The Inspiration
In the book The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman argues that the 10000 hour rule only applies to becoming a world class expert and about 20 hours is all that is needed to become “good enough” at most hobbies or professional skills.
Why 21 Days?
The goal of any sprint shouldn’t be mastery. It should be functional fluency. Becoming good enough to use the new skill to create something and overcome barriers that may come up along the way.
I for one don’t have a long attention span for learning new things and like to jump from topic-to-topic. 21 days timebounds me to 21 days of concentration on a subject. It’s short enough that it’s not a burden to maintain but long enough to overcome the learning curve of a new topic.
The 4-Phases of a 21 Day Sprint
21 Day sprints are split into 4-phases leading from no knowledge through the intial struggle and frustration of early competency, seeing things start to become easier, and then ultimately a refined skill with a tangible outcome.
Phase 1: Prep Day
Prep day is the only 1 day phase and it is the only day that should take longer than an hour. Phase 1, Prep Day, Day 1, whatever you want to call it should take somewhere between 1 to 3 hours to complete. Do not let research become a procrastination technique.
Phase 1 consists of the following steps:
- Pick your poison: Determine which new skill you want to spend the next 20 days learning.
- Define the essence: Identify the 20% of the skill that produces 80% of results
- Name the prize: Make sure the sprint ends with a tangible output, not just “knowledge acquired.”
- Clear the deck: Gather the tools required and remove potential distractions or barriers.
- Burn the ships Formalize your committment by writing “I will spend 60 minutes a day for the next 20 days working towards
so I can learn .
Phase 2: The Struggle
The Struggle typically takes place from days 2 through 6 (hours 1 through 5 of learning). During this phase you will feel clumsy, slow, and likely get frustrated. Thats is fine. Just don’t give up. This frustration barrier is where your brain is building the neural pathways needed to perform the new skill.
Phase 3: The Breakthough
Days 7 through 14 (hours 6 - 13) are The Breakthrough. This is where you start to see results. Your movements become smoother, things just start to click, and you are making fewer mistakes.
Phase 4: The Shine
Days 15 - 21 (hours 14 - 20) are The Shine. The Shine is where you are really refining your newly learned skill and the who process becomes enjoyable.
The Long Game
This site is a collect of 21 Day Sprints. Some sprints will be technical in nature like Learning Laravel by creating a Multi-Tenant CMS and others will be purely for the thrill of a hobby like learning gold farming techniques in World of Warcraft by attaining 10 million gold on a single charcter.
The goal here is not to become a world-class master of anything, but to attain functional fluency through 21 days of focused intent one topic at a time. The idea is to stop being a consumer and start being a producer.
Ready to see it in action? Check out some sprints here.