So, Malcolm Gladwell suggested in his Outliers book that it takes something like 10000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert at any field. But then along comes this guy - Josh Kaufman and says that's too long - WAY too long! Kaufman is not so much interested in becoming an expert, rather, he wants to be able to learn things to a pretty good level of proficiency - and he found that you can pretty much learn any skill pretty good if you follow these four steps...
- Deconstruct the skill - figure out what the central skill is that you want to be able to do and what are the sub-skills that make up that central skill - then practice the most important sub-skills first.
- Learn enough to self-correct - you don't have to learn everything about your domain of practice - just learn enough to be able to tell if you are on the right track (leading toward the central skill) or the wrong track.
- Remove practice barriers - like procrastination and scope growth and feeling like an idiot
- Practice for at least 20 hours
So, if we were to apply this to learning aikido...
- What is the central skill in aikido that we should be working toward?
- How much of which sub-skills would we need just to be self-correcting?
Want to discuss this blog post?
Come find me on Facebook at my Mokuren Dojo FB group
____________________
Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com
