From top-left to bottom-right: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Oprah Winfrey

8 Important Skills to Learn in Just Under 8 Hours Each

A small time investment for great life benefits

Danny Forest
SkillUp Ed
Published in
16 min readNov 6, 2018

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Updated: December 2020

8 hours? Are you kidding me? It takes 10,000 hours to learn a new skill!

Wrong!

10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the amount of time it takes to be a top performer in a highly competitive field, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers.

In the past 2 years, I’ve proven time and again that you can learn valuable soft and hard skills in about 15 to 20 hours of practice. And I’m talking about starting from nothing. I’ve learned 70 new skills in the past 2 years. But I’m not the only one who has experimented with that. My original inspiration came from Josh Kaufman’s TEDx talk, The First 20 Hours — How to Learn Anything.

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama, Oprah, and many more top performers dedicate a lot of their time to learning a variety of skills that allowed them to be where they are today. All of them have achieved much because of what they’ve learned and what they know. They are not more intelligent, they just dedicate more of their time to learning the most valuable skills.

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SkillUp Ed
SkillUp Ed

Published in SkillUp Ed

Learn Better — Quality Stories about Skill Development

Danny Forest
Danny Forest

Written by Danny Forest

Polymath. Life Optimizer. Learner. Entrepreneur. Engineer. Writer.

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