TokageStudies

“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.” – Anthony J. D’Angelo

  Why I bought this book:

           We have all wanted to learn a new skill, whether it is learning a new language, perform a new yoga pose, or trying to make a new dish for dinner. Learning a new skill takes time, which for a lot of us we do not have a lot to spare. But what if we did not need as much time as you thought? Must people believe you need hours a day to practice a skill when you just need 1 hour maybe 2 if you have the time to spare of course. Also, you do not need to log over 10,000 hours to say you know a skill, we are not trying to compete in the NBA or any competitive sport we just want to get better at something we enjoy that is it. Which means we need less time logged than competitive professionals, we just want to increase our success rate for combos in Guilty Gear Strive or improve our aim in Apex legends. After reading The First 20 Hours I have decided to use its skill acquisition process to learn and improve my skills.

 The New Information I Needed to Hear:

           Time is the most important thing we have and managing it, so we do not waste any of it, sadly we do not get a lot of time to learn all the skills we want to learn. We have work, cleaning, eating if we care time to go to the gym. Sometimes we are lucky to just have sit down time let alone time to learn a new skill. So, when you have the time to learn something you may be tempted to learn as many skills as possible in one sitting. It makes since, right? You want to learn a bunch of skills, so you need to practice them as much as possible, so when you finish one practice session of a skill you start the next one and the one after so on and so on. We all wanted to try and learn several skills one after another in a day to maximize your time, sadly that is not a proper way to gain a new skill. If we want to gain new skills, we must do it one at a time meaning we can not move on to another skill till we learn the current one to a desired performance level. It sucks but it must be done this way to make sure our learning holds a lot easier, I noticed that when I try to learn multiple things that have relation to one another I have a harder time remembering what I learned from each subject. To prevent this going forward I will only learn one skill at a time till my time limit is up or I hit the desired results.

 The Lists Needed to Acquire a Skill:

           In this book the author crested two list, one was called “the ten principles of rapid skill acquisition,” and the other was “the ten principles of effective learning.” I will not list the entirety of both list for two reasons, the first begin I will be using the list in future posts so I can use that time to explain what each one is and does then. The second reason begin that I will not use each principle on the list to achieve my goal, the author even states this in the book, depending on the skill some of the principles will not be needed. So, I will give a light summary of what to expect when using these lists two list. The skill acquisition list is mainly used for deciding on what skill you want to learn and then go about setting the right environment for you to learn, this is just a check list to make you have everything you need, and the time needed to practice your craft. The effective learning list will be used to learn everything you can about your skill, the author says himself to get lost in the information, learn as much as you can to get as much info as possible. Part of the list is literally get lost in information, this is list is about setting up expectations for where you want to, will be, and should be at once you are done with your full practice session. These lists will be the foundation for learning new skills and allow me to make progress in what I am trying to improve in.

 Time to Get to Work:

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it burned in one”

 You hear enemy footsteps running up the stairs. You throw an arc star to slow them down so you can round the corner for cover. The grenade goes off without hitting them and the enemy floods into room, guns ready. You draw your gun and aim down the sights to take out The Lifeline, but you miss all but one bullet. So, in hopes of knocking them, you switch to your second gun and land two bullets out the entire clip before the enemy, Octane, shows up to help The Lifeline finish you off. Being unable to aim or hit our targets is not an uncommon problem. This is a problem that I deal with a lot, and even though I hit my targets occasionally, I can never seem to finish the job. So, to fix this problem, I came up with my own training routine to improve my aim and hopefully in time, I can improve my aiming skill to that of a pro, if I am lucky.

 Mouse Settings:

The first thing that I need to adjust before anything else is the mouse settings such as the dpi and the sensitivity. I already settled on having a dpi of 800 and a sensitivity of 1.7. The reason for these settings is that this is what allows me to get a 360 degree turn from one solid movement from my mouse. This will change from person to person depending on your mouse movement style (wrist or arm) and the amount of space on your desk.

  Aim types:

So, the two types of aim styles we will practice is tracking and flicking. These two are the main types of aiming. Tracking is just following your target while shooting and also landing your shoots in the process (that last part is important). Flicking is going from the middle of your screen and snapping to an enemy target as fast as you can while making your crosshair land on your target. Now in order to practice these styles, we are going to start up the program called Kovaaks Aim Trainer and use its new mode called trainer. In this mode, we will be practicing both flicking and tracking, and they have a skill progression system already setup for each style that works differently from each other as well.

 Progression in trainer:

So, tracking has a rank progression (the better you do in a level the harder it gets), and an adaptive progression for flicking (it will allow you to progress after you cover your weaknesses). Now in order to make the most of these scenarios I need to set goals. These goals are simple and straight forward with how they are set up. The goal for tracking will be to get to diamond before I get to the next stage. With diamond being the highest rank and the difficulty changing mid-practice, getting to diamond will allow me to get the most out of each stage rather than just playing to completion. Now the flicking course will have a very different requirement for advancing. As I said before, the flicking course has an adaptive progression system. This means it will advance you if there are no weaknesses in your training. If it detects any problems, for instance you are having a harder time hitting targets in the lower hand side of the screen when the session is over, it will tell you and ask if you would like to make changes according to its findings in order to help you improve. Now you can choose to not make the changes needed for you to improve but then what is the point of doing this if you reject the changes? This system is setup to practice all your weak points before letting you progress on to the next level, making sure you are ready to move on.  

 Training Regiment:

Now for me to get the most out of all of this, I need to set out some time in order to practice these two training methods. After I spent some time on google looking for a good range of practice, I have made a decision. In total, I will practice for an hour with each mode getting 30 minutes each. The reason for this time is that after my research, I found that 1- 2 hours are the time you should shoot for when practicing. The reason for this is that after the 2 hours mark, the benefits of practice start to decline and becomes completely useless at the 4-hour mark when done continuously. There is nothing saying I cannot do more after about 15 – 30 mins of rest but I should still leave room for other things to practice.

 Expectations: