MindThe Beginner

What is the difference between failure and success? Or more accurately, what is the difference between learning and not learning? A very simple fact of life: You have to make mistakes in order to learn. But that isn’t where things start.

The first step in learning is actually getting of your behind and getting to it. In some cases you’ll have to get on your behind actually (like when you want to learn how to program a computer, desk-flying is the way to go.) but nevertheless, you need to act. Something I’ve been learning the hard way the last few days. For a quick background on that: I’m studying for a few exams and so I’m spending almost all my waking hours on it. Not to pass the exams (it’s important) but to learn more. To end each day knowing things I didn’t know when I woke up. (much more important)

Twenty minutes

By far the best way I know of to learn something is to completely focus on it for twenty minutes at a time. Set a timer and make write down what it is you want to have done in those twenty minutes. Start the timer and immerse yourself in what it is you want to learn. The timer goes off and you grab a quick cup of tea, perhaps some fresh air and after a short break (five minutes) you immerse yourself again for 20 minutes. Spend the first few minutes reviewing what you did in the previous block and then continue with the new things.

Studying this way  you can learn anything you want. Yes it takes some time but that’s common knowledge by now, getting something for nothing is exceedingly rare. You’ll just have to come to terms with it: if you want something you’ll have to work for it.

Twenty minutes, isn’t that a very long time to focus on something? Once you get going, the twenty minutes fly by and the timer will startle you. Seriously, time flies when you’re having fun. And if you’re a bit like me, learning something new is fun and you’re always looking to learn more. Every day brings new opportunity to learn stuff and to go to bed just a bit wiser than when you got up this morning.

Cutting down time

Now we go back to success and failure. What is the difference? It’s time spent on trying to be successful. Nothing more then that! The more time you spend learning how to be successful the more you will learn how to be a failure. In time you’ll learn every single pitfall that is stopping you and you can easily navigate around them. Success!

You’re already and expert with life but I’m sure you want to be an expert in other things too. But here’s another hard truth for you: you only have so many “10,000 hours” in a lifetime to spend. Now if we apply the 80/20 principle that Tim Ferris made popular to that you can become  really really good at something in 2,000 hours. But we can cut that down even further. Learning the basics of something takes far less than that.

If you want only the barebone basics of programming in c++ for instance. That can be done in 160 hours or less. (That’s what my University expects at least, the course Programming 101 is “worth” 6 ECTS, and one ECTS is equivalent to 28 hours of investment). Like a lot of courses students somehow manage to complete the tasks and pass the exams while not investing nearly as much time as expected. Another cut in our hours to leave us with the final number: 100 hours for something as complex as computer programming. That’s 300 blocks of 20 minutes to learn the basics.

Basics

Becoming an expert isn’t all that hard, find a direction and head off into it. Keep going into that direction and you’ll soon be the expert. Teach others how to do the same and become rich. Doing it for them will be even more profitable. Conquering the basics in any field often is more than enough. Do you need to be able to dream html/css/xml to build a website? Of course not, look at this blog for instance. I have no experience with css or xml (yet) and very little html. But I’m running a blog, a successful one at that as well.

You can get a tune out of a guitar on just one string, or if you want something a bit more fancy, learn a power chord and you can slide that all over the neck. Add a distortion and you’ve got rock! 100 Hours of learning to play a guitar and you can join a rockband. That’s all it takes, and you’ll get better while in the band of course.

Ruling the world

Does every guitarist on stage have 10,000 hours spent? If they have now they sure didn’t when they started out in a band. Likewise a computer programmer is capable of producing good basic code within 100 hours. Ruling the world isn’t being an expert, it’s investing twenty minutes at a time learning something so every single day you go to bed wiser, better and smarter than when you got up that morning. Day in day out: keep learning and going to bed wiser and you will rule the world, twenty minutes at a time.