You can learn almost anything in under 20 hours
My roommate once told me something that changed my life.
It was the first summer after we had moved out from our parents back in 2016. He told me about the 20-hour rule.
According to this rule, the learning curve peaks during the first 20 hours of doing something. After that it flattens out and you get less return on your time spent, learning wise.
That summer we decided to try it out by learning skateboarding. I remember the first hour — it was scary, hard and annoying to suck so bad. But it was interesting for the 20 hour experiment. After a couple more hours of learning I stopped thinking about the hours and started enjoying myself. After 20 hours I continued because it was useful to skateboard down the hill from our house to the subway. It had worked! I learned to enjoy skateboarding in 20 hours. Why? Well, I had started learning and didn’t give up after initial struggles.
The 20 hour rule is tremendous because it lowers the threshold to do anything. I can always try something for 20 hours and then stop if I truly don’t enjoy it. This has helped me a lot when trying new things — I’ve done martial arts, programming, podcasting, yoga, reading, playing games, and the list goes on — all with the 20 hour rule in mind.
It is especially powerful in the modern world of distractions and inability to focus. I suspect people are becoming worse at skills across the board.
Do anything 20 hours and you will probably be better at it than 99% of people. That’s of course an oversimplification but still its true to some extent.
Example: In the 90s you only had school and television to really stop you from learning a skill. Today we have everything that comes with social media, smart phones, Internet, games, dopamine, consumerism. Simply put, there are more distractions to overcome today than there were yesterday. Thus, less people overcome all the distractions and actually get the time to do something.
The 20 hour rule helps to overcome these distractions. You can always put in 20 hours — it doesn’t take away that much of your precious screen time. The threshold of starting is low. And often starting and continuing for 20 hours makes all the difference.
