The First 20 Hours summary

There are no doubt many skills you’d like to acquire, but an important part of skill acquisition is to choose the one you care about the most.

So make a list of all the skills you want to work on and pick the one that you feel most excited about at that present moment. This will help keep up your motivation to practice.

The third principle of rapid skill acquisition is all about deciding how good you want to become at your chosen endeavor. This is referred to as your target performance level, and it’s important because if you can imagine what you want your performance to look like, you’ll have an easier time getting there.

So ask yourself what level of performance constitutes “good enough” for you. For instance, if you’re learning to play the banjo, do you want to play three tunes by heart, or to seamlessly join in a jam session?

So you’ve decided on your chosen skill – but what tools do you need to pursue it?

Ensuring you have the tools you need is the fifth principle of rapid skill acquisition. This step is rather straightforward – if you want to learn how to play tennis, you need a racket, and if you want to learn how to operate a helicopter, you need access to one.

Nowadays, people lead busier lives than ever, which is why it’s important not just to try to find the time to practice but to make it. This is the seventh principle of rapid skill acquisition.

In order to make time to practice the skill you wish to acquire, identify other activities in your life that you’re not particularly fond of, or during which you tend to stall or feel restless, and then work on cutting those out of your day. This will free up time with the goal of dedicating 60-90 minutes every day to working on your desired skill.

Everyone dreads Mondays because they seem never-ending. After the pleasures of the weekend, it’s torture to have to endure an entire day of work. Indeed, engaging in any difficult or tedious activity for an extended period of time is both draining and inefficient – and that’s why you should only practice in short intervals.

The ninth principle states that practicing in short spurts is the best way to make progress. When you start learning a new skill, the time you spend practicing can feel like it’s going very slowly. In fact, at the very beginning, people tend to overestimate how much time they’ve spent practicing because the task often feels so arduous.