I was going through various TED talks and then I landed up on The first 20 hours — how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU

Source: xkcd/1530

This is really interesting, as he talks about how much time it takes to learn a skill. We all have been living under the impression that it requires 10000 hours to learn a skill. Which is wrong , 10000 hours is required to be the expert in that field something like getting Olympic gold medal for swimming.

But to be fairly good at something or atleast learn that skill you need about 20 hours – that’s it.

I had exams from the 8th December and so I had a lot of time, I decided to conduct a self experiment and see if 20 hours is really what you need. The skill I chose was Touch Typing.

Touch Typing in essence, is typing without looking on the keyboard and effectively utilizing all ten fingers. I started learning on, typing.com.

Twenty hours is about 45 mins a day for a month; you can have some time off too. The first few days might be frustrating and you might feel like giving up, but once you cross that barrier there is no looking back.

The result of my experiment, was I learnt touch typing and I wrote this post as I completed the 20th hour of my touch typing experiment. My speed is some where around 35WPM and accuracy is 90%, which is not very awesome but decent enough.

You all should give it a try! Dedicating 20 hours for a skill is not a bad deal.