TEDx Talk: The first 20 hours - how to learn anything Today I found a pretty interesting TEDx Talk on youtube. It's about how to learn anything. Maybe you want to play ukulele, to drive, to draw, or to learn a language (which, I guess, is why we're all here :) ). The speaker said that to go from knowing absolutely nothing to being pretty good at whatever you're practising, it takes about 20 hours in that process. (That's quite reassuring.) And another point he made, which I find particularly interesting, is that a great barrier to learning probably isn't how clever or smart we are, but rather it's how we feel. When we start learning something, we feel stupid. We feel bad. We feel terrible. And if we think about it, those negative emotions do nothing but stopping us from growing. Sometimes it's no one but ourselves that stop us from being a better person. If we change what we say to ourselves, well I guess, we could do anything we hope to be able to do :) (In case anyone's interested, here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY)