I want to share more takeaways from The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!. The major premise of the book, which I posted about yesterday, is that learning and skill acquisition are different. By combining the two, you accelerate your acquisition of a new skill. I found author Josh Kauffman’s thinking around the specifics of each area and how they work together interesting.

Skill acquisition

Kauffman defines rapid skill acquisition as the process of breaking down a skill into its smallest parts, pinpointing the important ones, and practicing those key subskills first. He believes “temporary obsession” aids skill acquisition and that “rapid skill acquisition principles” are a way to cultivate temporary obsession. Here’s a checklist of his acquisition principles:

• Choose a lovable project – Pick a skill you’re excited about. Your excitement will fuel you when you’re frustrated.
• Focus your energy on one skill at a time – Acquiring new skills requires concentrated time and focused attention. If you spread yourself too thin, your skill acquisition will likely be extremely slow.
• Determine your performance level – Rapid skill acquisition is about sufficiency, not perfection. Define what sufficiency means to you.
• Deconstruct skills into subskills – Identify what subskills make up this skill.
• Obtain critical tools – Get the tools necessary for you to practice the skill.
• Eliminate barriers to practice – Remove the soft barriers that will make it more difficult to practice the skill.
• Make dedicated time for practice – Schedule time to practice consistently. Commit to practicing regularly until you’ve completed at least twenty hours of practice.
• Create fast feedback loops – Figure out ways to learn how you’re performing when you’re practicing. The faster the feedback, the faster you can make the right adjustments. The faster you adjust, the faster you acquire the skill.
• Practice by the clock in short bursts – Set a timer for twenty or thirty minutes for your practice session.
• Emphasize quantity over speed – Do as many reps as you can without worrying about perfection. The more reps, the better your rep quality will become.

Learning

Learning about a skill is the acquisition of knowledge related to that skill. Kauffman doesn’t believe jumping straight into practicing a new skill is the most efficient approach. Doing some advance research and planning can reduce the amount of time and energy you’ll have to expend and the frustration you feel. He believes “learning principles” help you get the most out of your practice sessions. Here’s a checklist of his learning principles:

• Research the skill and related topics – Look for patterns—the same ideas and tools being mentioned repeatedly as you research. These will likely reduce your trial and error.
• Jump in over your head – You want to learn at an uncomfortable pace. Confusion is part of being uncomfortable and can pinpoint areas you should focus on more.
• Identify mental models and mental hooks – Look for ways to help you make sense of what you’re seeing. These mental models will help you understand the present and what the future could hold if you take specific actions. These will come in handy during practice.
• Imagine the opposite of what you want – Determining your goal’s natural opposite can highlight what to avoid. This is called inversion and is a technique Charlie Munger embraced heavily.
• Talk to practitioners to set expectations – Unrealistic expectations can be discouraging. Talking to others with more experience can illuminate blind spots so you’ll know what to expect.
• Eliminate distractions – Distractions can ruin focused practice, slowing or stopping skill acquisition. Figure out what could distract you during practice and eliminate it beforehand.
• Use spaced repetition and reinforcement for memorization – Review important information regularly. New or difficult information should be reviewed more often; familiar or simple information less.
• Create scaffolds and checklists – Create checklists to systematize your practice process and make it more consistent. Create a pre-practice sequence (i.e., a scaffold) to ensure that you approach the skill the same way each time you start practicing. A basketball player’s pre–free throw routine is a good example of a scaffold.
• Make and test predictions – Come up with your predictions based on your research and test them as you practice. Adjust accordingly.
• Honor your biology – If your mind and body aren’t good, your practice won’t be good. Put yourself in the best physical and mental state to get the most out of your practice.

Every principle won’t apply to every situation, but going through each checklist can prevent omissions that could hamper you from achieving your goal.

Acquiring a skill is the result of practicing it. How you practice impacts how fast you acquire the skill. Learning makes your practice more efficient and accelerates acquisition, but it doesn’t replace it. There is no replacement for practice. You must do the work. But how you go about it matters.

The insight and principles in Kauffman’s book aren’t earth-shattering, but his combination and articulation of them could provide clarity and an action plan to people who struggle to acquire new skills.

During one of my learning survey conversations, a founder friend mentioned he’d read The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! by Josh Kauffman. He described the book as an approach to learning any skill quickly. It sounded interesting, so I ordered it. I just finished reading it.

The book highlighted that skill acquisition and learning are different. Acquiring a skill requires practicing the skill until you become proficient at it. Learning, though, is about understanding the skill. Learning about a skill doesn’t mean you’ll acquire the skill—it means you’ll know more about it. The book uses the example of learning about a foreign language. You can understand all the nuances and history of the language without being able to speak the language. Speaking it results from practicing by speaking it with others.

Kauffman goes on to say that to acquire a skill, learning about it isn’t necessary, but it is helpful because it’s important to acquire the skill rapidly. Learning about the skill helps you focus on the most important subskills, understand the key concepts related to the skill, avoid practice pitfalls, etc., all of which make your practice more efficient. And you’ll acquire the skill sooner if you improve more rapidly.

Kauffman’s distinction is helpful. I now think about learning as the prework I do that will make practicing a new skill more efficient.

I’ve been on a good roll reading books. I’ve got a solid habit down, and I’m getting more from my reading than ever. This weekend I started another book. After a few days, I noticed that I couldn’t stay focused as I read and my pace was much slower. I tried to power through it, but today I had a realization.

The book I’m reading is killing my momentum. It was recommended in another book I read. But now that I’m into this book, I’m finding that it isn’t a good fit for me.

The book feels like a textbook. It goes into tons of detail about everything and contains many references to others’ works. And its main concept isn’t clearly articulated. This is all very different from the biographies and historical recounts I enjoy reading.

I tested my thesis: I started reading another book. Within thirty minutes, I was laser focused and reading twice as fast. I was back!

My takeaway is that all books aren’t for me. If a book is zapping my energy, best to put it aside for now and read something else.

I’m continuing with my learning survey, which turned into a customer discovery exercise. I’ve been intentional about talking with entrepreneurs and investors who provide early-stage entrepreneurs with capital to build businesses.

Today I spoke with someone who has founded multiple companies and is now a venture capital investor. After I finished asking him questions, I shared what I’ve learned so far and some of my insights. As we chatted more about learning, he shared personal stories about how learning the right things at the right time changed the trajectory of his life. The more he spoke, the more excited he became.

As I reflected on this conversation, I realized that most people who’ve been part of my survey have shown similar excitement. The conversations have illuminated lots of friction for people learning outside of structured learning environments like school. But even with this friction, entrepreneurs and investors have a thirst for wisdom and are excited about learning. My conversations have led me to believe that that thirst isn’t being quenched in a way that suits their on-the-go, digital lifestyle.

I’ve been listening to more podcasts recently. I’m usually doing something else at the same time (e.g., exercising), so the time feels more productive. One of the problems I’ve had is noting important things I hear in podcasts. It’s inconvenient (and sometimes dangerous) to abruptly stop what I’m doing to note what I heard and when I heard it.

I figured I’m not the only person having this problem, so I did some research. I came across the Snipd app. It’s a podcast player that generates transcripts using AI. As you listen to a podcast episode, the app allows you to highlight and save parts you want to revisit with the simple tap of a button. You can even export the highlights to other systems, such as notetaking apps.

I began testing the free version of Snipd recently. I haven’t tried all its features, but so far it’s materially better than what I was doing before. The friction to record podcast insights has been reduced drastically.

I’m going to continue testing the app, but so far I like it and plan to add it to my list of learning tools.

A few weeks ago, a friend suggested that I learn about the founding of Home Depot, since I’m in Atlanta. I did, and one of the cofounders wasn’t what I expected. His name is Ken Langone. He’s a colorful character from humble beginnings, a hybrid between entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and investment banker. I watched a few YouTube videos of him and got more interested in his story.

I discovered that Langone wrote a book called I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. It’s about his life and adventures in business. I bought it as soon as I found it and started reading. I’m not finished yet, but so far I’m enjoying it.

One concept that Langone shares in the book is over-delivering to cement relationships. Langone was the banker who IPO’d Ross Perot’s company, Electric Data Systems (EDS), in 1968. Langone had never taken a company public before and had a lot riding on the EDS IPO being successful. He thought highly of Perot. He wanted this transaction to be a success, and he also wanted to build a long-term relationship with Perot. Because of EDS’s uniqueness and growth potential, he was sure the public markets would be receptive to the IPO. He told Perot he could take EDS public at 100 times earnings (a number far higher than other bankers thought possible), or $15 per share.

The IPO was a success, and Langone was able to deliver Perot 115 times earnings, or $16.50 per share. Perot was ecstatic. He publicly praised Langone whenever the opportunity arose. Perot’s praise and the publicity about the EDS IPO got Langone a flood of new business. It also cemented his relationship with Perot because he far exceeded Perot’s lofty expectations.

Langone watched others over-promise and under-deliver. They’d close a transaction but ruin relationships because they’d lost people’s trust. Langone didn’t want to ruin relationships, so he took a different approach. To build a relationship and trust, he set what he thought were reasonable expectations and worked doggedly to over-deliver.

Fun fact: Because of Perot’s relationship with Langone, Perot was one of the first people who got the chance to invest in Home Depot when it was an early-stage company in 1978. Perot came close to investing $2 million and would have owned 70% of Home Depot if the transaction had been completed. As of the writing of this post, Home Depot has a market cap (i.e., valuation) of roughly $375 billion.

This weekend I began reviewing some of the highlights in books I’ve read. I realized that I have a lot of physical books with highlights. The best ideas I’ve read are scattered across tons of physical books, which adds friction to my goal of regularly reviewing the best ideas from these books.

Having my highlights centralized in one digital repository that I can access from my phone would be valuable. I’ve been playing with a reading app that does this, but the process of getting text from a book into the app isn’t efficient. I must take a picture of each highlight, which the app converts to text. The conversion is suboptimal, so then I have to correct the text before storing the highlight. Once the highlight is digitized it’s great, but getting to that point is painful.

If I want to regularly review the important concepts from what I’ve read, I’ll need to either find a better way to digitize highlights from physical books or read digital books (e.g., on Kindle). I enjoy physical books, so the former is my preference.

I read a quote this weekend from Charlie Munger that got me thinking:

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

I believe what Charlie is getting at is that continual learning increases your chances of success in the long run. Learning leads to acquiring wisdom, which improves decision-making and changes behavior. Knowing what to do and when to do it increases your chances of achieving your goals in the long run. Regular learning is something the average person can do to achieve outsize results.

From my learning survey results, I see a desire among driven people to learn and achieve their goals. But I see lots of friction along the path to the wisdom that helps improve their decisions and actions. I’m wondering if some of that friction could be removed and what impact that would have on these people’s lives. Would it materially improve their lives long term?

I’m continuing with my learning survey, which has turned into customer discovery. This week I had a chat with someone working at a late-stage venture capital firm. He shared a helpful insight: the amount of information available has skyrocketed because of the internet, but its quality is questionable. A high percentage isn’t value add. It takes time and energy to distill all this information down to the knowledgeable pieces that add value and align with learning goals. This friction frustrates him and slows his learning.

I’m continuing with my learning survey. It’s turned into more of a customer discovery exercise than a survey. This week I had a call with an entrepreneur who’s also an investor. One thing he shared stuck with me:

“My learning is curiosity led but application driven.”

In other words, he’s looking to learn something to a level of competence sufficient to apply it. I like his wording—it’s a succinct and accurate description of how I and the entrepreneurs I’ve surveyed approach learning.