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I recently watch Josh Kaufman's TEDxCSU talk about his new book, The First 20 Hours. Although his idea sounds reasonable, I coudn't find any mention of scientific research to back it up. I know some research has been done on the 10,000 hour rule.

Kaufman's claim: "You can go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well in a very short period of time: approximately 20 hours, often less."

Is there any evidence to back up Kaufman's claim?

Sklivvz
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yokimbo
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    I've changed "research" to "evidence", because of course that's what we look for on this site. – Sklivvz Sep 03 '14 at 11:05
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    I have the feeling that the claim is really "You can learn more than you think in 20 hours", which is at least as much about what people ecpect as about how much they can learn. – P_S Sep 03 '14 at 11:19
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    This may be true in very narrow areas, but I don't believe it WRT "big" topics.. No matter how good you are, you can't learn how to write assembly in 20 hours. The breadth of knowledge required (Cpu/Memory architecture, execution flow, etc, etc) not to mention all the ancillary data (what is hex). – Basic Sep 03 '14 at 12:41
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    @georgechalhoub: The claim isn't that one can learn to play expert-level compositions in 20 hours, but that one can "play the piano noticeably well." Learning to play anything more advanced than chopsticks could be considered "noticeably well." – Flimzy Sep 03 '14 at 12:46
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    @Basic: You can learn to write assembly "noticeably well" in 20 hours. – Flimzy Sep 03 '14 at 12:46
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    @Flimzy I suppose it depends on you definition of "noticeably well" but I have to say I strongly disagree. Try it with a family member / another guinea pig. From _no_ knowledge to something that will build and run in 20 hours? Again, perhaps it's our definition but I don't consider doing something by rote "noticeably well". Good luck to them when it comes to debugging! – Basic Sep 03 '14 at 13:09
  • Beethoven's Fur Eclipse ???? What about wallpapering. Twenty hours serious effort under expert advise, and you'll be able to get a passable result. Twenty hours of ice skating and you'll look quite competent compared to most people around you. – gnasher729 Sep 03 '14 at 13:40
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    The phrase "noticeably well" is so vague that I don't see how this question can have an objective answer. I also question that the speaker means this to apply to literally any skill. – Nate Eldredge Sep 03 '14 at 14:19
  • @NateEldredge - agreed. VTC since the claim is too vague to be falsifyable – user5341 Sep 03 '14 at 16:07
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    Another complication is distinguishing a skill vs a group of related skills. In ChrisW's answer he mentions writing Chinese as a skill, but it requires multiple related skills such as knowing how to draw characters, remembering the characters, and understanding their meanings. So what counts as a "skill"? – Rob Watts Sep 03 '14 at 16:46
  • Agree with @Basic about how narrow a "skill" is in question. Example: My company decided to cross-train _everyone_ as service reps, taking calls from clients. I had zero knowledge of the tools they use and limited knowledge of their jargon going in (I am in IT, using and developing entirely different tools, and using different jargon), but by the end of the training period (~5 work-hours) I could handle the most common type of call without assistance, and did not require **direct** intervention from my handler for more complicated calls. – Brian S Sep 03 '14 at 18:02
  • Basic: Compare someone with 20 hours experience writing Assembly language versus someone with 0 hours experience, and I think the speaker's definition of "noticeably well" will be quite apparent. (It may be a "no true Scotsman argument" as well, but that doesn't make the claim "untrue"--just not very meaningful for our purposes here) – Flimzy Sep 04 '14 at 10:17
  • As a couple of others have mentioned, this all depends on the definition of "noticeably well". If you mean "better than someone with zero training", I suppose it's probably true. If you mean "could get a job doing this and no one could distinguish you from people who have had years of training and decades of experience", it is surely false. If someone said he had 20 hours of training in how to design jet aircraft and this was the first plane he'd built, would you agree to go on its first flight? Or if someone had 20 hours training in brain surgery, etc? – Mark Daniel Johansen Sep 09 '14 at 14:15
  • I tried to learn to play the piano from a "teach yourself" book once. I devoted a lot more than 20 hours to it and got nowhere. I took a semester of French in high school and failed. Maybe I just don't have the aptitude for these particular subjects, but that's the point of the claim, isn't it? That ANYBODY who devotes 20 hours to ANY skill could become proficient. Now that I think of it, the fact that not all students pass every class they take is pretty much proof that this claim is false. – Mark Daniel Johansen Sep 09 '14 at 14:22
  • @Mark "the fact that not all students pass every class they take is pretty much proof that this claim is false" Not true. Taking a class to graduate is not willful learning with targeted (to the individual, etc) training. That said, I don't buy the claim. As I said, I think it's marketing hype. On the other hand, if it get's people off the couch and attempting to learn new thigns, then that's a good thing. – yokimbo Sep 10 '14 at 04:53
  • @yokimbo Okay, after I posted that it occurred to me that you could say that people who fail a class were just lazy and not really trying, etc. Maybe you could say that it doesn't count if the teacher is incompetent. So yeah, not proof unless you can demonstrate that at least some of those students really were trying to learn, the teacher was reasonably competent, maybe some other conditions. Still, I'd say there are plenty of examples that would meet any reasonable conditions. – Mark Daniel Johansen Sep 10 '14 at 13:36

1 Answers1

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The talk says that "10,000 hours" is, to within an order of magnitude, the amount of practice required to get expert-level performance: e.g. to be a professional athlete.

It says that, conversely, with a bit of practice you can get really good, really quickly.

The following is, I think, an example of the truth of that:

Those who pass their driving test have had, on average, about 45 hours of professional training combined with 22 hours of private practice. Learners who prepare this way, with a combination of plenty of professional training and plenty of practice, do better in the test.

Note:

  • Driving a car in traffic is (IMO) a reasonably complicated skill.
  • Doing it well enough to pass the driver's license test is doing it reasonably well.
  • This statement from the British Government is presumably based on plenty of experience (experiment).

The cited time (45 plus 22) is a bit higher than the "20 hours" you asked about; but it's very much the same order of magnitude (much closer to "20 hours" than to "10,000 hours").

Beware though that the above is a (one) specific example, not a proof of the general case: it's "a" skill, not "any" skill. The TED talk does actually say "any":

... about any skill you can think of. Want to learn a language? Want to learn how to draw? Want to learn how to juggle flaming chainsaws? If you put 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice into that ting, you will be astounded.

I suspect it's also possible to come up with some counter-examples: for example, that nobody gets "really good" at writing chinese in anything like 20 hours.

ChrisW
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    Someone may not get really good at writing some *dictated* Chinese in 20 hours, but I'm pretty sure they could learn a passage of script, memorize it, learn how to write it, and learn what each of the script characters are so that when an observer points to a character and says 'what is this part' they could answer. It sort of depends on the criteria you use to measure 'really good'. – JonW Sep 03 '14 at 10:54
  • @JonW As well as depending on the criteria for 'really good' (which I think is clear in the context of the first few minutes of the talk), may be even more dependent on how large the skill is: for example I should think that you could probably memorize a sonnet in 20 hours, but not memorize the complete works of Shakespeare. – ChrisW Sep 03 '14 at 11:00
  • Can you find stronger, more general evidence? – Sklivvz Sep 03 '14 at 11:06
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    @Sklivvz I won't be looking for it. The purpose of the TED talk was to say that you can learn some things, useful/desirable things, in a relatively short time: especially that the oft-quoted "10,000 hours" was based on studies of expert-level performance, and doesn't imply that it takes 10,000 hours to learn or to become good at anything. IMO driving is a useful, real-world example of that: and very "general" evidence, in the sense that most adults have experience with having learned to drive. – ChrisW Sep 03 '14 at 11:12
  • I suspect we're deeply in non-notable land, but if the claims says "any", you can't confirm it with a single example. – Sklivvz Sep 03 '14 at 11:34
  • I also like it as an example because a driving test has a well defined definition of how broad the scope/skill-set is, and how good "good" is. – ChrisW Sep 03 '14 at 11:53
  • @Sklivvz Yes that's what I said: beware that this is one example. IMO that confirms it's sometimes possible, not that it's always possible. If we wanted to be pendantic we could disprove it as a general/universal rule by showing only a single counter-example; for example, "you can't get really good at holding your breath for 30 days, chopping your head right off and jumping out of airplane at 60,000 feet without a parachute, and surviving unhurt" -- but that doesn't seem worthwhile. – ChrisW Sep 03 '14 at 11:59
  • I think the claim is marketing for the book. If the author said, "learn some things reasonably well in about 20 hours", he wouldn't sell nearly as many books or appear on TV or TED. That said, I did ask if there was *any* evidence. – yokimbo Sep 03 '14 at 21:28
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    @yokimbo There's presumably some continuum: some things can and other things can't be learned in 20 hours. What kind of evidence are you looking for, or, evidence of what? – ChrisW Sep 03 '14 at 21:53
  • I think that nails it. I was looking for a discussion on the topic, and this did it. We could also take into account people's natural or learned aptitude in varous areas of potential study. That said, it would be nice to have evidence of things people can't learn in 20-ish hours. – yokimbo Sep 04 '14 at 01:59
  • Yeah. If he had said, "There are some simple skills that can be learned in 20 hours", I think we would all say, Sure, of course. But "any skill"? No. Could someone learn a few Chinese characters in 20 hours? Sure. Could he "learn Chinese" in any meaningful sense? No. – Mark Daniel Johansen Sep 09 '14 at 14:18