January 31, 2017
Interview with Josh Kaufman, author of the book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!
Mike Carruthers:
You’ve likely heard that when it comes to learning something new kids are faster and better at it.
Josh Kaufman:
Completely false – they just pick up things differently and the fundamental differences are children tend to have a lot more unstructured free time (so they have more time to experiment and explore) they’re also way less self-conscious about not being good at something at first.
Josh Kaufman, author of the book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! …
So a toddler learning to walk, when they fall down they don’t curse themselves and say, “I am not talented at walking” – right? They just get up and try it again.
Whereas an adult will try something new, get frustrated and quit. However it’s important to realize that…
What every single study has found is that the rate of learning or the rate of improvement is fastest during those 1st critical early hours. So if you can get yourself to sit down and practice we improve really quickly. The trick is getting ourselves to sit down and practice in the first place.
Getting distracted in those early hours is what derails a lot of adults from learning something new.
And so it’s important when you’re going into the process of learning something new it’s important to pre-commit into spending a certain amount of time on it. And the reason you do that is it becomes much easier to actually sit down and do enough work that the process becomes non-frustrating.
