A few weeks ago, when I realized lockdowns and stay-at-home orders would probably continue for a while, I decided to spend some of my lockdown time learning a new skill, with the additional goal of becoming a better learner in the process. By observing myself learning a new skill, I hoped to discover more about how I learn, and find ways to improve my ability to learn new things in the future. With these goals in mind, I came up with many candidate skills, including learning a language, an instrument, a new programming language, even mixology – and after much deliberation, I eventually decided to learn to juggle.

Juggling seemed like the ideal skill for the lockdown: I could learn it in the comfort of my own home using equipment I already owned (a few tennis balls). Additionally, its simplicity made it a great subject for my first foray into meta-learning, the culmination of which is this article.

Without further ado, here are the six most important things I learned about learning while learning how to juggle:

#1. It’s Probably Easier Than You Think

One of the hardest things about learning something new is convincing yourself to get started. It’s easy to come up with reasons not to start – it’ll be too difficult, take too much time, and you’re not talented enough. To overcome these excuses, take a minute to realize: it will probably be easier than you think.

In one attempt to convince myself that I couldn’t learn to juggle, I ended up searching for the percentage of people who can juggle. To my surprise, I found surveys showing that around 20% of people know how to juggle 3 balls. If millions of regular people around the world have learned how to juggle, it couldn’t possibly be as hard as I had convinced myself it would be. Knowing would probably be easier than I thought, I finally got started. It was indeed much easier to learn than I could have imagined – around an hour after deciding to start, I was able to juggle a 3-ball cascade for around 15 throws.

So, if you’re convinced you don’t have what it takes to learn something you’re interested in, realize, like I did, that it will probably be easier than you think. Most skills or topics have been learned by thousands, or even millions of people who started from exactly where you are. If they could learn it, so can you.

#2. Embrace the Momentum

Once you’ve started, it’s important to leverage the excitement from each small accomplishment as motivation to work towards your next accomplishment. At the start, pick a small but meaningful milestone, and focus. Once you’ve accomplished your first milestone, pick something a little more challenging, and use the excitement from completing the first milestone to fuel your efforts towards your next milestone. You’ll be surprised how far you can go using this mechanism alone.

Juggling is full of small milestones. Early on, every additional throw felt like a great achievement. The momentum from making 3 successful throws quickly built into 5, then 10, then 20. After 50 throws in a row, the milestones became more complex – learning specific tricks, juggling while walking, juggling 2 balls, etc. – each milestone providing momentum for the next. After finding the motivation to start, I was able to ride the momentum of each accomplishment through multiple practice sessions.

#3. Feedback is Essential

As the momentum grows and you begin to take on more challenging milestones, you’ll inevitably want to speed up your learning. I believe the most important factor in speeding up learning is feedback, which is essential not only for learning, but for all improvement. Without ample feedback, we must simply dead reckon towards our goals, with no way to tell if our actions bring us closer to or further from them. The stronger the feedback, the more quickly we can adjust and the more quickly we can learn. The most powerful feedback mechanisms have at least these three characteristics:

Strong signal: it’s clear when you did something right/wrong Strong connection: based on the signal, you can easily form a hypothesis of what you did right/wrong Simple verification: it’s easy to test your hypotheses in a repeatable way Juggling has an extremely powerful feedback mechanism: if the balls hit the ground, you did something wrong. Usually the mistake occurs within seconds before the ball is dropped, leaving little room for red herrings. A few seconds later, the ball has been picked up and you’re trying again – with a little more knowledge about what not to do. This is the tightest feedback loop I’ve ever experienced, and I’m convinced this is the central reason I was able to pick up juggling so quickly.

Contrast this feedback mechanism with a similar one from surfing: if you fall off the board, you did something wrong. This is also very powerful feedback, and it sometimes even comes with some strong negative reinforcement – you take a gulp of saltwater or get hit by a large wave. But despite the strong reinforcement, I would argue that this feedback mechanism is not as effective as dropping a ball in juggling. When you fall off the board, the mistake may have occurred early in the run – for example, your feet were planted wrong initially, so you fell off 10 seconds later. Thus, it’s difficult to pinpoint which of many actions was the real mistake. Additionally, it is very difficult to test your hypotheses – you must swim out, wait for a wave, get back on your board, and finally try to recreate the situation you were in before.

So, to accelerate learning, you should find or construct strong feedback mechanisms. If you’re lacking a strong signal, create tests or challenges which have a clear outcome. If you’re missing a strong connection, try using video to more easily find errors, or hire a coach or teacher with greater knowledge of the common causes of specific classes of errors. And if verification is where your feedback mechanism is lacking, try simplifying your scenario. For example, you could use an artificial wave to decrease the effort required to test your surfing hypotheses. Whatever you’re learning, I’m convinced you can greatly accelerate your learning by intelligently selecting your feedback mechanism to be more like juggling and less like surfing.

#4. Timing is Everything

OK – maybe it’s not everything, but timing is still quite important. The wrong timing can impair learning, and the right timing can drastically accelerate learning. Suppose you had a long, hard day at work and your brain is exhausted – maybe now is not the time to start learning quantum physics. Perhaps it would be better to wait until the morning when your mind will be fresh. Or suppose you did yard work all day and your hands and arms are tired – maybe now is not the best time to begin learning how to draw. Of course, you eventually want to reach a level of proficiency that you can succeed despite such timing issues, but when starting to learn something you should take every advantage you can get.

Due to the strength of the feedback mechanism described above, I was able to notice stark differences in my juggling abilities based on timing. For example, one evening I was making great progress on learning some new tricks, but I decided to stop and do some strength training. When I returned after my workout, I could hardly juggle at all – let alone learn new tricks. I tried and tried, but I didn’t come close to learning the tricks. But when I tried again the next day and was able to learn those same tricks in about 15 minutes, I realized all the time I spent failing the night before probably should have been spent succeeding at something else more suited to the time.

But don’t let finding the “perfect” time to learn something stop you from learning that thing – that “perfect” time will never come. There will always be something happening in your life, some excuse to wait another day. But if you don’t use timing as an excuse and instead use it as a pragmatic tool, you can greatly speed up the learning process. So be mindful of how timing affects your learning and plan your learning schedule accordingly.

#5. Pursuit > Possession

It’s amazing how quickly something that was once exciting can become monotonous. Some things are simply not worth doing for doing’s sake – and yet learning to do those same things can be very exciting. There’s something inherently fun about learning new things and reaching new milestones, even if the underlying activity isn’t fun.

On my first day of juggling, every successful throw was exhilarating; but only a few days later, the normal three-ball cascade had gotten quite boring. So I learned new tricks, which were again exciting for a while but now have also fallen towards monotony. I’ve come to the conclusion that juggling for the sake of juggling is actually pretty boring – but learning to juggle has been extremely fun. The pursuit of new juggling skills has been much more fun than possessing those skills afterwards.

Thus, pursuit is sometimes greater than possession. So if there’s something you need to do but don’t necessarily enjoy doing, try reframing it into a pursuit. Set goals and milestones, and draw your enjoyment from their pursuit and attainment rather than the activity itself.

#6. The 10 Hour Rule

The 10,000 Hour Rule – made popular in Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers – states that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are needed to become world-class in any field. As you can probably guess based on the title of the book, Gladwell was interested in what makes someone an outlier within their main field, which requires true expertise. But how often do you require real expertise in life, outside of your main field? For most other things, it’s enough to simply be proficient. Do you need to be an expert chef to make learning to cook worthwhile, or is there some earlier level of proficiency that would be sufficient? If you’re learning a language, do you really need to be the best speaker of that language in the world, or is it enough to simply be able to communicate with another person who doesn’t speak your native language?

With this in mind, I’d like to present the 10 Hour Rule, which is: 10 hours of deliberate practice can be enough to become proficient in some fields / skills. This is definitely the case with juggling – I’ve spent less than 10 total hours in deliberate juggling practice, and I can now easily juggle a 3-ball cascade for hundreds of throws. In addition, although I learned as a kid, I believe most adults could learn to unicycle in less than 10 hours of deliberate practice. Now that I know how to juggle, I plan to combine these skills and learn to juggle while unicycling, which I assume will take another ~10 hours. I haven’t yet found statistics on this, but if 20% of people know how to juggle and less than 1% of people know how to unicycle, then being able to combine the two skills clearly must be rare. So it’s possible to become proficient in two new skills and become one of the few people who can combine them, all in less than 30 hours of deliberate practice. 10,000 hours my ass!

Don’t let the fact that it can take 10,000 hours to become an expert stop you from learning something you want to learn. You don’t need to be an expert in everything, and proficiency can come in as little as 10 hours.

So get out there and learn something! It’ll probably be easier than you think.