In one of my favorite TED presentations, Josh Kaufman talks about the amazing ability of humans to aquire a new skill in a calculated time of less than 20 hours. He also evidently  explains the the misconception of the original 10,000 hour rule of learning something new. After completing his research he discovers that the 10,000 hour rule was developed after studying professional athletes and world class performers. He uses Malcolm Gladwell’s book called “Outliars, The Story of Success” to talk about the book’s idea on the 10,000 hour rule and compares to the game of telephone on how the idea of “it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert” was altered to “it takes 10,000 hours to learn something”. This dramatic change of meaning is false and has people confused in the amount of time it takes to aquire any new skill.

The main idea still stands in where the more you practice the better you will become. But the confusion lies when you ask how long it takes to be fairly good at it from being grossly incompetant. Josh Kaufman through his own experince states it only takes 20 hours of deliberate focus and concentration. His first tip is to deconstruct the skill and break it apart so that you focus on the most important assests. His second approach is to learn enough so that you can self correct and notice your mistakes. The third way is to remove the distractions the will prevent you from sitting down and doing work.The fourth and final step is to be comitted and stick to practicing for 20 hours.

In this presentation he shows his new skill of playing the ukulele which he learned in 20 hours. He tells the people to make sure they have the tools they need in order to practice and learn to do the prep work before actually practicing. In his case he had to learn how to put on the strings of the ukulele before he could even start playing. By playing the instrument at the end, he fulfilled his deserved credibility and convinced the audience of the minimum 20 hour limit of studying and concentration to one narrow subject.