From Zero to Skill in 20 Hours: focus on doing, not just learning

As 2025 begins, the buzz is all about AI replacing jobs and Learning Departments stepping up to deliver upskilling and reskilling paths for workers. In a world that values continuous personal and professional development, we often hear the terms ???????????????? and skill acquisition used interchangeably. However, it’s crucial to distinguish the two. Learning is about gaining knowledge, understanding theories, and accumulating information. Skill acquisition, on the other hand, focuses on becoming proficient in a particular task through practice and application.

Josh Kaufman’s book, “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast”, offers a game-changing approach to acquiring new skills quickly and effectively. Kaufman emphasizes that the first 20 hours of deliberate practice can make a significant difference in reaching a competent level of proficiency in almost anything. But his method doesn’t promise instant mastery. It’s about strategic effort, prioritizing the right elements, and practicing smartly.

What is the method, one would ask?

• Decide exactly what you want to learn. Define the level of performance that you want to reach. Focus your energy per one skill at a time
• Obtain critical tools: physical, mental, and emotional
• Eliminate barriers to practice
• Deconstruct the skill into smaller, manageable sub-skills. Practice the most important sub-skills for at least 20 hours
• Make dedicated time to practice
• Learn enough to self-correct as you practice. Create fast feedback loops
• Emphasize quantity and speed

This approach highlights that skill acquisition is not about perfect practice but about focusing on the essentials, removing distractions, and committing to regular practice.

As Kaufman himself shares in his book, he has applied these principles to learn a wide variety of skills, including:

- Yoga: Learning yoga postures and techniques.

- Go (the ancient board game): Learning the rules, strategies, and patterns of play.

- Ukulele: Mastering basic chords and rhythm for beginner songs.

- Programming languages: Understanding syntax, structure, and key concepts in coding.

- Keyboard Efficiency: Learning different types of keyboards and optimizing for speed and accuracy.

In all of these cases, Kaufman’s approach centers on the need for deliberate practice, not mindlessly going through the motions but focusing on the critical components that will drive improvement.

My personal use case: learning to dance, as a couple

For about 4 months, I have been taking dance lessons, together with my husband. While reading the book, I could very clearly match the learning method that is used by our instructors, to the one from the book. We weren’t looking to become professional dancers, but we did want to be able to confidently perform a waltz routine at a family wedding. This goal required us to step outside our comfort zones, and applying about the same framework principles to the process allowed us to learn more efficiently than we ever expected.

Decide exactly what we wanted to learn

Our first step was clear: master the basics of four dance styles—waltz, bachata, rumba, and tango. This kept us focused on learning choreography and foundational steps without getting lost in the wider world of ballroom techniques.

Find the right tools

We needed a dance studio close to home and work, with patient instructors who could match our vibe, a.k.a. lots of laughs and a laid-back approach to learning.

Remove barriers to practice

With our busy schedules, consistent practice was essential, so we committed to twice-weekly sessions and booked them in our calendars. Parenting without help, we brought our child along (he’d read while we danced). Overcoming mental barriers like “I don’t have time” was as crucial as the physical effort. We created space for practice, both mentally and physically.

Deconstruct the skill

Dancing, like any skill, can be overwhelming if you try to learn everything at once. So, our instructors broke it down into smaller sub-skills: mastering the basic steps (the box step), learning how to lead and follow (the coordination between partners), and then perfecting our posture, arm placement, and timing. Each of these elements was a piece of the larger puzzle.

Learn enough to self-correct

We didn’t need to become dance experts; we simply needed to learn enough theory to understand the movements and identify errors in our technique. Watching tutorial videos, and the videos with us dancing, and getting feedback from our instructors helped us correct mistakes and make adjustments as we practiced.

Practice the most important sub-skills for 20 hours

We didn’t aim for perfection from the start. Instead, we focused on quantity over quality in the early stages. The first 20 hours were about repetition, over and over again, doing the steps until they felt natural. The more we practiced, the more confident we became. We still feel like we are having wooden legs when we are practicing, but we now know 3 basic routines.

Kaufman’s book is a light reading, but is yet another testament to the adaptability of the human mind. His central message encourages us to continually update our skills in response to the changing demands of the world around us. Whether it's a new technology at work, a creative hobby, or even a personal challenge like learning to dance, his method offers a blueprint for fast and effective skill acquisition.