king versus another pawn, and that's how we're gonna play. So doing things in reverse actually can be extremely beneficial. When I was training for Argentine tango in Argentina— this was in 2005, uh, very accidental, in fact— but I looked at a number of ways that the best people competed, what they trained, what they taught explicitly versus doing in competition but not teaching, and I decided that I thought I could make more progress by learning the female role first. So instead of learning the male role first, which is a real hassle, a real pain in the ass, and very embarrassing, I decided to learn how to follow. And I trained with one of the best female dancers in the world to learn how to follow, and 5.5 months later, as part of that, was able to go to the World Championships and make it to the semifinals. I'm not a tango dancer. I'm built like a monkey. Look at me. So if I can do it, I think you guys could probably do very much the same. These next two photographs are related to learning skills under pressure or not learning them under pressure. The worst time to learn how to cook, or for instance, knife skills, is when you're under pressure to make a meal. It's the worst time to do it. You should actually look for opportunities to practice what I call "no-stakes practice." So if you look at this second photograph here, I'm learning how to sauté, which means to jump in French. And I'm not doing it over the stove. I'm actually practicing the wrist motion with dry beans in a skillet, and I'm kneeling on a carpet so they don't fly everywhere on a hardwood floor. You do this for 20 minutes, 2 or 3 times, you'll have the motion down. And then you can use two hands over the stove and you won't have any problem. No omelets on the walls. All right. The last photograph, knife skills. This is something that's very intimidating for people, and it need not be intimidating. You just need to learn when you can't cut yourself. So this is a lettuce knife. The green knife is a lettuce knife. Has the same form factor as the chef's knife next to it. So all you have to do is learn how to hold the knife properly, which you see here, and then practice while you're watching Game of Thrones or whatever the hell you might be watching on TV, and just Just cut celery. Just get used to cutting celery. Again, do that for 20 minutes, 2 or 3 times, you'll be comfortable with a knife. And then you can use the stuff that can stab people. But start with the no steaks approach. Speaking of steaks, this doesn't mean steak, i.e., piece of cow. It means stake, like vampire, stake through the heart stake, or consequences. If you don't stick to your diet, what happens? You just stay the way that you've been. You don't get fired from your diet. You don't have someone chastise you necessarily about it. Of course, in your job, you do get fired if you don't do something, and you therefore are inclined to do it. You have an incentive. It is extremely, extremely effective to build incentives into whatever behavioral change you want in your life, to whatever skills you want to acquire. This is AJ Jacobs. AJ Jacobs is a human guinea pig. Much like me. And in this particular photo, or set of photographs, he decided for a year to try to follow all of the rules in the Old and New Testament, which is extremely, extremely, extremely difficult. He lives in New York City, so the after photo that you see with the beard there is when he was dressed in full white robes and had his beard grown out. And he did everything. In fact, when he had to stone adulterers, plays a pretty big part in the Bible. He was at a bit of a quandary because he didn't want to get arrested or just feel guilty or just kill anyone by stoning them. And he realized they didn't specify the size of the stones. So he got a pocketful of pebbles, little tiny pebbles, and he went to Central Park asking people if they were adulterers, and then he would flick one at them and run away. Check. And AJ, following this, this is a great book called The Year of Living Biblically, it's a wonderful book— decided he wanted to get in shape. And he had never been in shape. He had what he described as a python that swallowed a goat physique, which he was not happy with. And he didn't need a new special trainer, he didn't need a secret technique from the former Soviet Union, he needed motivation. So AJ is Jewish and he wrote a check to to the KKK for $1,000 and gave it to one of his friends and said, "If I don't lose X number of pounds, 30 pounds, by Y point in time, I want you to mail this to the KKK." That's an incentive. Money is a great incentive, as all of you know. And you don't have to do what he did. You can use a tool like stick.com. I have no affiliation with them. I'm just a fan. Stick.com came out of research done by professors Professor at Yale. It was initially called the commitment store. What do you do? You set your goal. I want to follow ABC diet. Next, you set your stakes. So I'm going to take 1% of my pre-tax income and put it into escrow as my stakes, my motivation. All right. Then what's not in this list right here is you choose an anti-charity. So you choose a charity that you would rather nuke than give money to. That you would hate to have your name on the record for giving money to. The most popular— and this is not a political statement, just following the data— is the George W. Bush Congressional Library. That is the most popular anti-charity at the moment. So choose whatever you like. Then you find a referee. This could be a merciless friend who is willing to punish you if you don't do what you say you're going to do, or it could be someone from the site. And then you have support, and on you go. And I've seen the data from this site. When you take someone and apply stakes and a referee, their compliance goes from something like 25 up to well over 70%. It is— it has a huge impact. So consequences. What's the overlying principle for all of this? It's simplify. It is to keep things simple, and when you're looking for solutions, to try to remove things first rather than to add things. This is a really, really critical principle. And less can be more in this particular respect, especially for behavioral change. This is a sign that I have over one of my doorways in my house, "Simplify." And above that, I have a knife. Why knife? Because when you make a decision, the word decision is related to incision. It means to cut off. It means to cut away other options and to commit and to focus. And that's what I recommend all of you do with whatever that skill is that you have in your head still, hopefully. This is a beautiful example, an elegant example of simplification to me. This is one of the most delicious scones— you might think of it as a scone or ash cake in this particular case— that was made for me. And it was made for me by Cliff Hodges, who is a former MIT engineer, He runs a company called Adventure Out. And this was made in the Santa Cruz Mountains by simply taking acorn meal, which used to provide 75% of the calories for Native Californians, and laying it directly on top of the embers of a fire. And it came out, it was absolutely incredible. And I think that that's what your results can be as well, if you focus on removal. So I would encourage you in closing to hold in mind a quote from the author the author of The Little Prince. I love The Little Prince. What a lot of people don't realize is the author was also a pioneer in international flight and postal delivery. Very, very smart guy. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. That's my horrible French for you. But in English, what he said was, "Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to take away." And I'll leave you with that.

So my quick take on this is 2 things. First off, you have to have a passion. When you have a passion to learn something, you're much more likely to pick up that skill. Think about what you had to learn in school through the textbooks and think about how relevant some of those things were to your life and how excited you were about actually learning it. If you are not interested in learning it, if you can't find meaning in your life that that's applicable to, it's gonna be so much harder to master the skill. If you look at the people who've done insane things or at the height of their industry and have the most skills, they have a passion to do it. And so stop trying to learn stuff that you're not excited about, and instead learn something that you can get really good at quickly because you love it. You can quickly pass. A lot of times people look at an industry and say, oh, that person, they have a decade of experience, like, who am I? I'm just starting out. You can quickly pass somebody who has years of experience because you are just so much more excited about doing it. I see it all the time, uh, in the salsa world with my my business, Toronto Dance Salsa. Somebody who really wants to learn the material and is out practicing, they go to a class and they tape it and then they go practice and practice and practice and they come back the next week. They're so far ahead of the person who just came to class, even if that first person has more skills or has more natural talent. You can overcome any of your shortcomings through hard work, practice, and dedication, and that comes because you have a passion to learn it. The second quick tip I have is model success. Whenever you have something that you want to do and you have no idea how to do it, go find the person who's done it and look at how they did it. I don't care about how somebody does it now. Somebody at the, the peak of their career, how they do it now isn't as relevant. Think more back to the early stages. How did they get started? How did they initially pick up those skills? How did they initially acquire that knowledge and expertise? And then bring that to life for yourself. Whatever it is that you want to accomplish in life, somebody has already figured it out. And just modeling that success, you can quickly learn from them, from their success and their mistakes, apply it to yourself to rapidly master that skill. So thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Santosh Susarla asked me to. If there's a topic that you'd like me to cover in the next edition of Believe Life, please leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can I'd also love to know what did you take from this video that was the most inspiring, most interesting, most applicable to you and your life and your situation right now. Please leave it in the comments below. I'm gonna join in the discussion. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Dolores Clark from sorted4u.co.uk. Dolores, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really, really means a lot to me. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and and whatever your one word is. Much love, have an amazing day, and I'll see you soon.

Why do so few of us master things? Well, last week I had the opportunity of spending some time with an instructor, golf instructor Michael, and he and I were sitting down and having a conversation together, and he said, you know, the game of golf is very annoying and very frustrating. I said, "Tell me. Tell me why." He says, "Well, because you're going at 80 miles an hour swing and you're supposed to hit the small ball and all the small little angles could dictate which direction the ball's going to go, so you could really drive yourself nuts." So I said, "When does one really start enjoying the game of golf?" I wanted to hear his answer. Listen to what he told me. He said, "One learns and enjoys the game of golf when you know why the ball went where it went. I said, elaborate. He said, as an amateur, you get up and you try to hit the ball, you miss the ball, right? If you make a contact, it goes right, it goes left, it goes all over the place, and you want— how come it went to that place? He says, once you learn why the ball is going to the right and why the ball is going to the left, you get to actually enjoy it, because your next swing, you just make a minor adjustment. Maybe it's your shoulders. Maybe it's your back not being straight. Maybe your head's moving more than 2 or 3 inches. Maybe your weight is on your heels instead of your toes, 70/30. Maybe you're not 60/40 on your back foot. Maybe the ball's not aligned right with your left foot if you're hitting a driver. All of these things you think about. He says, but once you figure that out, you actually get a chance to enjoy the game. And I said, you know what, that's exactly what it is to be an entrepreneur and a businessman. You know, you sit there and you wonder, why is this thing not working for me? And you know typically what it is in business? It's one small, minor adjustment you've got to make and boom! You start enjoying the game again. So you don't mind if a certain number is going lower or higher, but you know why that thing's going lower or higher. It's because of this. This concept is true in many aspects of our lives. You could say, my lower back is having problems. I really have a hard time with my lower back. And so you go out there and work on your lower back. And you hire a personal trainer and he says, it has nothing to do with your lower back. Your hamstrings are weak. Your abs are weak. You need to work on your abs and your hamstrings. You've got to be kidding me. Say, my marriage is not working out. It's because of our finances, because of this. You go talk to somebody and they say, no, it's because of communication. You know, my finances are not working out. It's because of my income. No, it's because you're spending too much money with the barbecues you do every other weekend and beer. You're spending $300 every time. That's $600 right there. But once you figure out why it is that you're having those challenges you're having, and you make minor little tweaks here and there, you start really enjoying the game of life, and it just becomes so effortless to you. And you know who could do that?

Anybody.

You just got to figure out what those tweaks are that you need to make.