Upgrading up in Quarantine

This blog is about how to learn anything quickly. Develop any new skills or learn anything new very quickly than all others.

How do we learn? How do we learn things quickly in a way that allows us to go from knowing absolutely nothing about a skill to being really good in a very short period of time? So there’s one idea that keeps coming up over and over again. The Ten Thousand hour rule, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something and it’s NOT TRUE, and thank goodness, it’s not true. The order of magnitude of going from knowing absolutely nothing to be really good is about 20 HOURS, not 10,000. And the method very broadly has 5 steps and they’re very SIMPLE. So the first is to decide exactly what you want, what you want to be able to do? What is going to look like when you’re done? What are you going to be able to look at yourself and say, “I did this thing that I’ve always wanted to do” what does it look like? The more clearly and completely you’re able to define exactly what you want to be able to do the easier it will be for you to find ways to accomplish the desired END result as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now the second thing that you do is what is called deconstructing the skill. So most of the things we think of as skills aren’t they just one skill, they’re bundles of smaller subskills that we have used in combination with each other. For example, driving off the tee(the little piece of equipment that raises the golf ball off the ground) and chipping on the green have very little to do in common with each other very few skills overlap there but they’re both important if you want to able to play golf well. So instead of trying to learn the global skill, you break it apart into these smaller parts and you practice the most important sub-skills, things that you’re going to use most first. Now the third part is Researching, researching just enough that you’re able to identify the most important sub-skills, but also understanding and being able to self-correct as you’re practicing. Go out and find 3 to 5 books, courses, DVDs, trainers, people, or resources that can help you do that initial deconstruction. Now, the trick is don’t allow that research to become a form of procrastination. The best approach is to pick 3,4,5 resources, you don’t go through them completely you skim them, identify the idea that comes up over and over and over again. Those are the things that you should know so you can self-correct as you practice and those are the sub-skills that you should probably practice first. The fourth part is removing barriers to practice, making it easy to sit down and actually do the things you want to get better at. So in our lives, we have thousands of distractions. During the practice process, turn off the TV, shut the internet, close the door, and turn off your cell phone. Remove the distractions that can remove the distractions that can take your focus away from whatever this thing that you’re trying to practice is and make sure that time that you have set aside to practice in a way that was going to make you better is as undivided and focused as possible. And fifth very importantly, pre-commit to at least 20 hours of focused deliberate practice you begin and that’s really it. There’s no magic to it. It’s just a focused strategic effort invested in something you care about and something that is going to be rewarding to yourself. Learning, the process of learning is not difficult what we’re doing in this process is really just removing all of the frustrations, all of the things that get in the way of us sitting down and doing the work. Even in the busiest schedules if you can clear a half an hour to 45 minutes a day to sit down and finally learn that the thing that you’ve always wanted to learn, you will be astounded, absolutely astounded at how good you’ve become in a very short period of time. PEACE ✌