Hi learners,

What if you’d only need 45 minutes a day for a month to get decently good at skills such as language learning, coding, or arts?

Out of necessity (his newborn child minimized his free time), Josh Kaufman explored how to learn new things really fast. As a result, he developed a practice method that allows you to gain decent skill mastery in about 20 hours.

1. Deconstruct a skill by breaking it down into smaller pieces. The more you can break it apart, the better you can learn. For example, learning to write online becomes idea-collection, headline practice, introduction writing, editing, and distribution.
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2. Learn just enough to self-correct. Books, courses, etc. are often a way to procrastinate on the practice itself. Use resources to learn enough to know when you make a mistake. Then practice.
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3. Remove any distractions that keep you from practicing. This aligns with what many smart people such as Clear or Thaler preach. Self-control and self-discipline depend much more on your environment than on your willpower. Ban your phone and TV from your practice.
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4. Really practice for the full 20 hours. You have to do the work and overcome initial frustration barriers. The greatest barrier to learning something is emotional, not intellectual. So, push through the initial “feeling stupid” phase and learn for 20 hours before your stop.

Happy learning :)

Featured Articles

Here's a collection of articles I wrote. All links are friend links, so you can read these stories without having a Medium subscription.
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• 🧱 How Cohort Based Courses Can Help You Master Any Skill You Want - MOOCs are dead. Here’s what’s next. (5 min)
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• 🎯 Five Common Beliefs About Learning That Are Actually Learning Myths —Stop following them to save precious time and energy. (4 min)
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• 🧠 The Complete Guide for Building a Zettelkasten with RoamResearch - This is how networked thought transformed my writing process and cut my research writing time in half. (18 min)

Learning Nuggets

✨ How to actually stick through with your learning goal

Have you ever set a learning goal you never completed? "Enthusiasm is rarely matched with execution," Scott H. Young writes. His article explores how to tie yourself to reality so you can pick a project and see it through.

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✨ Laziness Does Not Exist - But unseen barriers do

Psychology professor Devon Price writes in this empathy-loaded article about the laziness myth. The article is full of wisdom that helps us (including all educators) enrich our perspectives and let go of judgment. Some of my favorite lines:

"It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgment."

"If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple."

"It’s morally repugnant to me that any educator would be so hostile to the people they are supposed to serve. It’s especially infuriating, that the person enacting this terror was a psychologist. The injustice and ignorance of it leaves me teary every time I discuss it. It’s a common attitude in many educational circles, but no student deserves to encounter it."

"If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed."

"I know, of course, that educators are not taught to reflect on what their students’ unseen barriers are."

"When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are."

“Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself... The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress..”
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- Bell Hooks

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