暢銷書作家 Josh Kaufman 在演講中提出了“ 20 小時(shí)定律”，并認(rèn)為 20 小時(shí)足以對任何技能上手。

他因著作《 The First 20 Hours：How to Learn Anything Fast 》而為人熟知。

- 中英文演講稿 -

（手指在框內(nèi)上下滑動即可查看）

Hi everyone. Two year ago, my life changed forever. My wife Kelsey and I welcomed our daughter Lela 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. This is an actual outfit, I thought this was a good idea. And even Lela knows that it’s not a good idea. So there is 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 develops courses online for yoga teachers. I’m an author. And so, I’m working from home, Kelsey’s working from home. We have an infant and we’re trying to make sure that everything gets done that needs done. And life is really, really busy. And a couple of 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. Somebody said it’s true. Yeah, it’s not exactly true, but it feels really, really true in that moment.

And 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 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’ve 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. 10,000 hour rule And I read a bunch of books, I read a bunch of websites. And tried to answer this question, how long does it take to acquire a new skill?

You know what I found? 10,000 hours! Anybody ever heard this? It takes 10,000 hours. 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 website. And my mental experience of reading all of this stuff was like: No!! I don’t have time! 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, 10,000 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 something kind of funky going on here. What the research says and what we expect, and have experiences, they don’t match up. And what I found, here’s the wrinkle: The 10,000 hour rule came out of studies of expert-level performance. There was a professor at Florida State University, his name is K. Anders Ericsson.

He is the originator of the 10,00 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 spend practicing the elements of 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 were 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 central piece of that book was the 10,000 hour rule. Practice a lot, practice well, and you will do extremely well, you will reach the top of your field. So, the message, what Dr. Ericsson was actually saying is, it takes 10,000 hours to get at 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 best seller lists, stayed there for three solid months.

All of a sudden the 10,000 hour rule was everywhere. And a society-wide game of telephone started to be played. So this message, it takes 10,000 hours to reach the top of an ultra competitive field, became, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, which became, it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something, which became, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something. But that last statement, it takes 10,000 hours to learn something, is not true. It’s not true.

So, what the research actually says — 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 a graph like this. Now, researchers, whether they’re studying a motor skill, 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 little task, something that requires physical arrangement, or something that requires learning a little 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, 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 mean. Learning Curve So if we relabel 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. o that early level of improvement is really fast. And then at a certain point you reach a plateau, and the subsequent games 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, as short 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 this skill that would 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, could be DVDs, could be courses, could be anything. But don’t use those as a way to procrastinate on practice. I know I do this, right? Get like 20 books about the topic, like, “I’m going to 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 than at 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 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- and-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.

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 a ukulele god. It’s amazing. I saw it, I was like, “That is so cool!” It’s such a neat instrument. I would really like to learn how to play. And so I decided that to test this theory I wanted to put 20 hours into practicing ukulele and see where it 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 lovely assistant? Thank you sir. I think I need the chord here. It’s not just an ukulele, it’s an electric ukulele. Yeah. So, the first couple hours are just like the first couple hours of anything. You have to get the tools that you are using to practice. You have to make sure 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, 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 looked in online databases and songbooks 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 are accompanying yourself, yay you.

And when I started looking at songs, I had an ukulele chord book that had like hundreds of chords. Looking at this and “Wow, 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 in most songs you’ll use four, maybe five chords, and that’s it, that’s the song.

You don’t have to know hundreds, as long as you know the four or the five. So, while I was doing my research, I found a wonderful little medley of pop songs by a band called Axis of Awesome. Somebody knows it. And what Axis of Awesome says is that you can learn, or you can play pretty much any pop song of the past five decades, if you know four chords, and those chords are G, D, Em and 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 share it with you. Ready? (Music and sings) 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 a girl, that you’re married now. Every night in my dreams I see you, I feel you, that is how I know you go on. I won’t hesitate no more, no more. It cannot wait, I’m yours. Because you were amazing, we did amazing things.

If I could, then I would, I’d go wherever you will — Can you feel the love tonight. I can’t live with or without you. When I find myself — When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, Sometimes I feel like I don’t have partner. No woman, no cry. Yeah mama, this surely is a dream. I come from a land down under. Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong. Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me Hey sexy lady, op, op, op, op, oppan gangnam style. It’s time to say goodbye. Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. (Singing and music ends) Thank you, thank you.

I love that song. And I have a secret to share with you. So, by playing that song for you, I just hit my twentieth hour of practicing the ukulele. Thank you. And so it’s amazing, pretty much anything that you can think of, what do you want to do. The major barrier to learn 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 is 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? Do you want to learn a language? Want to learn how to cook? 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.

兩年前，我的女兒 Lela 出生后，我的生活徹底改變了。 看著很簡單的事，比如給孩子穿衣服，但是這些對于老婆和我來講都是需要重新學(xué)習(xí)的事。 我們沒有任何自由的時(shí)間，但是，有一件事我很擔(dān)心，我是一個對世界充滿好奇的人，并沉湎于學(xué)習(xí)過程中，但因?yàn)楹⒆拥某錾?，我就再也不會有那樣的生活了，哎…?情人節(jié) 分割線 我決定去圖書館，去書店來找各種關(guān)于“我們應(yīng)該怎么學(xué)”以及“怎么學(xué)得更快”的資料。 我讀了好多書，看了好多網(wǎng)站，就是想回答一個問題，如何更快的掌握一門技能。 在我讀了一本又一本的書，看了一個又一個的網(wǎng)頁之后，就發(fā)現(xiàn)了一個學(xué)習(xí)曲線圖（無論身體技能還是精神技能的學(xué)習(xí)，研究者都希望能量化）。 研究者做了一些實(shí)驗(yàn)，找了一些志愿者來參與這個調(diào)查，給他們一些身體或心理的任務(wù)，讓他們學(xué)習(xí)，看他們需要花多長時(shí)間能夠完成任務(wù)。 最開始，志愿者會需要花很長時(shí)間來完成，畢竟這些事對于他們來講是全新的、陌生的甚至有些難度的，但是經(jīng)過一些練習(xí)之后，他們就會做得越來越好，效率越來越高。 通過一些練習(xí)之后，人們就會慢慢變得擅長做這件事，更有意思的一點(diǎn)是，當(dāng)我們真的喜歡做一個事時(shí)，我們是不在乎時(shí)間長短的，我們關(guān)心的只是我們做得怎么樣，有多好，怎么樣才算好。 所以，如果給“我做得有多好”這個行為進(jìn)行圖表分析的話，我就得到這個很有名的學(xué)習(xí)曲線。

最開始，你完全做不好，但通過一些練習(xí)之后，你就會越做越快，越做越好，而且提升也很快。但慢慢地你就會到達(dá)一個瓶頸期，接下來的任務(wù)和目標(biāo)就會比較難完成，也需要花更多時(shí)間。 情人節(jié) 分割線 事實(shí)上，我想談的是，想要從菜鳥狀態(tài)發(fā)展到做得還不錯，最短需要花多長時(shí)間？ 我的調(diào)查結(jié)果是只需要 20 個小時(shí)！ 別驚訝，無論你是想學(xué)新語言，想畫畫，還是想變一個魔術(shù)，如果你花了 20 個小時(shí)精心刻意地學(xué)習(xí)某個技能，你自己都會驚訝原來你可以做得這么好！

每天花 45 分鐘，堅(jiān)持一個月，當(dāng)然其中也可以偷懶幾天，20 個小時(shí)就可以輕松累積到了。 情人節(jié) 分割線 如果能高效地開始練習(xí)，從而掌握某一個技能？我鉆研出了四種簡單的方法。 分解這個技能 當(dāng)你要開始學(xué)一個技能時(shí)，先好好研究下這個技能到底是什么，然后再把它分解成一個一個的小技能。 我們想要學(xué)的技能，基本上都是由一捆不同的小技能組成的，我們分解的技能越多，我們就會做得越好！ 分解技能真的很有用，分解完之后，我們先從最重要的小技能開始練習(xí)，這樣我們就能用最短的時(shí)間最好地提升技藝。

學(xué)會自我修正 找到 3 到 5 個能用的學(xué)習(xí)渠道，包括書籍、視頻、課程等等。千萬別拖延！當(dāng)我想學(xué)習(xí)電腦編程時(shí)，我就立刻買了 20 本書。 當(dāng)你在練習(xí)過程中，發(fā)現(xiàn)問題就立刻改正，或者嘗試一種新的方式，通過自己改正或者修正，就會讓你的學(xué)習(xí)效果變得更好。 消除練習(xí)中的障礙 像電視、互聯(lián)網(wǎng)這些容易讓人分心的事都在阻擋你學(xué)習(xí)的進(jìn)程，你消除這些“阻礙者”的意志越堅(jiān)決，你越有可能安心地坐下來練習(xí)。 至少練習(xí) 20 個小時(shí) 做任何事情都有個沮喪期，眾所周知，完全菜鳥與一知半解的狀態(tài)都同樣會讓人沮喪，我們都不喜歡看起來很蠢的自己，而覺得自己很蠢經(jīng)常是我們好好學(xué)習(xí)技能的障礙。

所以呢，在學(xué)習(xí)某一項(xiàng)技能之前可以做一些宣誓，說自己一定會克服最初的沮喪期，并會持續(xù)地練習(xí)，這真的很有用。 情人節(jié) 分割線 任何事情都是說得容易，做著難，不過我卻覺得做起來反而更有趣。 我想學(xué)烏克麗麗很久了，但一直沒有做?？戳私芸恕u袋的演講之后，我感覺他就是“烏克麗麗之神”，我也想嘗試一下，花 20 小時(shí)檢驗(yàn)一下這個理論，看看效果會怎么樣。 第一件事就是我需要有一把烏克麗麗，巧婦難為無米之炊，所以，先把設(shè)備備齊，然后我開始學(xué)習(xí)曲調(diào)。

我第一件事就是在網(wǎng)上查相關(guān)資料與書籍，烏克麗麗是你一次可以不只彈一根弦，也就是說你可以彈和弦。當(dāng)我拿到一本書的時(shí)候，天哪，竟然有幾百種和弦，太恐怖了！ 但當(dāng)我想要演奏一首歌，拿到曲譜的時(shí)候，我發(fā)現(xiàn)實(shí)際上也就只需要那么幾種和弦，它們重復(fù)來重復(fù)去，所以，你不需要一下子學(xué)會幾百種，只需要先把眼前需要用的那幾種練熟了就好，然后我就用烏克麗麗搞掂了這首曲子！ 情人節(jié) 分割線 通過學(xué)吉他，我發(fā)現(xiàn)一個道理，學(xué)習(xí)新技能的障礙不是智力上的，而是心理上的。

我們都不喜歡那種作為初學(xué)者看著自己很蠢的感覺，因?yàn)槟欠N感覺真的很不好。所以，當(dāng)你找到你想要的技能，并找到學(xué)習(xí)動力時(shí)，要學(xué)會克服心理上的障礙。那么無論你是學(xué)習(xí)語言、廚藝還是畫畫，真的都只需要 20 個小時(shí)。

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