TED-别不信，你只需20小时，就能学会任何事情

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 happend to mean.So if we relabel performance time to how good you are,the graph flips,and you get his famous and widely known, this is the learning curve.

And the story of the learning curve is when you start,you’re grossly(非常) incompetent and you know it ,right?With a little bit of practice,you get really good,really quick.So 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.

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(电锯)?If you put 20 hours of focused deliberate practice into that thing, you will be astounded(震惊).Astounded at how good you are.20 hours is doable(可行),that’s about 45 minutes a day 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(无足轻重) around for about 20 hours and expect these massive( 大量的)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 pieces.Most of the things that we think of as skills are actually big bundles(块) of skills that reqire all sorts of different things.The more you can break apart the skill,the more you’re able to decide,what are the parts if this skill that would actually help me get to what i want?And then you can practice those first.