Use This 4-Step Formula To Learn Anything In Under 24 Hours

6 min readAug 30, 2018

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“Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can, there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.”
― Sarah Caldwell

In this world, where we hear about concepts like the 10,000 hour rule to become an expert in any skill, the promise of learning something new in under 24 Hours seems too unrealistic, rather crazy.

In fact, that’s what I thought initially, until I was exposed to a practical TED Talk by Josh Kaufman named How to learn anything in twenty hours.

This claim of learning anything in twenty hours seems quite provocative in the first instance.

Isn’t it?

But here is the main thing — there is a difference between becoming an expert vs. becoming reasonably good at something.

Expert means touching the top level in one’s field, whereas being reasonably good at something means you can handle that activity reasonably well.

The idea is to learn enough that transforms you from ‘being grossly incompetent’ to ‘reasonably good at something.’

Take an example: Learning only a few important elements of a foreign language doesn’t make you an expert; but it can make you reasonably good at the language. And with such knowledge, you can manage to stay in that country and have reasonable conversations with the people around in the foreign land — meaning you learned in a way that practically serves your purpose.

Therefore, if your goal is to have a reasonable understanding of some field, and not to become an expert in that domain, you can achieve your learning goal in 20 hours.

Here are the four important steps of this 20-Hour roadmap to learning something new.

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Step 1: Deconstruct the Skill

To learn any new skill, the first step is to break that skill into various small components. Remember every big skill is a bundle of many small skills covered in it.

Now, once you have deconstructed the skill, the important thing to remember is to practice the most important parts of that skill first. The main thing here is to practice intelligently; given our objective of becoming reasonably good at something in 20 hours.

Therefore, while deconstructing, you have to identify the most important sub-skills needed that will give you maximum advantage — you need to follow 80:20 principle in your learning, also known as Pareto’s principle.

This principle was propounded by an Italian engineer and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto in 1906. The principle states that the world works on the rule that only 20% of your activities (even lesser) deliver 80% results (even more) in almost every area of your life. It could be substantiated by following facts:

1. 99% of the world’s wealth is accumulated by only 1% of the people.

2. 80% or more of every business’s turnover/profits are contributed by only 20% or fewer of its customers.

3. If you satisfy 20% of the people in your life with your work, that will give you an 80% assurance of the perfect working life.

This principle universally applies to everything and therefore also to learning. Let’s take an example of learning a new language and how 80:20 principle fits in here.

In any language, it is a small percentage of vocabulary that serves most of the comprehension and understanding requirement for that language. Tim Ferriss in one of his book states that:

95% proficiency with conversational Spanish = 2,500 words = You can learn in 5 months.
98% proficiency with conversational Spanish = 100,000 words = You will take 5 years to learn.

It means that just 2,500 words that is just 2.5% of even not the complete Spanish language, gives you 95% proficiency in speaking. And you can achieve this massive proficiency in just 5 months of practice.

Let’s make it simpler, If you just want 80% proficiency, maybe 2 to 3 months learning is sufficient. But you need to find out 2.5% of any specific language.

Step 2: Learn Just Enough

When you are starting out to learn any mini-skill (as a subset of the major skill), you don’t need to become an expert before you start out. Rather, you need to learn just enough, so that when you find yourself committing mistakes, you can self-correct yourself.

Step 3: Remove Barriers to Practice

The next step in the process is to remove any obstacles that may come as a hindrance to your practicing of the sub-skill. Generally, TV is the biggest culprit, followed by our smartphones that steal our willpower as we drift away from practicing.

Learning anything new for the first time definitely brings some frustration; you don’t feel like progressing faster in your chosen domain. There you have to safeguard yourself from any distractions so you remain focused on your journey towards learning the skill.

Step 4: Practice for 20 Hours

Now you’ve determined your list of mini activities or sub-skills to be learned and also taken care of removing the barriers to the practice- it is the time to practice this for 20 hours.

But here is the important thing. You don’t have to and in reality, you can’t effectively practice for twenty hours in one stretch. It is not humanly possible to practice all in one stretch due to human attention span limitations. You need to follow distributed practice learning method (learning split in multiple periods) for effective learning.

20 hours of practice would roughly mean 45 minutes of practice for a period of thirty days in a row.

And that’s achievable.

When I published my first book The 30-Hour Day in November 2014 along with my full-time day job, I remember writing every evening for around 30 to 45 minutes after my office hours. This daily practice of writing 1,000 words every evening gave me a reward of a 25,000-word book in a short 5 to 6 weeks period. I learned how to write and publish a book in such a short period — thanks to the power of following repeated actions over a consistent time period .

In reality, the major barrier in learning anything new is not intellectual, rather it is emotional. We often get scared of sounding stupid, if we are learning something new and miss out few things. And that fear of sounding stupid often stops us from trying anything new; whereas in reality, you can learn anything if you really wish to.

“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice”
― Brian Herbert

This simple 4-step process can help you become reasonably good in a anything new you want to learn, be it a new language, be it playing guitar, learning martial arts, or any other skill — with little daily practice over a repeated period of time.