You Can Get Competent at Almost Anything in 20 Hours

0:00Mhm. You can get competent at nearly anything in 20 hours. The problem is most people spend a decade delaying the first 20 hours. More potential is wasted through inaction than incompetence. >> I saw a TED Talk years ago where a guy talked about how you learn how to play the guitar in 20 hours. And that TED Talk changed my life not because I learned to play the guitar, but all of a sudden

0:23>> [gasps] >> complex tasks or seemingly complex tasks felt incre much much more attainable. I was like, "Okay, I might not be the best website developer in the world, but in 20 hours I can have a website." And that 20-hour mantra for me has just been like 2 days. Two full days. Two 10-hour days fully focused. You can pretty much go from zero to not hero, but zero to confident. Um and when you string hundreds of those 20-hour days together, I think you become incredibly dangerous.

0:55We were talking earlier about Range, the book. I think being cross-departmental, being cross um what's the >> multidisciplinary >> Thank you, disciplinary. Multidisciplinary is is is hard to calculate how valuable it is because of the because the the first 20 hours of almost every discipline is probably the biggest most meaningful concepts from that discipline. >> being able to ride a bike to being able to ride a bike.

1:23>> Yes. Being able to not read to read. Um even if you can't read Shakespeare, but you can read all of a sudden like 80% >> of Shakespeare is now opened up to you. It's just a a matter of time before you get there. >> Yeah. And even if you could never read Shakespeare, the 80% of the books that you can read as a result of a sixth-grade reading level is basically more books than you have time to read. Um and you will get the largest returns from those first 20 hours. And so there's a very strong argument for trying to collapse the time between uh wanting something and beginning those first 20 hours. And because the the 80/20 of your of the skills you gain that are that have utility. Like that your usefulness across a huge amount of domains is multiplicative not additive.

2:04So, I I I I've said this example before, but like, you know, Jay-Z in the very beginning it's like he might have had some rhythm or something. And then all of a sudden he, you know, learned how to rap. And then he learned how to sell. Now, some people say maybe he sold earlier than that, but I'll just leave it there. He learned how to sell. And then all of a sudden he learned how to market. And with each of these additional skills his income didn't go up by like, oh, 1 + 1 = 2. It went, you know, 1 Well, 1's a bad number. So, 2 to the 10th power all of a sudden becomes significantly greater um than what you can do. And so, when when unsure about what step like when you're not sure what to do, build potential.

2:48Because when the opportunity does come, you want to be ready. And so, it does make sense in the beginning of your career to maximize optionality. It's just that you have to be willing to trade it in. And so, when you're not sure what to do, the logical thing to do is I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, but I'm going to get a good night's sleep. I don't know when I'm going to meet a mate, but I'm going to start getting in shape now. I don't know what I'm going to sell, but I'm going to start building an audience making content. There's always an argument for like you if you don't know what to do, there's still plenty of things to do. And but the goal is not necessarily to do those things forever, it's to do those things to then use them as the launchpad to get the thing you really want.

3:22>> The trap is opening up some optionality without the concordant decisiveness. >> If you like this video and you're business owner who wants to break through your current revenue ceiling, I distilled every lesson from scaling 10 businesses past 10 million and three businesses past 100 million into a completely free scaling road map that I've used to go from 0 to 1, 0 to 10, and 0 to 100 plus. And so, you can click here and you can check it out. Again, absolutely free. And since you're business owner, I appreciate you and uh enjoy.