Transcription
This video will change your life. If you always wanted to learn a skill, pick up a language, or draw like Bob Ross, I'll teach you the exact blueprint to make it happen. As long as you follow five key steps, you can learn anything in less than 24 hours. How do I know this? Because I've spent my entire life doing stuff like this. Apart from inhaling textbooks every day in medical school, I've also taught myself how to dance, how to tie my own shoes, and this one I'm really proud of. Last week, I even learned how to wipe my own butt. How cool is that?
But enough about me. Let's talk about you and how you're going to spend the next 24 hours. First of all, why does this feel like an impossible task? Because everyone compares it to the 10,000 hour rule. It's the rule that says 10,000 hours is what it takes to become an expert at something. Guess what? A complete oversimplification. I mean, think about it. What's harder to play? The viola or the triangle? Personally, it'll take me 10 hours to even figure out what a viola is. Yeah, I think learning the triangle is going to be a lot easier. Point is, how quickly you get good at something is based on a lot of factors, a lot of which is entirely within your control.
Have you ever spent 4 years learning something only to realize you know jack squat about it? Of course you have. You've taken high school Spanish. Did you come out of there knowing how to speak even a single lick of Spanish? I bet if you just spent even a few weeks in Mexico, you learn more than all four years of high school combined. This is what I call the efficiency gap. Imagine you're in an apocalypse. Whatever skill you need for survival. I can bet good money, you're going to suddenly be able to learn that skill very, very quickly.
I don't know why, but today's society loves making us think picking up a new skill has to be this long, drawn out process. Medical school was 4 years long, but that's because we spent hours learning random things that didn't actually matter. Business school was a waste, too. The dude teaching marketing had no real world experience. Working on this YouTube channel for even a week taught me more marketing than I'd ever learned in all of business school. That's why the first step to learning something fast is purpose. I think of this as the three questions: what, why, and how. We'll get to the how in a minute, but being very clear on the what and the why immediately makes your job easier. You want to learn tennis not to win Wimbledon. It's so that you can have fun with your friends on the weekend. You want to learn Spanish not because you have to, but because you want to hit on that cute Spanish girl over there. And later when her Spanish boyfriend comes to beat you up, you need the vocap to convince them you're actually gay. See, purpose. Answer the three questions like this. I want to get this good by this date in order to do this one thing.
But this is the part where you tell me, "Yo, dude, I've been trying to learn Spanish for the past 5 years. I do Dolingo. I watch Netflix with Spanish subtitles. I pretty much only hit on Spanish, ladies. Why isn't this working?" That's because you don't understand how the learning curve works. A learning curve is S-shaped. It has two phases. First phase is exponential and the second phase is logarithmic. The exponential phase is the tail portion of the s. The tail portion is what turns most people off. Progress feels slow. Nothing really happens. You learn a few Spanish phrases like hello, good morning, and where is the library? But you never go to the library because all the hot Spanish leaves there are already taken and so you don't care. Or take guitar for example. Most people learn five basic chords and stay at this level for the rest of their lives. They never hit the rapid growth part of the curve because they practice in a way that's way too sporadic. They take random stabs in the dark, busting out the guitar only when they feel like it.
Let's say you did practice for 24 hours. But let's imagine two scenarios. Who's going to get better? A guy who concentrates those 24 hours in 10 days or a guy who spreads those 24 hours over an entire year? It's a no-brainer, right? The more concentrated your practice is, the more efficiently you'll grow. Deficiency gain here is all thanks to your brain. Concentrated practice gets your brain to pay attention. The brain is like, "Okay, I need to start caring because this apparently matters. It's thinking about it in the background even when you're not." This is something called duse mode thinking. It's why you get breakthroughs randomly in the shower when you least expect it. This is how you hit your inflection point and get to the rapid growth phase of the learning curve. In my opinion, the sweet spot is around 90 minutes of practice a day every single day. Most people can't keep up with this, which is a shame because they'll end up spending even more time practicing over their lifetime, but get much less for their effort overall.
The other implication of the S-shaped learning curve is realizing the biggest gains actually come at the beginning. It's much easier to go from beginner to intermediate than it is to go from intermediate to advanced. And that's exactly what the 24-hour rule is designed to exploit. Consider this amazing fact. 1,000 Spanish words cover about 85% of daily speech. If your goal is to pick up hot Spanish, ladies, learning the most common 1,000 words means you are good to go. To become a native speaker, you have to learn 10,000 words. To become a master Spanish linguist, you then have to learn 100,000. This is the logarithmic portion of the learning curve. The part everyone thinks about when they imagine what it takes to pick up a skill. Let someone else waste their time memorizing the dictionary while you go res up the ladies.
Speaking of a complete waste of time, I was helping my friend pick up the ladies the other day. We're at this bar and he's trying to muster up the courage to talk to this nice lady who just so happened to be speaking Spanish. Of course, my friend's kicking himself, wishing he remembered more high school Spanish, but part of me was like, "Okay, dude. Even if you were fluent, would that change the outcome here? It's not like the girl didn't speak English." And so, clearly, this wasn't a communication problem. But still, my friend went home that day, telling me he's going to restart Dualingo just in case he runs into her again. Come on, dude. If your goal is to get a girlfriend, is that really the best use of your time?
But this is the exact problem people run into when they try to learn a skill. They have no idea what to focus their energy on. All skills have what I call a hierarchy tree. If at the top of this tree is knowing how to pick up hot Spanish ladies, there's actually a bunch of high yield sub-skills underneath. Under the sub-skill communication, you may have more sub-sub-skills. 50 more layers down this branch do then get into the tiny tiny sub-skill of oh yay. Hey, it would be nice to have a few more Spanish words in my back pocket to break the ice of all the sub-skills my friend could be working on. He picked the lowest yield, most niche skill possible. When you break down a skill like this and see where people spend their time, you can quickly see why they're not making progress.
But how do you know what your skill tree looks like? By getting meta with it. By looking at the bigger picture, studying not just the pros, but their coaches, too. This part is crucial, which is why you should dedicate the first 2 hours of your 24-hour journey to drawing out this skill tree as clearly as possible. Only when that's done do you then know what to focus on. The three highest yield, lowest hanging sub-skills of this tree. Highest yield because you want these skills to have high impact, but lowest hanging because you want to pick up skills that you sort of have an edge already or at the very least most enjoy learning. This is how you most efficiently climb your learning curve.
Once you hit the exponential part of the learning curve, the rest of the skill tree comes rapidly. Having a role model to copy and knowing what good and bad looks like allows you to enter what I call the self-editing stage. To explain, let me tell you a story that I still think about to this day. I was in this tennis tournament right during a break between games. There I was, sitting on the side, happily sipping my water, thinking about random crap like what the most ultimate Pokémon will look like, while the other kid I was playing was busting out index cards and notebooks on the court. I was like, "What is this dude doing? Homework?" I asked him, and he's telling me he's writing down his thoughts and how the last few points went and using his index cards to remind himself what he wants to work on. This guy was analyzing every point, every swing, literally every moment of our entire game. Meanwhile, I'm over there trying to fuse a Diglett with a Charizard in my head. Needless to say, he completely crushed me. This is the power of self-editing. When you can be a coach for yourself and give yourself feedback in real time as you practice, your ability to send the learning curve gets pushed to the next level.
But self-editing requires a certain awareness, a juggling of three things in your head. First ball is being conscious of how the pros do it. Second ball is knowing where you fall in relation to that. And last ball is a bridging that gap each and every time you hit it. This is the concept of deliberate practice, which is very different from what I call mindless practice. The default way most people fall into when they learn anything at all. This is probably the number one reason why most people don't make progress. You remember my friend with the hot Spanish ladies? Dude's actually been trying to find a hot Spanish lady for the past 8 years now. He goes out every weekend and has probably hit on more girls than my entire ancestral tree combined. And yet, the dude is no better than he was 8 years ago. You know why? Because he's hit something called the okay plateau.
Consider a similar paradox you're facing right now. You've probably already typed more than 10,000 hours in your lifetime so far. And yet, you're probably not some expert typist clocking 100 words per minute, right? In fact, if you're anything like my dad, you're probably still typing with two fingers. Just because you're practicing or doing the skill doesn't mean you're going to get better at it. But even worse than the okay plateau is the I still suck plateau. That was me with the guitar. I was stuck in the same five basic chords, the one strum pattern and the one song, which let's be real, was of course Wonder Wall. These plateaus all happen when you turn off your brain.
This is why there's a fundamental law of learning I call the rule of effort. Deliberate practice is supposed to be uncomfortable. That discomfort is what it feels like to grow brain connections. If you aren't feeling some sort of frustration, you're quite literally wasting time. Think about the gym. Your muscles only grow when you push them to do more. If you don't get sore, you're not going to get stronger. Your brain is the same. That's why with deliberate practice, I have the 4020 rule. If you're going to practice for an hour on anything, first 20 minutes are for doing things you're already comfortable with. This includes the warm-up and basic exercises to review, but the remaining 40 minutes are where you push yourself to the next level with more difficult challenges. If my friend had kept this basic ratio every time he went down, he'd probably already have a line of Spanish ladies out the door waiting for him to call. In fact, he'd probably already be married to a few, maybe even owe child support for a few others.
But unfortunately, he doesn't because he also failed to do the last step of this system, a step that ties everything together. To explain this idea, let me tell you how I destroyed every standardized test I've taken. And yes, I've taken a lot of them. SATs, MCATs, GMATs, BDAPs, Q-tips, TAGs, list goes on and on. Everyone knows to practice with question banks, but the real secret to acing the test isn't simply to do more. It's how you do them. You don't do 50 questions and review them all at the end. You do one question at a time and review ASAP. I want to know immediately if my thought process was correct. I don't even care if I got the right answer or not. It's the thought process that counts. If the thought process was wrong, I want to know that and self-edit my thoughts immediately in real time. This is what I call a feedback loop. Your job is to create the fastest feedback loop possible. The doing has to be fast, but the feedback coming back has to be just as fast.
If you're shooting hoops, that's minimizing the time it takes to get the rebound. Instead of just practicing with one ball, you need a basket filled with balls. If you want to become a writer, it's not hiding in a cape and publishing one book every 2 years. It's writing shorter articles you can publish every week in a public forum that can give you feedback immediately. Like, stop writing about furry fanfiction. And then you say, "Oh, okay. No problem." And write 50 Shades of Gray instead. This concept is called the 1,000 experiments. Consider each time you practice simply an experiment. This gives each practice a little bit more structure, a little more purpose, a little less pressure. It's like your Thomas Edison. The faster you can run your experiments and test what works, the faster you get to invent the light bulb.
So, if you want to get good at anything insanely quickly, this is the blueprint you follow. First two hours is the research and prep stage. Study the pros and try to understand what that skill tree looks like. In this hierarchy, find the three highest yield, lowest hanging sub-skills to work on. Know enough about each skill to be able to self-edit and coach yourself in real time. Focus on one sub-skill at a time, dedicating three to five hours to each sub-skill while using the rest of your time practicing the coordination of all these subs skills together. Get rid of all psychological and emotional barriers stopping you from practicing because you want to concentrate your time and ascend up that learning curve as fast as possible to hit that inflection point. That means 90 minutes a day at a minimum. And when you practice, practice deliberately. Defeat the okay plateau by using the 4020 rule to make your sessions challenging. Minimize downtime during practice sessions by building the fastest feedback loops humanly possible.
If you want to try this 24-hour skill challenge and be held accountable along with other like-minded folks, not to mention partake in the many other amazing surprises I've created for you, join the Spoonfed productivity community. Having a new skill is going to open a lot of doors and make some goals feel a lot more achievable. That's why this next video is perfect. I'll teach you how to achieve your entire year's worth of goals in just 90 days. I'll see you there next.