Mike Boyd, How To Learn Any Skill, and the Power of 100 Hours

We promised to send you emails on the science of self-improvement.

This week, we’re sharing what you can learn from Scottish YouTuber Mike Boyd about learning any skill faster and more scientifically. 

Mike is just a regular guy, but over the last few years, he’s learned how to:

• Muscle up

• Solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 2 minutes

• Count cards

• Ski

• Ride a unicycle 

• Pick a lock 

• Spin a book on his finger 

• Kickflip a skateboard

• Break a glass with his voice

On average, Mike was able to learn these skills in 10 hours and 12 minutes—all without having any crazy natural talent in those areas. 

Mike’s secret formula is simple:

He just gets a camera out, starts practicing, and records how many hours he spends on the skill. Once he’s hit a point he’s satisfied with, he goes back over the footage and edits a YouTube video out of it, and figures out exactly how long it took him. 

What has he learned about learning over that time?

Here are 4 lessons on how you can learn any skill faster from a man who’s dedicated years of his life to investigating the science of skill acquisition. . .

(These are direct quotes from Mike that I’ve edited for clarity.)

1. Don’t ask yourself how many years—ask yourself how many hours 

“If you ask someone who's really good at piano, guitar, or golf exactly how long they've been doing it, they will most likely quote you a time in months or years.

And for a beginner, that can be daunting.

That number seems both arbitrary and ambiguous. Did they practice every day? Every second day? How many hours per day did they practice?

So when I heard this guy quote time in hours, it really caught my attention. That was something I was able to wrap my head around much more easily.

Hours.

I know what an hour is. I can do an hour of practice. I can digest that much more easily than six months or three years—those seem like enormous stretches of time.

But hours—hours, I can deal with.

And that's where I hatched the idea for this channel—to practice and learn skills and measure practice not in months, weeks, or years, but in much more discrete intervals like hours.

This concept of measuring practice time in hours rather than weeks completely changed how I think about practice.

It made it tangible, real and achievable.

I could squeeze in half an hour before work, do an hour after work—that's 1.5 hours.

It meant that no matter how bad my practice session was, how crappy I was performing, or how terrible the weather was, I still got a little win.

I did one hour.

And I've been practicing with this mindset ever since.

By breaking practice time into smaller, digestible chunks, it's just way easier to put in the time.

I don't know the psychology behind this, but for me, this really works.

It gets me out of bed, gets me practicing, and it feels good to just check off another hour—another hour’s practice, done.

And that really is the underlying theme of this channel.

Not 10,000 hours.

But rather—what can you achieve in 10 hours?”

Source video: The 10-Hour Rule + a giveaway 

2. Learning can be quick—we often overestimate how long it will take us to learn something, but underestimate the impact of the time we spend preparing for learning 

“When I added up all the time that I spent on the unicycle learning to ride for 30 continuous seconds, it amounted to 2 hours and 38 minutes in the saddle.

I was amazed at just how little time it took me to learn how to do this.

I would try and do 20 minutes before I went to work. This represents the portion of the time that I actually spent on a unicycle, but surrounding that time is all the faffing around required to get me out there—coffee, breakfast, getting dressed, driving to the location, waiting for the weather to improve, wasting time taking breaks, showering, coffee, getting dressed before going to work—it all adds up.

This unaccounted-for time can soon completely dwarf the portion of time I actually spent learning something. What this shows is that learning is actually pretty fast. It's all the other stuff that takes up the time.

So it seems that if you really want to learn something quickly, what's more important than how you practice, where you practice, or your equipment is reducing the time surrounding your actual practice time—weaving it into your routine.

When I learned to spin a basketball, I spent 4 hours and 40 minutes over 10 days learning how to do that, but it felt effortless. It was really woven into my routine. I would spend 5 minutes here and there—between emails, working on other videos, watching TV—and just take 5 minutes to spin the basketball. The excess time surrounding the task at hand was effectively reduced to zero, and it felt like I learned it much quicker.

I'm not special. I'm not particularly smart. I'm not talented. Learning just doesn't take as much time as people think. If you can somehow find a way to strip out all that excess time surrounding the thing that you're learning, you will be amazed at just how little time is actually required for you to pick it up.”

Source video: Why Learning is Quicker Than You Think It Is

3. There’s a process you can follow to learn skills faster 

“Acquiring new talents and growing my skill set is one of the most fulfilling things I've done with my time.

And after 25 novel abilities gained over two years’ worth of videos, I’ve picked up a few tips along the way to help make the learning process smoother.

Tip #1: Set a Clear, Concise, Objective

Without a goal, you can’t score. And no one wants to ‘kind of’ learn something—so create an unambiguous milestone.

“30 seconds of continuous spinning.”

“I’m trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube in under two minutes.”

“How long will it take me to ride this thing for 50 meters without falling?”

Say it to a camera. Write it down. Tell someone your plans.

Make it tangible, real, and concrete.

Tip #2: Keep Learning Sessions Short—20 to 40 Minutes

I feel this is the best window for pure learning before fatigue sets in, both physically and mentally. Try and do two sessions a day with a break in between.

Work full-time? Wake up earlier.

Tip #3: Break Learning Into Smaller Chunks

This seems obvious, but I surprise myself with how often I just try to do it all at once.

It doesn’t have to be complex—just split what you are trying to do into discrete components and work on one at a time, with the aim of eventually putting it all together.

For example, learning muscle-ups:

First, pull-ups.

Then dips.

Then technique.

Then strength training.

Finally, put it all together.

Tip #4: Stay Hydrated

Nothing kills a learning session faster than dehydration.

I find this is the one thing that stops learning dead—even more than lack of sleep or hunger.

Get a water bottle.

Tip #5: Celebrate Your Success

This is the most important tip of all—the driving force behind everything I do.

The fix I am always searching for.

Celebrate your success.

Any little sliver of triumph—celebrate it.

Get excited. Get pumped. Embrace that dopamine hit.

You deserve it. You learned something.”

Source video: How to Learn Anything Quickly

4. The power of 100 hours

This isn’t something Mike has specifically talked about, but while watching his content we were reminded of something we’ve often thought about…

Most people probably wildly underestimate just how good they can get at something with 100 hours of deliberate practice. 

On one hand, 100 hours is not that long. Compared to the popular ‘10,000-hour rule’, 100 hours is just 1% of that. If you practiced something for an hour a day, you’d hit 100 hours in just over 3 months. 

(If that sounds unrealistic, consider this: according to Netflix's third-quarter earnings report in October 2024, subscribers spend an average of two hours daily on the platform, which adds up to 100 hours in just 50 days.) 

But spending 100 hours on any skill or topic will likely catapult you into the top 10% of that group. 

Example:

I (Benji) have always been able to swim breaststroke but I decided to learn how to swim front crawl last year—starting from pretty much zero ability to do so. It took about 16 hours of training before I could swim a mile straight, which probably put me in the top 10% of the population for swimming ability. 

My baseline fitness level was probably pretty decent already but it definitely wasn’t anything crazy, so I make this point not to brag but to demonstrate how big of a difference just spending any time on something makes. 

There’s a concept we often think about called ‘beginner gains’ which perfectly explains why 100 hours can be so transformative.

In the early stages of learning a skill, progress comes shockingly fast because of neuromuscular adaptation, improved efficiency, and an untrained body or mind’s high responsiveness to new stimuli. Whether it’s strength training, swimming, language learning, or even juggling, the first chunk of hours delivers outsized results compared to the diminishing returns that come later.

That’s why 100 hours, though seemingly small compared to the legendary 10,000-hour rule, can take you from a total beginner to better than 90% of people—because most people never get past those first frustrating hours.

This is something we want to spend much more time investigating and writing about, but we’ll end this email here for now. 

We hope you enjoyed learning these four lessons on learning any skill from Mike Boyd. 

(We recommend giving his channel a watch if you find this kind of thing as interesting as we do!)

Until next week, 

Benji and Jacob

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