January 30, 2017
Interview with Josh Kaufman, author of the book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!
Mike Carruthers:
How well you learn something new depends up in large part in how well you think you’re going to learn it.
Josh Kaufman:
So if you believe you have to be naturally talented at something in order to do it you’re not going to improve very quickly if at all.
Josh Kaufman, author of the book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! …
If you believe that your mind is a muscle and the more you practice the better you become at something you tend to improve very, very quickly. And the research says that the later interpretation is the true one. If you sit down and practice anything you will be much better at it.
One reason we avoid learning new things is we talk ourselves out of it. Believing…
I’m not sure where to start, this looks scary, I’m sure if it’s worth it – that’s a big, big barrier. The second is let’s say you get to the point where you start to dabble around in it. Usually in the first few hours you’re terrible – none of us like the feeling of feeling stupid. So that’s what I call the frustration barrier- it’s being so frustrated about your inability to do something that it’s more comfortable to stop doing it and go watch TV or surf the internet.
The trick right then at that critical moment is to be persistent and not go off and watch TV.
Because if you can persist long enough, and the threshold that I recommend is about 20 hours of practice, you can go from knowing absolutely nothing to be very, very good at something in a very short period of time.
