Hi, I’m Josiah Keller.

This blog tells the story of a journey in rapid skill acquisition. A quest to learn 12 skills in 12 months, practicing a different skill each month, with at least 20 hours on each. That’s just 40 minutes a day!

The idea was first inspired by watching a talk given by Josh Kaufman at a TEDx conference, titled The First 20 Hours. After watching the talk, I then read his book, The First 20 Hours – How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! In the book he goes into a good deal of detail on optimizing your practice, so that it has the greatest result, and goes through six different skills that he learned in the space of about a year.

I began by making a list of all of the skills I would like to acquire, deciding I wanted half to be music related, and half in other fields [Changes in skills since the original plan makes it a 4:8 split, instead of an even 6:6]. I then selected the twelve skills that I was most enthusiastic about, grouped them together when there was some overlap of skill set, and set out to have one amazing year.

The skills:

• January – Piano by Ear
• February – Ukulele
• March – Palmer Method Handwriting
• April – Tap Dancing
• May – Unicycle
• June – Handstands, Cartwheels, and Assorted Gymnastics
• July – French
• August – Sight Singing
• September – Piano Sight Reading
• October – Speed Reading Discontinued
• November – Storytelling Discontinued
• December – Drawing Discontinued

Before beginning each month I’ll set my target performance level, break the skill down into the most important subskills, and start learning!

Buy the book on Amazon:

Josh Kaufman’s talk: