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The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Unmistakable Classic: The First 20 Hours of Learning Any New Skill with Josh Kaufmann

Josh Kauffman is a poster child for how to give yourself an education that kicks the crap out of the one you got in school. Instead of going to business school, he decided to create a Personal MBA. The result has been a book that sold over 130,000 copies, and an incredible journey. In this interview we get into the first 20 hours of learning any new skill.


  • What You Can Learn from the Marketing of Procter and Gamble 
  • Insights into How You Can Conduct Consumer Research
  • The Importance of Rapid Experimentation in Your Early Days
  • The Advantages You Have Over Procter and Gamble
  • Translating Data and Insights into Something Actionable
  • Why You Should Tune Out What Other People Are Doing
  • The Power of Taking a Very Strong Stand on Things
  • Dissecting How to Give Yourself an MBA 
  • An In-Depth Exploration of Self-Directed Learning
  • Deconstructing Things into Smaller Parts
  • The Growth and Many Iterations of the Personal MBA
  • The #1 Mistake You've Heard 1,000 Times 
  • Seeds for What Resulted in the First 20 Hours
  • An In-Depth Look into Josh's Accelerated Learning Model


Josh Kaufman is the bestselling author of The First 20 Hours and The Personal MBA. His work helps people make more money, get more done, and have more fun. You can follow him on twitter @joshkaufman.

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Duration:
1h 19m
Broadcast on:
16 May 2014
Audio Format:
other
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In this unmistakable classic, we revisit our interview with author of the first 20 hours, Josh Kaufman, where we discuss the process of accelerated learning and rapid-scale acquisition. Josh, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. >> Thanks, Randy. Great to be here. >> Yeah. So, Josh, I'm going to ask you the very first question that I usually ask everybody, and that is, can you sort of give us the reader's digest version of your background and how that has brought you to doing the work that you do today? >> Sure. The very short version of the story is almost 10 years ago now, I feel old. Almost 10 years ago, I was graduating from college, and I happened to have a job at a large company, Procter & Gamble, doing marketing type things, which was interesting because my background was actually in very geeky systems administration, corporate IT kind of things. So I found myself graduating from college. I had an offer to become a marketer at Procter & Gamble, and at that time, all of the people that I was going to be working with had just graduated from a top 10 business school. So the Harvard's and the Wharton's and the Stanford's, everybody that I was going to be working with, at that time, I believed they had some knowledge and experience about business, about how to work in a big company, how to make things happen, that I believed that I didn't have. But I also had this job, and it didn't make sense for me to quit my job and go to school and borrow a bunch of money, I just wanted to learn what I thought they knew. And so what I decided to do is go to the Cincinnati Public Library and every Barnes & Noble in the greater Cincinnati area and start reading. And my goal was very simple. I wanted to learn as much about how businesses function, what they are, how they work, how all the pieces come together, and how you can build one that performs very well. I wanted to learn that for myself as quickly and easily and inexpensively as possible. So I started reading. And over the past 10 years, I've read thousands of business books. I lost count at a certain point. And when you read that much, I learned a ton, and I've talked to a lot of very interesting people and have consulted and advised with some very, very large companies and some of the smallest ventures on the face of the earth. And when you work in business for a long period of time and you read all of this material about how businesses work, you start to see patterns. So the same ideas, the same principles, the same concepts appear over and over and over again. And at a certain point, this was about five or six years into personalmba.com, which was my primary site as a project. I just kind of thought to myself, well, wouldn't it be nice to just take all of these very most important ideas about business and put them all in one book? Instead of having to read thousands, you could just pick up a book and say, this is what you need to know about business. And that's how the personalmba Master of the Art of Business, my first book, came to be. And it's been out for two and a half years now and has spread all over the world. I think we're somewhere around 130,000 copies sold worldwide. So just kind of blown away by the response. Awesome. Well, let's do this. Let's take a few steps back to the earlier part of your career. And I want to start at the Proctor and Gamble piece and working in marketing. And I have a question around that and kind of how this ties to building a brand of your own online. Proctor and Gamble really is, for all intents and purposes, I think that we sort of look at them as sort of the pioneers of marketing products, right? Like everybody looks to them as sort of, even business schools use them as a case study often for products. And what I'm really curious about is sort of the lessons from your experience marketing at Proctor and Gamble that you've actually applied to building your online project. And what are the takeaways for people listening from that? Yeah. So one of the things that marketing at P&G does extremely well is they focus on teaching you really the fundamentals of marketing, which are the same everywhere, right? You understand at a very deep level who you are building something for, or who you're talking to. You make sure that whatever it is that you're offering is really filling those primary needs or wants that that person has. And you talk about whatever it is that you're offering in a way that immediately resonates with who you're talking to and makes them want to, at a minimum, get more information, but ideally, explore more or buy it and try it for themselves. And so, you know, a lot of, and it sounds like marketing 101, and it really is. You know, what Proctor and Gamble as a company is really good at is doing that consistently and systematically for every single thing that they produce. And so, you know, I had the great privilege when I was at P&G. I spent about a year and a half doing product development, so working with research scientists and seeing the types of technology that P&G had at its disposal. And then my job was to work with the scientists and talk to consumers and users to figure out what needs are being met yet and find a way to kind of bridge that gap between what the company was capable of pulling off and what customers and consumers really, really wanted. And so, you know, doing, so every once in a while, you'll hear or see a big profile, like in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, that talks about these insane lengths that P&G goes to do consumer research and dig into consumer psychology and find out more about the people who use their products. It was really cool for a couple of years I was that guy. And so, you know, just understanding those very deep fundamentals of how marketing actually works, how good marketing works, it made it much easier to really sit down and in the process of building personal MBA, think about, you know, who are we talking to here? Who wants this? Who would need it? Who would find it valuable? And then understand how people who are in this particular mindset, like I want to learn more about business, how do I go about doing that? So, for example, kind of inside baseball here, there's a reason the personal MBA is called the personal MBA instead of learn what you need to know about business, for example, something more general. And the reason is when adult learners start thinking about learning how businesses work for better or worse, the first thing they Google is MBA program. And so, the name the personal MBA was both a pretty accurate description of my personal project, what I was trying to do for myself. But it also happens to hit people right at that psychological point of market entry. When they Google MBA program, they find me and I'm an alternative to that. Well, so a couple of questions around this, right? You talked about lessons from a behemoth of a company that has a billion dollar marketing budget for practically everything they do, and what we're looking at is people who don't have two pennies to rub together often that are starting interesting online projects. So, there's a couple of questions I have around that. One is, what are the lessons for us that are applicable there? And then you brought up understanding, the understanding that you serve part, I think that we're starting to get some ideas around that. It's interesting because I hear a lot of different questions on identifying this ideal person. And lately, the shift seems to be not understanding them from a demographic level, but understanding their values and what they're truly like as a person. And then also, when you have, say, a small audience or you're just starting out, trying to figure out what they need, I mean, it's kind of guesswork. I call it the Steve Jobs approach to customer development. So, how do you deal with those issues? Because, I mean, there are going to be a lot of people who are either starting at the very beginning of their project or midway through where the data points they have are not going to be aligned with what you're talking about. Yeah. So, let's take the second part first. When you're starting anything, you have precisely zero information about what people want or what people respond to. And so, when you're just getting started, a lot of experimentation, as quickly as possible. So, putting something out there and seeing how people respond, that's the biggest, best thing that you can do when you're starting from nothing, right? So, I ran a very small personal blog at my personal site, Josh Kaufman.net, where I wrote about lots of things for a period of almost a year. And it wasn't until I put together this idea of the personal MBA and published the very first draft reading list that I ever produced about the best business books that you should look into if you want to learn business on your own. It wasn't until I published that and got such a big response from it. It's like, okay, there's something here. And then, you know, once I noticed that response, it became much easier to talk to people who were interested in it and start having conversations about, you know, what's compelling about this? What's helpful? What's not? And then, just doing that experimentation and continuing to refine those things that are working over a long period of time, that's the best thing you can do. What's amazing is that, you know, having worked on the inside of a very large marketing company, there are things that because of the size and scale, and frankly, because of the type of game that PNG is playing in the product development and retail marketing space, there are things that PNG does, like multi-million dollar TV campaigns just for brand awareness. That's great for PNG because that's, you know, the secret of that is the advertising doesn't necessarily have to work. The advertising just needs to make sure the buyer at Walmart thinks PNG is supporting it enough to give it display space in their stores. That's the purpose of it. And so, it's important to, you know, when looking at all of these big companies, like, you know, like your experience at Intuit, big companies do wild things. And if you try to emulate those too closely, you end up wasting a lot of money, right? So, a lot of the ways that PNG markets brands absolute complete and utter waste of time for you and me and everybody else who's probably listening to this right now. Right, right. Definitely. We'll talk about that in a bit more detail. I want to ask, you know, I want to dig into something else you said, you know, you started paying attention to the responses that you were getting from people. And I want to analyze that a bit more or kind of dig into one how you do that and sort of synthesize it into something more useful or translated into something more actionable so that it leads you to your sort of next step or next experiment because, you know, one of the things I've always said is that with these experiments, like you said, we don't really know what is going to happen, but I feel like the view changes with every step forward, right? Like you see things that you didn't see before and the question is how do you take that information that you get and translate it into an action that will keep moving you further and something useful? Yeah. So a lot of it is just first, you know, kind of priming yourself to pay attention about this stuff. I think most of us tend to do this a little bit blindly or haphazardly, if that makes sense, just deciding that you're going to go out and talk to people and look for things that can help you either run another experiment or test something new really helps your brain kind of latch on to the things that can help you. That's actually, it's a pretty well known psychological principle called priming. So if you prime your brain to look for specific things, lo and behold, your brain will actually notify you when they appear in your environment. So the first thing is just decide that you're going to go out and look for it. You know, the second is actively reaching out to people who are, who may be interested in this particular thing. So you know, early on in the personal MBA, I was having a lot of conversations with people who are interested in business education and how learning was changing in general. And just having a lot of those conversations really helped me understand what people were looking for and what they valued. And you know, there were a lot of early directions that the personal MBA could have taken. And you know, so for example, do I spend a lot of time talking to recruiters at large companies trying to get the idea of personal MBA pushed through as a legitimate way of understanding business in a way to create value? No, absolute complete and utter waste of time based on my early conversations. But some of the other things, so for example, putting together a very, a both basic but comprehensive primer about how businesses work, entrepreneurs, and folks who are in the process of having an idea and evaluating it as a business, loved it, absolutely loved it. And so if I'm going to spend a couple of years building something, I would personally much rather have that time be spent building something people like actually want and will find valuable. Yeah, no doubt. We'll actually talk about sort of the framework around that in just a second. And I want to go back to something else that you brought up when we were talking about sort of the marketing 101 piece, you know, we said, you know, finally, what you do is you tie all of this together and create things in a way that resonates or connects with the people that you want to serve. And you know, I mean, you started the personal MBA a long time ago, I remember it was probably one of the very first blogs that I came across. And now, you know, the world is getting noisier, everybody has a microphone and the way we connect with people I think is becoming more and more about a message that only you could deliver that nobody else can really compete with. And you know, and the problem is that far too often what I've been seeing is that we tend to mimic rather than models. And the result, of course, is this giant echo chamber and the internet is littered with Tim Ferris, copycats and people who see that an idea worked, you know, for example, and this is something that's going to come up in a recent speech of mine. Somebody says, you know, hey, shit, my dad says got a TV show. Next thing you know, there's 40 other Twitter accounts like shit, my cat says shit, my mom says and shit, my dog says. And the result, of course, is this just giant, you know, like this endless stream of copycats. So what I'm curious about is in a world where everybody has a microphone, you know, how do you take whatever it is that you can deliver and deliver it in a way that resonates with other people? Yeah, well, it's, you know, in such a busy world, it's not enough to be just better anymore. You have to be different in some way, shape, or form. And a lot of that is, you know, it's kind of a way to kill two birds with one stone to abuse that expression. If tune it out, tune out what other people are doing. So for example, I'm glad you brought up Tim because the first 20 hours, my new book about rapid learning and skill acquisition is the same, same topic that Tim talks about in four hour chef. And so one of the things that I did very deliberately is I, until the manuscript was complete, I decided not to read for our body. I decided not to read four hour chef because this was something that I was researching and I wanted to put together something, a framework that came from my research and a framework that came from my experience. And you know, now it's, now that the book is done, it's fascinating to go back and read some of Tim's stuff and see all the, see the things that are similar, and there's quite a bit of similarity, and see all of the things that are different. Where the approach is different, where the method is different. And so, you know, the best thing that you can do for yourself, if you want to create something that is different and that will stand out, is tune out, you know, in the business world there's a lot of emphasis placed on tracking your competition, don't, you don't need to, tune it out, decide on your method or your approach, and if you're not copycatting everybody else, you will be different by the time this thing is done. You just need to make sure that when it's done, it is, you have exposed it to enough people who can benefit from it, that you know how to talk about it in a way that resonates. I love that, you know, and I'll share two examples, I'll refer back to something that Robert Green said when I had him here to talk about mastery, and it was really interesting, you know, he said, yeah, he's like, I love Malcolm Gladwell's books, I love his New Yorker essays, but he said I didn't want to read the tipping, or outliers because it was a similar type of book, and I wanted this story to be told in my own voice. And you know, it's funny, even when I had Tim Ferris here, somebody commented on my Facebook, well, it's like, hey, you know, you should listen to the other Tim Ferris interviews, and I said, well, that's precisely why I don't want to listen to them, because, and I, you know, this, I don't think this, at this point, I've openly admitted this, somebody had asked me a handful of times that said, you know, what podcast do you listen to, Shrini, I said, this is going to sound really stupid, but I don't listen to other people's podcasts. Right. Yeah. And I don't, you know, it's not because I don't respect them. Like, if anybody is doing work, I'll definitely support it, but I mean, a big part, I especially don't listen to other people's interviews, partially because I don't want my style of how to do it to be influenced. Like, let's say, Josh, you had been interviewed somewhere, I definitely would not have listened to it until after you and I had spoken. Right. Right. And there's a lot of benefit to just doing things in the way that makes sense for you, and it's going to stand out. You know, the other thing that works really well is not being afraid to take a very strong stand on, on something. So, so the personal MBA makes a very strong stand about business school, right? You don't need it. Yes. Unless you are in a extremely small percentage of a percentage of a percentage who is only going to be happy working at a large investment bank, right? Yes. If you're in that other 99.999% of the population, you don't need it, but you do need to understand how businesses work. So, here's a way of getting that end result. Okay. So, let's actually talk about this strong stand idea in a bit more detail. Sure. Because I have, I've started, you know, started noticing a pattern very recently in that there's certain writers that I'm very, very drawn to, and why I'm drawn to them, and why I feel that most people are drawn to them, is because they have a level of honesty, imperfection, and not to use an overly used word, you know, word vulnerability, and everything they do. And the example that I always come back to is James Altitry, because you read in James writes and you're kind of like, "Holy crap, I can't believe you said that." Right. But at the same time, like, I mean, even Julian Smith told me, he said, you know, everybody that I know who is successful is very, very opinionated. And I think that we're in this very interesting place in the online world where people don't want to piss other people off. And I think that keeps people afraid from being opinionated or having bold opinions. But I've noticed the bolder I've got, like, you know, with my writing, the more the people who like me like me, and the ones, I mean, I've seen my newsletter for my School of Life blog as my writing style has evolved and my voice has changed, drop off in droves, but I'm realizing I'm also getting rid of the people who probably don't belong there. Totally. You know, if you are trying to please every single person on the face of the earth, you're going to drive yourself crazy and you're going to get worse results. It is way better to decide what you believe or what you're doing and make it really insanely awesome for a certain type of person or a person with certain values or certain characteristics or certain goals. And just focus on serving those people and let everybody else go watch something else or do something else. So for example, interesting experience yesterday, the first 20 hours was just featured on Life Hacker. Super awesome. There are some comments in there that are not good about the method that we talk about in the first 20 hours. But instead of spending a lot of time feeling bad about that, there's a simple explanation. This is not a good fit for them at their point in life based on their values and what they think is important. It's okay. It doesn't need to be. It just needs to be a super awesome method for a particular type of person who's in a position to benefit of it. And as long as there are enough people in that position, then everybody wins. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think to me it kind of goes to this idea of I don't know anybody necessarily. I've always said I don't have any advice, just observations at this point. And I don't think anybody has advice. I think what everybody is giving us is observations. And I love what my friend Laura Garnett said and I've mentioned this on the show before. She said, you know, go to people for support, not advice because advice is based on their worldview. Totally. Yeah. So information, perspective, questions, ways to think about something, you know, the books and the resources and the blogs and the courses, all of the things that I've personally gotten the most value out of haven't been a do how to do this particular thing in this particular way to get this particular result. It's all been here's how to think about some really important area of life, right? Here's how to think about writing, here's how to think about speaking. Here's some questions to ask yourself when you get stuck. It's all of those resources that when you're in a position to use it, you can think about and use in a way that gets you a better result based on when you need it. Yeah. Well, I mean, to me, it really comes down to basically saying, you know what? Use a compass instead of a map. Totally. Hey, everybody, it's Sreeny, I want to take a quick break to tell you about a new initiative that we've launched called the Unmistakable Salon, our monthly live event series in which you'll be able to interact with one of our former podcast guests and ask them your questions. The very first one is right here in our own backyard, Los Angeles, with our very good friend and creative instigator, Justine Musk, or we're going to talk all about creativity. You can get tickets at unmistakable salon.com and don't worry, I know you don't all live in LA, if you want us to bring the salon to your city, send me an email at Sreeny@unmistakablemedia.com and now back to the show. Talk about it from an MBA standpoint. I want to dissect the idea of self, you know, designing a curriculum for yourself. You know, Dale Stevens and I had this conversation and, you know, you being somebody who has essentially replaced, you know, you've more or less done what Dale has done, but as an adult in an adult context while he did it in high school and, you know, decided not to go to college. So what I'm curious about is, and I think this will actually make a really interesting transition to talk about the first 20 hours, is designing our learning curriculum for what we want to learn and how we do it and how we do it in a way that's effective in a world where there's just, we're inundated with information. Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple of things that, you know, in the personal MBA, one of the organizing principles behind the book is what I call a mental model. It's an idea about how businesses work or about how some important area of life works in general, right? And so if you understand the fundamental idea behind something like marketing a product, behind going out and selling that product, behind analyzing finances or creating something new or trying to be as productive as you possibly can during the day, what you'll find is there are a very small number of general principles or general techniques that you see over and over again, that you can use most often that apply to every situation. And if you know those fundamentals, fundamental ideas, it's much, much easier to look at your situation and come up with ways to improve that thing. So one of the things which was actually perceived by my publisher as a very risky thing for personal MBA, personal MBA is not a narrative book by any means. It's very much a reference type of work that's designed, you can read it through from start to finish. So it makes sense if you read it through, but it's also designed to be a reference. But the whole organization of the project and the book is here are the most important parts of how business works, here are the most important parts of working with yourself and other people. And here are the most important parts behind systems in general, because businesses are just systems designed to create a particular result. And so deconstructing each of those things into very small ideas that are easy to understand. But you can also use those ideas in combination to look at a situation and say, "Okay, I should probably do this or this is most important or here's a technique that would help me here." Understanding how to deconstruct something very complex into smaller and smaller elements gives you a great deal of flexibility. And so, for example, if you have a new business idea and you're not quite sure whether or not it'll work, having some basic ideas of how to break the business down into understandable parts and how to ask yourself questions about things that are going to be super fundamental to the business, going through that checklist of questions can provide a lot of insight about how the idea will work and it'll help you evaluate that idea without spending a lot of time and spending a lot of money building something nobody wants. And so part of how I try to organize my work in general is looking at a universal area of human existence that everybody can benefit from knowing and then deconstruct, helping the reader deconstruct that into smaller and smaller parts so they can really understand what's going on and then focus on the parts that are going to give them the best result for the least amount of time, energy and effort. Love it. Okay. So that's really, really awesome. So let's do this. Let's shift gears a little bit. I want to, and I think this will make a perfect transition to the book, but I want to talk a little bit about the growth of personal MBA, taking it from sort of where it was at to being this massive thing. I mean, you don't sell 130,000 books by luck. I think you and I both know that. And so I want to talk about the growth in product development pieces because I know you mentioned product development as something that you had had experience with because I think we are all to some degree developing information products and so I'd love for you to talk about kind of where you sort of saw the hot buttons and how you translated that into sort of the product development process and then we can start talking about the next book. Yeah. So personal MBA has gone through many, many evolutions since it first created. Actually believe it or not personal MBA.com started its life as a forum. It wasn't a website. It wasn't a blog. It was a forum that I put up saying, hey, I'm doing this crazy project. Here's, here are the results of my research as it's ongoing. What do you think? And so that was really, you know, as, as, as much as I would not recommend running a forum in quite that way, it was a really fantastic learning experience because as I was doing things, it was built around a discussion, right? Other people would jump in and give me feedback and that just helped every later iteration of the personal MBA become better and better and better. So at a certain point, I was really hoping that initially or, or my expectation was this is something that I'm doing, but I'm expecting a lot of people to, to take and run this as well. And what I found very early is this was something that I cared about deeply and nobody was going to care about it more than I did. So people were interested, people were using it whenever I did research that they were, they were taking it and giving me good feedback. But if I wanted to drive the project forward, I needed to step up and really take it seriously and really build something. And so this would, this would have been about a year and a half, two years into the project. I transitioned into personal MBA as, as a website, as a blog and, you know, still kept that, that dialogue with the people who were using it, but this was, you know, this is something that I am actively building and I'm going to make this the, the best possible resource for learning business on your own that, that exists on the internet. And so, you know, the primary method in continuing to develop was the reading list. So even, even still somewhere between 60 and 70% of new visitors to the personal MBA find the reading list first. And it's this, this, you know, this is now the seventh, eighth iteration of, of a revision of the reading list and, and it's still this evergreen valuable resource that somebody could have no experience, have no knowledge of who I am or what I do, have no previous experience with personal MBA and they could land on that page and get a lot of value immediately. And so continuing to develop that into the best possible resource became a really, really big priority. The thing that I wish I would have done and I didn't start doing until really late and I'm thinking myself for it. I know what you're going to say. I already know what you're going to say. Yeah, what am I going to say? You can anticipate this. Email list. Oh my gosh. If I had an email list when this thing started, holy cow. So yes, anybody who is, who is listening to this, if you have a website and you're not collecting email addresses, drop everything and go to MailChimp or go to AWeber or go to campaign monitor and get you an email list because it is, it is a big deal. So yeah, once, once the email list started or once I put it, finally sat down and put an email list in place, the whole thing just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And you know, it was the email list that allowed me to go to Penguin portfolio and talk about doing this as a book. It was the, you know, the growth in that email list, you know, is what allows me, when a new book comes out, I can let everybody know about it right away. It is by far the most effective marketing channel for pretty much anything and if you don't have one, you're really missing out. Yeah. I, there's no, no question in my mind about that now and, you know, I mean, our newsletter is probably my biggest priority between that and the podcast, you know, and then for those you guys who haven't signed up, like I said, if you go to fame and fortune guide.com, you get our free guide on how to repackage and repurpose content. And that's completely free. And all you have to do is sign up for email list, but I think, I think, you know, one of the things that I want to caution those of you guys who are listening against is viewing your email list as purely a transactional relationship because it's not. And that's, I think you have to deliver a lot of value. I noticed the other day we had, you know, I promoted an affiliate sale and I thought, wait a minute, I was like, no, but like two people unsubscribed and I was very, very surprised by that. And I realized I think it was because for, for, you know, for a long time, the email list has been all about value and that's not going to change. Like I've made it something that I want people to, like people actually look forward to receiving an email, which is awesome in a world where people are annoyed as hell by all the email they get. Yeah. I think it's really easy to overestimate kind of being naturally a geeky or techy or kind of crowd. You are not your customer and your customer really, by a long shot, people love receiving email. They really do. And you know, I definitely, definitely thought this when I first started by my email list. Like I don't want to email people too much. But really every time you send, there are people who are looking forward to that. And the whole reason they signed up in the first place is because they found what you're doing cool and they want to keep learning from you. They want to keep talking with you. They want to keep taking advantage of all this cool stuff that you're doing. And so the more email that you send them, the better off everybody is your readers are benefiting and you're benefiting too. Spark something uncommon this holiday with just the right gift from uncommon goods. The busy holiday season is here and uncommon goods makes it less stressful with incredible handpick gifts for everyone on your list all in one spot, gifts that spark joy, wonder delight and that it's exactly what I wanted feeling. They scour the globe for original, handmade, absolutely remarkable things. Last year, I found the perfect gift for my nephew, periodic table building blocks. These blocks were a big hit and considering he was talking in full sentences before he even turned to, I'd say that's a pretty good win. They're not just educational, but also a fun way to spark his curiosity. Uncommon goods has a knack for offering gifts that are truly memorable, unique and make every occasion special. 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That's uncommongoods.com/unmistakable for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer. Uncommon goods. We're all out of the ordinary. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Honestly, when I started this, I thought only I had to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch, whatever you're ready. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of CDTails. Expand the way you work and think with Claude by anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with the team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages, and solving complex problems. Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy, and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Discover Hydro, the best kept secret in fitness. Hydro is the state-of-the-art at-home rower that engages 86% of your muscles, delivering the ultimate full-body workout in just 20 minutes. From advanced to beginner, Hydro has over 500 classes, shot worldwide and taught by Olympians and world-class athletes. For a 30-day risk-free trial, go to hydro.com and use code ROW450 to save $450 on a Hydro Pro rower. That's h-y-d-r-o-w.com, code ROW450. Yeah, I think I remember what my friend A.G. Leon said, which I really loved, he said, "You don't even view it as a list. You view it as a community. I think that you have to remember always that behind that email address is a person." Totally. "Just viewing it that way, I think changes your ability to write newsletters." Like I don't even, I try not to think, "Okay, this is a list. I try to think about the people." Yes. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's the most effective way beyond anything. You know, so for example, if you're a blogger, people will sign up for your email list just to be notified when you have something cool and new up to give them. You know, and you get the benefit of keeping in touch with all of your subscribers. You can contact them whenever you want. They can give you direct feedback, so I don't know about you, but I read every single reply that somebody sends to my email list. They can get a hold of me extremely quickly. And that back and forth can give you new ideas. It can alert you to problems or something that isn't going right. It can give you a way of launching a new product in a way that doesn't cost anything beyond your time and energy. I mean, it's an amazing tool and way too many business owners or prospective entrepreneurs don't place the appropriate level of importance on that. Yeah, I think we could beat this point like a dead horse. Yes. You know, I will say, you know, you mentioned even the ability to go to Penguin. I think it was Tim Grohl who works with Dan Pink. He said that in terms of book sales, email outperforms social 10 to 1. Absolutely. Which was no surprise to me, but some of the thing about it, I don't think that just applies to launching a book. I think it applies to pretty much everything. Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big fan of Tim. Actually, believe it or not, Tim was one of my very first clients when I started doing advising for personal MBA. He's an amazing person. Awesome. Well, let's do this. Let's shift gears and let's talk about the new book. You know, there's a lot of things. You know, obviously it caught my attention immediately when I saw it. Somebody, I think it was one of our listeners who actually mentioned it to me and said, "Hey, Shreeni, have you had Josh yet?" And naturally, I thought this book was just a perfect fit in terms of the things that are going on in the world today in the fact that we have so many resources in which to have sort of self-directed learning. And yet, I don't think everybody's trying to become a master at everything they do. And like he's trying to talk about in the book, like we would like a certain level of competence. Like, you know, if I wanted to speak Spanish, I'd like to be able to hit on girls in foreign country and sound relatively intelligent or witty, right? Good priorities. Yeah, exactly. We can see what my priorities are here. I'm joking. But you know what I mean, I'm saying. Yeah, totally. I think that's an appropriate goal. That's great. Yeah, so I mean, you know, I'm not necessarily looking to go and basically have political negotiations with a dictator in a foreign country where Spanish is the main language. Right. That would require a whole other level of skill. But first, what I want to talk about is sort of what the seeds were for this book. Like, what was the genesis of it? Yeah, so part of it is, I would say there was a confluence of factors all coming together at a point. So I have always been temperamentally a guy. I'm just fascinated by thousands and thousands of things. And so one of my favorite things in the world is to be curious about something, jump in and learn a lot and come away from that process, knowing how to do something really cool. And that is pretty much universal. So learning how to do something, some cool new skill or tool for the business, some fun new skill is a hobby. So everything from playing music to programming to windsurfing, like the number of interests I have that I would like to explore in my life is gigantic. And so before, so for the past couple of years, I've had enough free time to kind of do that in a dabbling sort of way, right? Just get curious about something, read a couple of books, try it out, spend some free time figuring it out and come away with something neat. The interesting event that happened about two and a half years ago was my wife Kelsey and I welcomed our daughter, Lila, into the world. And all of a sudden, this seems to be a universal experience with new parents. You kind of reach this point, like about, I don't know, six to eight weeks in, where the sleep deprivation, like really, really hits home. And you're just running on fumes at that point. And I remember having this almost existential crisis of, oh, my gosh, I am never going to have free time ever again. And if I'm never going to have free time, that means I'm never going to be able to learn something new, ever again. And it was like this really like, oh, my gosh, I am never going to have free time again. The sucks. And my daughter is amazing. And I would love nothing more. I am, I would say, very ambitious. I want it all. So I want my business to be successful. I want to have a wonderful relationship with my family and spend lots of time with my kids. I want to learn all sorts of really cool hobbies. And I want to do that while getting a semi-normal amount of sleep. And so, you know, this super time crunch, it's like, OK, if I want to keep learning and growing, I need to figure out a way to make this more efficient, because I don't have the time to dabble anymore. And so that really prompted my interest in this whole idea of accelerated learning and rapid skill acquisition. If you only have, for example, less than an hour a day, maximum, to sit down and learn something new in a way that's going to allow you to become really good in a very short period of time, how do you go about doing that? And so I decided to really dig in, because this is one of those areas. Like, picking up new skills is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. The skills that you have to find how good you are at your career, how much fun you're going to have in your free time. If you decide to start a business, how successful you're going to be and how quickly you're going to find that success, learning new skills is super, super important. And so I decided, it's like, OK, this is a complex, fundamental area of human existence. I have a really deep need to know this right now, so I'm going to get serious about putting together a method to do it. And that led to the method that I talk about in the first 20 hours. Awesome. Well, let's do this. Can you give us sort of a high level overview of the method just so people-- because I know it's a 200 plus page book, so we can go through the entire method here, but sort of a high level overview so people who are listening can decide this is something that they want to buy or they would find useful. Yeah, no, it's actually reasonably straightforward. So the first is super common sense, decide what it is that you are interested in learning about. And not just a topic, but getting very, very specific about how good you want to be. And in the book, I call this a target performance level, right? What do you want to learn and what do you want to be able to do when you're done? Like hit on girls and bars in Spanish. Exactly, right? If that's the point, yes, I would love to go up to an attractive person in a social situation and have a good conversation that results in a great outcome, right? That's a target performance level. Sure. And so you notice that is way more specific than something like I want to speak Spanish fluently, right? Super broad. And that doesn't give you a lot of information about how to get started, whereas that specific target performance level actually gives you a checklist of things that you probably need to know. It helps you figure out what you need to learn first and the types of things that are going to provide the most value with the least effort, right? So you define your target performance level, get very specific, and then you do just a little bit of research. So one of the things that I struggle with-- I'm a researcher, guy by nature. I want to read all the books about every topic ever. But that just-- at beyond a certain point, that becomes another form of procrastination. You're just reading and researching. You're not actually sitting down to practice the skill in a way that makes you better. So you want to go and find 3, 4, 5 books, tutorials, courses, blogs, websites, whatever, that talk about the fundamental parts of that particular skill. And the goal in picking up these resources is not to read all the books covered to cover. It's not to take all of the courses. You're doing a very brief overview. And the reason you do that is because if you see a method or a concept or a technique come up over and over and over again in three to five really good resources about the topic, chances are it's really fundamentally important. It's probably one of the things you need to practice first. So you do a little bit of research. And then the point of doing that research is to help you deconstruct what may be a very complex skill into smaller, more specific sub-skills that you can then practice. So for example, classic example here is golf, right? Golf is not one skill. You have to be able to do 100 different things well in order to say I'm a good golfer. So instead of saying I want to get good at golf, break it down, what does that mean? You need to be able to drive off the tee. You need to be able to put on the green. You need to be able to get out of a bunker. You need to be able to select a club. There's lots of things that are all sub-skills that are packed in that one global skill, right? So by deconstructing the skill into smaller parts and comparing those against what you're seeing in terms of research, you can identify the most valuable, most important sub-skills that you should practice first. Once you've done that, we get into the realm of behavioral psychology. So how do you get yourself to the point where you've identified the appropriate sub-skills and you're sitting down to practice in a way that makes you more effective? And the key here is putting together what's called a pre-commitment. And the very basic pre-commitment looks like this. Are you willing to spend at least 20 hours over the course of the next month learning this thing? That equates to about 40 minutes a day, give or take. If you're willing to rearrange your schedule, if you're willing to buy the tools, if you're willing to reconstruct or alter your environment to make it easier to practice, and you're willing to pre-commit to putting at least 20 hours into that thing, it's a really good sign that you're serious enough about this in order to make it work. And the rule is, once you start practicing, you can't stop until you reach your target performance threshold or you hit at least 20 hours of practice. And if you're not willing to make that pre-commitment, it's a really good sign that this is not important enough for you to learn right now. So just go learn something else, saves you a lot of time. But what you'll find is, psychologically, there seems to be something about 20 hours that serves two purposes. First, it doesn't feel like so large a commitment that it becomes a barrier to getting started, right? It's only 40 minutes a day, right? It's only 20 hours. If you don't like it or you're not good at it at the end of 20 hours, you just go do something else. It's not a big commitment up front. But it is long enough that when you sit down and do 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice on anything, you'll be absolutely astounded at how good you are at the end of those 20 hours, going from knowing absolutely nothing to performing reasonably well. That's really all it takes. Awesome. Well, it's so funny. As I'm listening to you describe that, it's almost my entire experience of learning how to surf. Yeah, I mean, I've told anybody. I mean, I suffer from absolute athletic ineptitude to be able to surf was something I never thought in a million years. But the other part that really interests me is, I have tried to teach friends how to surf. And the challenge is it becomes the knowledges, so tacit after a certain point that it's very difficult to deconstruct, but you actually have given me a lot of interesting ideas. I think what's funny is you've given us two frameworks. Even though we've looked at it from a learning perspective, if you flip it on its head, it also becomes a teaching framework. Absolutely. And for those of you guys who are creating courses or anything along those lines, that's incredibly useful. Yeah. And so it's kind of funny. One of the things that I wanted to do for this book, because it's easy to go do research and put together a theoretical method that you think probably will work. That's just research time. I am not comfortable teaching something unless I know with absolute certainty that it works. And so one of the things that I wanted to do in the first 20 hours is, yeah, put together the method, put together the framework. But I wanted to go out and test it on a bunch of different things to make sure that it works. And so it works on professional things. It works on hobbies. It works on cognitive skills, and it works on physical skills, motor skills. And so one of the things that I decided to learn for the book, like you, I consider myself not the most coordinated person in the world and not super athletic. But I wanted to learn how to win surf, which I'd never done before. And the first-- I tell the story in the book. The first time I went out on the water, got the whole rig and it's like, get a piece of cake. Not a big deal. It was one of the most painful experiences in my entire life. And so there's a value of jumping in and getting to the point where you're getting actual physical experience as quickly as possible. Because that taught me a lot about what was really important. And then you can take some of that experience and then go back to the research and say, oh, that is why talking about a dagger board is really important. I forgot to put mine down. That's kind of important. And then practice in a slightly different way. So one of the ways that I was able to accelerate the process of learning how to win surf was just going out and taking the sale off the board and just spending some time getting a feel for what it feels like to balance on the board in the water. How far can you lean in any direction? And just kind of breaking it down and having some more experience just isolating one particular part of the skill. When I put the sale back on the board, it was way easier to actually stay on the board and not drink mouthfuls of lake water. So, yeah, the whole idea is deconstruct it and get to the point where you're actually-- how quickly can you start making mistakes? How quickly can you start actually practicing this thing? The faster you can get to that point, the more experience you get. It's funny. It sounds-- when people go snowboarding, almost the exact same process I've seen. It's like, give, we'll tell you, go for three days in a row. And that's why I always tell friends of mine. It's like, you want to come out and surf. And you come once in three months, you're never going to learn how to surf. It's very simple. But if you come five days in a row, you'll figure it out in no time. Yeah, and it'll just brute force amazingly enough. Somebody with my athletic skill could do it, you could. Yeah, and the biggest risk here-- and this is the trap that I think most people find themselves in-- is the first hours of learning anything just are brutal. They suck. They're frustrating. You're never going to be good at it, right? And that's a universal human thing, too, right? First time Tiger Woods picked up a golf club at the age of three, he sucked, too. So part of the process in deciding to be serious about learning something new is having a strategy to overcome that universal experience of the first hours are just horrible. If you can persist, what most people do is they decide to try something. I'm going to go try to surf. And they go out, and they're horrible, right? Like everybody is. And then they just mentally label to themselves, oh, that's really hard, or I'm not good at that, or I'm not coordinated. They explain that this is not something that I'm capable of learning. It's hard, and so I'm not going to persist. And because they don't put in that initial time, because the first hours are frustrating, they don't end up learning the skill. What you find is if you are serious about the pre-commitment, if you decide to yourself that I am going to invest 20 hours in this skill, no matter what, if it sucks, it's going to suck for 20 hours, and I'm going to decide after that point, what you'll find, even for the hardest things, somewhere between hours two, three, and four, a switch flips. And all of a sudden, you're not as bad as you remember being, right? It's not nearly as frustrating. It's like, oh, I'm seeing some improvement here. This is cool. And if you keep going, you will become very, very skilled in a very short period of time. You know, it's funny to say that there's, you know, I remember, I met a guy at a bar when I lived in San Diego working for Intuit, and that was when I first started dabbling with surfing, and he said, go 50 times, because you'll be too invested to quit. Right. And I thought that was a really interesting observation, and I found that to be true. You know, I think it was about the 15th time I went out, I was finding that I could actually pop up on my own without anybody pushing me, or it started learning how to read waves. Of course, you know, from there, at that point, I didn't want to quit. I was hooked, you know, because then all of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, I actually kind of know how to do this. And I think, so one thing I'll mention that you know, you didn't talk about, but in Sean Acor's book, The Happiness Advantage, he talks about this concept called activation energy, which is similar to the whole idea of a pre-commitment. I think activation energy makes your pre-commitment a lot easier, and I'll give this, you know, in terms of the context of a very tactical example. You know, a lot of your writers and content creators, and I wrote a post about how to write a thousand words a day. And this is on Search Engine Journal, you know, and I'll link it for those of you guys listening, but what I found is that if I set up the journaling software the night before, and it's the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, like no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing else, but just the journaling software, writing a thousand words is easy, and it's a very small step, but it's kind of like if you wanted to learn the guitar, if you, he actually talked about this, he said when he kept the guitar in his closet, he couldn't get himself to practice. When he put it right in front of him, it was like this constant reminder that he had to do it. - Yeah, totally. There are actually a couple of fascinating ideas in there, and actually these are two ideas that I talk about in the personal MBA. So the two ideas are structural determination and friction. So structural determination is the idea that the most, or the biggest influence on your behavior each and every day is the environment that surrounds you, right? What is easy or not easy to do in your environment plays the single largest role in determining what it is that you are actually going to do? And so, you know, one of the things that we try to do in this process of learning how to do new things or change behaviors in general is we tend to rely a lot on our willpower to make it happen, right? I'm just gonna decide to do it, and I'm gonna force myself to do it. Your willpower runs out super quick. It really does. It's not a sustainable strategy. It's way more effective to spend just a little bit of willpower altering the structure of your environment to support the behavior, which is exactly what putting the guitar out in an easy place where you're seeing it every day does. You know, the other thing is the whole idea of friction. So like in physics, you know, friction is something that robs energy from a system. The more effort that it takes to get started doing something, the less likely you are to do it, right? And, you know, tons and tons of applications of this in business, right? You know, classic example is one-click purchasing on Amazon, right? They remove the amount of effort it took to buy something, and as a result, sales go up dramatically, right? You can do the same thing for yourself, and you can either do that by making something easier, making something take less steps, or removing things that get in the way of you getting started. So, you know, there's lots of ways to apply both of those principles to skill acquisition in general. Make sure you have the tools at your disposal. Make sure they are in plain sight and easy to see. Make sure that it doesn't take you very much time to get started or jump in. All of those things can make it much, much easier to, after you've made the pre-commitment to practice, can make it much, much easier for you to actually follow through on that. - Awesome. Well, Josh, I want to ask you one other question around the book, and then we'll wrap things up. I want to ask you about the marketing plan for the book. You know, you brought up the email list earlier, but I think you and I both know that publishers don't do anything to market your book that it's all on you with rare exception from what I've heard. - Yeah. - So, what I'm curious about is what's gone into the marketing plan for this. - Yeah, so there's a number of things. Actually, I would say that large publishers in general are good at a very specific type of marketing, which is having their sales force go into large booksellers and have them stock it, which is a form of marketing in itself, and have them display it. So, you know, part of the marketing, as far as Penguin is concerned, is making sure that this book appears on the front table of Barnes and Noble, right after it comes out. And they're doing a really good job of that. There is a combination, at least on my side, what I've found with a lot of experimentation is, you know what moves the most books, believe it or not? - Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch, whatever you're ready. - $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of CD-Tails. - Expand the way you work and think with Claude by Anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with a team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages and solving complex problems. Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. - Discover Hydro, the best kept secret in fitness. Hydro is the state-of-the-art at-home rower that engages 86% of your muscles, delivering the ultimate full-body workout in just 20 minutes. From advanced to beginner, Hydro has over 500 classes, shot worldwide and taught by Olympians and world-class athletes. For a 30-day risk-free trial, go to hydro.com and use code ROW450 to save $450 on a Hydro Pro rower. That's H-Y-D-R-O-W.com code ROW450. - Go ahead. - Blogs and podcasts. - Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. - Always, always. And you know, have a nice AB comparison. So, on two consecutive days, back when the personal MBA paperback came out, I had a feature on a podcast and a mention on the front page of the style section of The New York Times. And you know which one sold more books? - A podcast. - A podcast, by far. And so, what I'm trying to do is make sure, you know, this is a really useful, interesting framework that can help a lot of people. And so, my goal in all of this is to make sure that people who are in a position to benefit from learning new things, which, in my opinion, is pretty much everybody. They know that this framework exists. They know that the book is the best place to get that. And it's presented in a way that encourages them to go out and check it out. And so, I'm spending a lot of time talking to super cool people and having conversations like this. And then, you know, a lot of the things that I'm doing on my end are both trying to continue to reward people who read the first 20 hours by giving lots of bonuses and extras and cool things. Because, you know, to me, a book is not something, if you're going to do it right, a book is not something that you promote for a week, and then it drops off the face of the earth and goes out of print and nobody ever sees it again. And so, you know, my marketing plan for this book is I'm thinking like three, four, five years out from now. And so, you know, one of the things that I'm doing is, actually, if you pre-order or order a copy of the book and you send a receipt to extras@first20hours.com, that's first20hours.com. I'm going to be going to continue researching and producing things for the readers in this book. And so, you know, by doing that, you get access to all of this stuff as I continue to build it, which is cool. The other thing is, and I'm super excited about this because, you know, the online marketing stuff is what the large traditional publishers aren't super good at. But I have quite a bit of experience doing, you know, back in my PNG days and then experimenting on my own. So, a lot of the cool new marketing channels, for the business folks who are listening to this, the two things that I'm looking at most seriously right now is StumbleUpon. There is a way to target people who are interested in specific topics. So, I'm going to be doing a lot of experimentation there. And then email newsletter marketing through a company called Launchbit. And I have the back end, you know, the nice part, one of the things I learned in the writing of the book, one of the skills that I field tested was programming. So, when you send an email to extras@first20hours.com and you receive an email to me that grants you access to the system, I wrote that myself, which is kind of cool. And so, you know, being able to experiment and track and all this stuff, you know, the reality is, I don't know what's going to work. We're going to try a bunch of things and gather data and we'll keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn't. Well, you know, and the reason I ask that question specifically with every author is because I get a very different answer. And I jokingly tell everybody, the reason I also ask that question is because someday I'm going to steal all those ideas when I need to write a book. Yeah, totally. I'm going to basically, I'm going to use everything I've learned, you know, the first 20 hours of learning how to market a book. But, you know, I think I really appreciate what you said about that sort of being a five year out thing because I think that even Carrie Wilkerson, from the Barefoot Executive told me, she said book promotion as a marathon, it's not a sprint. Like, you know, you definitely want to work your tail off in those first few days, but it doesn't end there if you want it to be an evergreen book. Totally. And one of the things that I'm personally most proud about with personal MBA is the book has even been more popular now, two and a half years later than it was when it launched. Awesome. And I'm planning to keep it that way and keep building it. And so, you know, that's the nice part about books and publishing in general is if you do it right and you create something that is valuable to people and will continue to be valuable over time, and you do, you build the marketing in the systems in a way that as the book is successful, that success supports the success in the future, you can do a lot of cool things in publishing still. And, you know, whether you work with a traditional publisher, whether you self publish, there are a lot of really cool opportunities out there. And really, all it takes is spending some time and learning the skills that will help you do these really cool things. Awesome. Well, Josh, I mean, I close up with my final question that I've asked pretty much everybody. And I jokingly always tell people I'm unknowingly doing research for a book by asking this question. Perfect. But, you know, we live in a very interesting world in which we have access to resources like we've never had before. Yes. And I have witnessed things that blow my mind over the last couple of years where, you know, people like you have really, I mean, people have literally created careers for themselves out of thin air for the most part. Like they've created jobs where jobs didn't exist. And I think we're moving towards an era in which that is going to be more and more necessary. You know, James Altridge's next book is called Choose Yourself. Right. So what I'm curious about, based on your experience, you know, having been around the web for as long as you haven't, and probably having seen people come and go, you know, you see people like the Rameet Seth, these of the world, the Danielle Lawrence, the Chris Gillibos. And then you see people who, like people who really achieve at the highest levels, and then you see people who don't quite get to that level of success. And what I'm curious about is what you think distinguishes those two groups of people and, you know, based on your own personal experience, what do you think has allowed you to achieve the level of success that you have? Yeah, I would cite two primary factors. And I think this is pretty universal regardless of the particular person, and regardless of what their audience is or what they're talking about. What I've noticed is that the most, the people who are most successful are the ones who are willing to jump in and get their hands dirty, and build skills that will help them succeed in the long term. Right. And some of those skills may be writing, some of those skills may be starting a website and maintaining it, doing marketing, doing outreach, learning how to write a book, which is way different than learning how to put together a blog, learning how to podcast, learning how to shoot video, learning how to create a course that sells and support it, and, you know, do the systems around that without exception in my mind. The people who are the most successful at this stuff are the ones who spend the time and energy to figure out how it works. And if they don't know how to do those things that are necessary in order to make it, they spend the time and they learn it. And that's the background of all of this crazy, weird stuff that you almost never see publicly. There's a lot of energy and effort that goes into practicing and getting good at things in order to make something cool happen. And so the most successful people are the ones who are spending the most time figuring out how to get the capabilities that will allow them to do things that other people can't do. I think the other thing is there is a certain amount of persistence. There's a certain amount of grit that is absolutely essential if you want to do something cool and interesting in a new way. So, you know, for example, mutual friends with Chris Gillibault, the amount of sheer dogged persistence that that guy has about pretty much everything is amazing. He's been doing this for a very long time. The early parts of that process were not public. And just by virtue of getting up every day and doing one or two or three things to build this thing that you care about. At a certain point, you know, the overnight successes are very, very, very, very much the exception. Usually there's about three, four, five, six, sometimes decades of work in the background that nobody knows about that has allowed the person to build the audience, create the cool thing, build the skills, and do it in a way that is enticing and valuable to people. And so, you know, if you are in the process of building something you really believe in, it's perfectly normal if it starts out small first. I mean, personalmba.com, I think at its height before personalmba started to work, I think it had maybe 20 readers, maybe. But, you know, weird and wonderful things happen when you stick with something and you keep building it over the course of a couple of years. And so, you know, it's kind of like, you know, the old saying, the best time to plan a tree was 10 years ago or 100 years ago. The next best time is now. Getting started and sitting down and doing the work and building the skills. That's the only way you'll get there. And really, if you are building something you're jazzed about, it almost doesn't even count as work. It's really fun. And if you treat the whole process as growing something that's going to be deeply meaningful and help a lot of people, and doing that in a way that is expanding your capabilities as a human being, and maybe at some point you even get paid for doing that, like, holy cow, how cool is that? Awesome. You know, I'll basically finish it up with one comment on that. You know, I think about something that I, a lot. In Scott Belsky's book, Making Ideas Happen, he talks about our traditional reward system and how it conditions us to need immediate rewards for our work. Sure. And that actually makes it difficult to do some of the most interesting work we could possibly doing in that, you know, you're about 10 years. And, you know, a lot of what Chris has experienced. And I think a lot of what any of us have experienced, a lot of that isn't public. Like we only see what we see. Totally. It's very difficult to, you know, realize that, hey, there's an insane amount of work that goes into all of this. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the neat part about, you know, coming out of this really deep research into, into accelerated learning and a rapid skill acquisition, there is nothing in this world that you can't decide to sit down and get better at. Absolutely nothing. You know, a lot of the things like, you know, people sometimes have a tendency to say, well, I'm not good with technology. Your brain is not fundamentally incapable of learning technology things, right? It's just a matter of a little bit of research and practice getting better at it. And so, you know, that's the awesome, optimistic outcome of all of this research. And, you know, if you're interested in learning this, I also recommend it's a book by Carol Dweck called Mindset, which talks a lot about this. There is nothing that your brain is fundamentally incapable of learning. You can decide that something is important to you and you can decide to break it down and sit down and do the work. And if you do the work, you will become very, very good at that thing. It just requires some practice. And it doesn't really take that much to become really, really good. Awesome. Well, Josh, I think that makes a perfect way to sum up our conversation. This has been a very, very eye-opening and insightful look into sort of deconstructing a learning process and really, I'm glad we finally got a chance to chat. Likewise, thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. And we will wrap with that. You've been listening to the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. Visit our website at unmistakablecreative.com and get access to over 400 interviews in our archives. Expand the way you work and think with Claude by Anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with the team, Claude is AI built for you. 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Josh Kauffman is a poster child for how to give yourself an education that kicks the crap out of the one you got in school. Instead of going to business school, he decided to create a Personal MBA. The result has been a book that sold over 130,000 copies, and an incredible journey. In this interview we get into the first 20 hours of learning any new skill.


  • What You Can Learn from the Marketing of Procter and Gamble 
  • Insights into How You Can Conduct Consumer Research
  • The Importance of Rapid Experimentation in Your Early Days
  • The Advantages You Have Over Procter and Gamble
  • Translating Data and Insights into Something Actionable
  • Why You Should Tune Out What Other People Are Doing
  • The Power of Taking a Very Strong Stand on Things
  • Dissecting How to Give Yourself an MBA 
  • An In-Depth Exploration of Self-Directed Learning
  • Deconstructing Things into Smaller Parts
  • The Growth and Many Iterations of the Personal MBA
  • The #1 Mistake You've Heard 1,000 Times 
  • Seeds for What Resulted in the First 20 Hours
  • An In-Depth Look into Josh's Accelerated Learning Model


Josh Kaufman is the bestselling author of The First 20 Hours and The Personal MBA. His work helps people make more money, get more done, and have more fun. You can follow him on twitter @joshkaufman.

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