Learning new skills is actually not that difficult. You just have to persevere for 20 hours and you’ll have the basic level of the skill. This sounds borderline absurd, right? It’s true though. I’m sure that you can remember moments from your life where you magically learn a new skill on the fly.
If you want to get the basics of something, 20 hours of focused attention is often enough. Let’s take the example of a Ukulele. If you start learning all the possible chords, progressions, strumming patterns, well… Then it’s definitely tough. But, if you start with just a subset, let’s say 4 chords and 2 strumming patterns. That way you can learn to play them very well in a
This is also true in languages. I’ve spent 20 hours over a week on Lingvist app (was procrastinating from my exams) learning French. Just from that, I could understand big chunks of it, had a vocabulary of over 500 words. Tim Ferriss is also a big promoter of quick, basic learning. In his article, he showcases how to learn the basic grammar rules of a language in 1 hour. I agree, though, that to be a world-class master of a certain skill you should spend about 10,000 hours in deliberate practice and there’s no magic bullet.
The concept of learning quickly is not to start learning anything but to try and structure it in a way, where you master the fundamentals first. The skill of learning the fundamentals requires some dissection before starting. However, that extra hour of planning can save you hundreds of hours down the road.
Here’s a reference video of a Ted talk about this topic.