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Comment by joshkaufman | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a book on this topic: https://first20hours.com

There's a ton of (replicated) psychology research that supports this thesis: the early hours of skill acquisition are very effective/efficient in terms of improvement-per-hour-invested. 20-50 hours is enough to see very substantial improvements in any skill, even if you have no prior knowledge or experience.

I wish more people focused on the early process of skill acquisition: that's what most of us will experience for most of our lives/careers.

Learning and practicing skills in many different areas is underrated: if you think of skills from an ROI perspective, spending a little time to get a lot better at a portfolio of useful things has a crazy high return.

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I would add on by saying from personal experience that the wider your breadth of experiences, the more you find that experiences in seemingly unrelated fields overlap and synergize to make it even easier to pick up new skills. Anecdotally I found my background in software + college coursework in signal processing gave me a huge boost with getting into music production, and in line with the ROI perspective I feel like I'm passively reinforcing my understanding of Fourier transforms and whatnot when I'm playing around with Ableton so it's akin to the effect of compounded interest

The book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733-range argues a lot for this as well, and goes on to discuss numerous examples where generalists have made the breakthroughs and/or excelled in some way, due to synergy, overlap and inspiration.

Thanks for the link, the to-read list never seems to stop growing but that book certainly sounds like one I'll have to add

I will second this recommendation. It has some great stories about people such as Van Gogh and inspired some new thoughts on machine learning.

Sure but a course in the science of music production isn't unrelated to music production.

Right, and the example is meant to illustrate that. My coursework on signal processing approached it from a mathematical and computational perspective, so I didn't necessarily have an appreciation for its application in a music context. Once I picked up music production and started dealing with filters and EQs and all, though, the relationship then became apparent pretty quickly and certainly helped with understanding how all the effect processing worked.

As long as you don’t get stuck in the expert beginner trap.

I like to say that my long history of studying the art of studying helps me get over that hump quickly. But you’d have to ask other people if I have or I’m full of it.

Why is it a trap, though? I think the whole "T-shaped engineer" analogy applies really well here. Expert beginner of a lot of things, true expert of a few. Sounds like a great balance to me.

In this context you're not spending enough time on it to become an "expert beginner". You're not getting the same three months of experience a dozen times, you're getting them once.

Surprised to see you hang around here! Your TED talk with the ukulele + chords was also an eye-opening introduction to this idea.

Also check out this guy who documents his progress playing table tennis everyday for a year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y21uwFUgkE. I'm nowhere near his level but I can tell he got pretty good.

Yes! Expertise is good, but overrated. I've found that you can be much happier getting good enough at a broad range of skills that combine professional, personal and whimsical

Very cool! Thank you for the link.

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