So today we are tackling

how you can learn new skills incredibly quickly.

Over the course of this video,

I'm gonna share a four step process

that you can use to take any skill,

whether it's related to school or your future career,

or whether it's just a fun one like guitar or cooking,

and break that skill down

so that you can learn as much as you need to

about the most important parts

and then start practicing them effectively

so you can gain basic proficiency really really fast.

Now this process we're gonna talk about

applies to any skill,

because at its core,

skill development, whether it's really physical

like basketball

or whether it's really mental like mathematics,

it's all learning.

As you intake information about the skill,

and as you practice it,

you're forging new neural pathways in your brain,

you're connecting them with other neural pathways,

and you're strengthening them over time.

As you do this,

you move though what's called the three stage model

or skill acquisition,

which starts with the cognitive stage

where you're just learning about the skill,

and you're just forming those neural pathways.

Then moves into the associative stage

where you're doing a lot more practice,

and now you're able to sort of self reflect

and pick out mistakes and change things

based on those mistakes.

And eventually you move into the autonomous stage.

At that point you have mastered the skill,

and it's basically able to be done automatically.

And this autonomous phase takes

a really long time to get to.

Mastery takes a lot of hours of practice.

But that doesn't mean you're doomed to spend

dozens of hours in the beginning phases,

because if you know how to structure the learning

and the practice processes the right way,

you can make a surprising amount of progress

in a very very short period of time.

In fact, in his book The First 20 Hours,

author Josh Kaufman argues that you can learn

basic proficiency in almost any skill that exists

in under 20 hours of dedicated practice.

And his process for doing this breaks down

to a series of four distinct steps.

And in a second we're gonna go over those steps,

but first I wanna issue you a bit of a challenge.

If you're sitting there watching this video,

and you have a skill you've been wanting to learn,

use this framework to create a plan for doing that.

Once the video's over,

take out a piece of paper and create a plan

going through each of the steps,

and then start putting it into action.

So the first step in Kaufman's process

is to deconstruct the skill.

Basically you break it down into its component parts,

and then you prioritize those parts

based on your particular goals within that skill area.

Now to give you an example

let's talk about playing the guitar.

A lot of people want to play the guitar,

but there are lots of different ways to play the guitar.

There's tons of different musical genres,

you might want to just play a few different songs,

or maybe you want to be like Slash

or like DragonForce guitarists

and be rippin' solos all day long, right?

These are very different skills.

So, by breaking it down into individual sub-skills,

chords, scales, picking technique,

reading tabs, understanding musical intervals,

you end up with a list of building blocks

that you can then prioritize and take action on.

The second step in Kaufman's process

is the education step.

Basically at this point you want to take each sub-skill

that you've prioritized and learn enough about it

that you can practice well

and identify your mistakes and self-correct.

Now notice I said enough about each sub-skill,

not as much as you can about each sub-skill.

Because I know personally I'm the kind of guy

who will walk into Barnes & Noble

and look at every single book on the shelf

related to what I'm interested in,

and think, I should buy every single one here

and read them all before getting started.

And that's just not how good skill development works,

especially if you want to do it quickly.

You need to learn just enough about each sub-skill

so that you can start practicing,

getting your hands dirty, and making mistakes,

because then you're gonna know what you should correct.

Alright, step number three in the process

is to eliminate any potential barriers to success

or barriers to your progress and your practice.

And in my mind,

the most likely thing that's gonna get in the way

of your practice is a lack of motivation in the long-term.

So, find a way to motivate yourself on a constant basis.

Maybe it's having an accountability partner,

maybe it's joining a forum where you can talk

about your interest,

or maybe it's just making a record

of every single day you practice

so you can see a chain developing

that you don't want to break.

Alright, so skill has been deconstructed,

learning has been done,

and barriers have been sliced in half with a samurai sword.

We are now on the fourth and final step of the process

which is simply to practice deliberately.

In The First 20 Hours,

Josh Kaufman's rule is that you should practice deliberately

until you've achieved your goals for each sub-skill

that you prioritized,

or until you've hit 20 hours of dedicated practice.

And what he recommends

is that you actually practice by using a timer or a clock,

and track the amount of hours you put in.

Because when you're practicing something difficult,

it can be really really easy to overestimate

how much time you spend practicing.

Now that we've gotten through the four step process,

I want to give you a few additional tips

you can use to make your skill development journey

even more successful.

And the first one is to identify the work

of somebody who is a master

or somebody who is where you want to be.

Analyze that work as best as you can,

and then try to imitate it.

Now a lot of people are gonna say,

this is copying, this is ripping people off,

but actually as long as you're not passing off

this work as your own,

this is how a lot of people learn their skills.

And in fact in Japanese martial arts,

there's a concept called shuhari

that is exactly this.

And in music, it's the same.

The famous jazz trumpet player Clark Terry

believed that imitation was in fact

an essential part of becoming a great musician.

And he told his students that music learning happens

in a three stage process,

which he called imitate, assimilate, and innovate.

Here's what he said about the role of imitation.

"By imitating the players you love,

"you'll begin to understand the music

"on a deeper level and begin to see a personal sound

"develop in your own approach to improvisation.

"Questions that can't be answered

"by music theory or etude books,

"like how to play longer lines or how to articulate

"and swing, will reveal themselves as you start

"to imitate the masters."

Part of the reason this tactic works so well

is it gives you a method to go way way beyond

your comfort zone and your current level of skill.

Because if you can take something that a master made,

and you can analyze it from every angle,

you can probably recreate certain aspects of it

even if you don't know exactly what you're doing

or why you're doing it.

Then later on as you're kinda backfilling your knowledge

by learning the theory and all the fundamentals,

you're gonna be able to say,

oh that's why I did that, or that's how I did that.

I didn't understand it at first, but now I get it.

And I kind of have like a rung to pull myself up

because I did that work in the first place.

The Stanford mathematics professor Ravi Vakil

called it backfilling.

And here's how he described it in terms of mathematics.

"mathematics is so rich and infinite

"that it is impossible to learn it systematically,

"and if you wait to master one topic

"before moving on to the next,

"you'll never get anywhere.

"Instead, you'll have tendrils of knowledge

"extending far from your comfort zone.

"Then you can later backfill from these tendrils,

"and extend your comfort zone."

Of course, another way to learn from the masters

is to simply be taught by them.

Which is why another way you can really accelerate

your skill development process

is by finding a teacher or a coach or a course

that you can take.

Now I know from personal experience,

having a coach or somebody who can tell you your mistakes

is probably the most valuable thing in the world.

But you don't have to let geography be a limiting factor

in your access to teachers

because there are 100s of 1000s of tutorials

and online courses that you can use for basically

any skill that you're trying to learn.

And one place where you can find those courses

that I wanna let you know about

is Skillshare, who's actually the sponsor of this video.

Now Skillshare is an online learning community

that has over 12,000 courses in a ton of different subjects.

And I've actually been taking a few of those

in After Effects animation,

but they also have courses in photography,

graphic design, logo design,

and things like cooking, guitar, presentation skills.

In fact, they have a presentation skills class

from Simon Sinek who gave probably my favorite

TED talk of all time.

But one of the reasons I really like Skillshare

is that it gives you the ability to get feedback

from both your teacher and from other people

who are taking the same course.

There's two ways it does this.

Number one, below the videos in any course you're taking

there's a comments section.

And if you ask a question, you can get an answer

from the course instructor.

But also, most of the courses on Skillshare

have a participation component.

Basically there is a project section of the course

where you can upload your own work for feedback.

Now a membership to Skillshare

is normally around $8 a month,

which is right around the same price as Netflix,

and potentially a lot more useful.

But, if you wanna get three months

of completely unlimited use on Skillshare,

you can get it for 99 cents by using the link

in the description below,

and I'll have a few more details about that

at the end of the video.

Before we end this video though,

I've got three additional tips for you.

And all three of them

relate to making your practice sessions

more effective and more useful.