Sixteen hours per week of deliberate practice

I have been reading and watching a lot of the late Charles Poliquin this week. In a video this morning, he talked about the amount of learning you need to do to be world-class at what you do:

Eight hours per week is the minimum you need to learn… The people that make the most money in their profession learn sixteen hours a week… The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know.
Charles Poliquin

Charles Poliquin was well-read and based all his recommendations on expert knowledge, so I spent some time looking for this recommendation’s origin. I returned to the ‘Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance‘ paper by K. Anders Ericsson to see how these recommendations for developing masters compare. The article presents research from multiple sources that it takes ten years or more of necessary experience to develop the skills to produce outstanding work at a world-class level. This practice should be time-limited at 2-4 hours per day, every day, for many years. This recommendation was present in research on experts from chess, musical composition, mathematics, tennis, swimming, long-distance running, scientists, authors, and poets.

The average age of the first published works was 25.2 for scientists, and 24.2 for authors and poets and the average age at which they published their most remarkable work was 35.4 for scientists and 34.3 for authors and poets. There was an average of more than ten years between the scientist and authors first work and their best without considering the time it took learning and writing to get to the first publication. The highest performance levels were not attained just by years of experience but by deliberate efforts to improve slowly over a very long time.

Deliberate practice is a set of activities that are most effective in improving performance. It requires the motivation to do the task and effort to improve performance. These activities are repeated consistently with slight variation and should provide immediate informative feedback. The idea of deliberate practice in developing scientists and artists is very similar to athletes and musicians’ development. This development involves years of intensive preparation under an expert teacher, total emersion in the field, and most importantly, identifying the most likely activities to result in the desired achievements.

When looking at scientists, the highest performing are also those who produce a larger number of publications than others in their field. This would suggest that writing to develop arguments would be the deliberate practice that helps them develop a new published theory or idea. Writing is a demanding activity; most world-class scientists stick to a rigid daily schedule that involves writing as the first significant activity of each morning and is time blocked to 1-2 hours, leaving the rest of the day to other work.

In virtually all domains, there is evidence that the most important activity – practice, thinking, or writing- requires considerable effort and is scheduled for a fixed period of time during the day. For those exceptional individuals who sustain this regular activity for months and years, its duration limited to 2-4 hours a day, which is a fraction of their time awake.
K. Anders Ericsson

Two to four hours per working day would be equal to ten to twenty hours per week. To hit Charles Poliquin’s sixteen hours of learning per week target, we would require just over three hours of learning or around 40% of a typical eight-hour working day. The question then is, what is a Learning Designer’s deliberate practice that will allow them to become world-class, and how do I provide an environment to help Learning Designers do this deliberate practice to gain mastery?

The length of time between each iteration of a course makes the day to day work of a Learning Designer unsuitable as deliberate practice, so I need to find something more immediate. My wife is launching a company and becoming active on social media to market the brand. The kinds of skills she is learning are very similar to those that make an excellent Learning Designer—developing Learning Designers as Youtubers might be an effective strategy. Youtubers produce regular video content that is published, continually work to improve all aspects of quality, operate on social media and interacting with viewers to drive traffic to their youtube site, and using the analytics tools to track activity and inform future content. This might be a crazy idea, but it might just work.

Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for two years

Many people have predicted that the future of work is in portfolio jobs made up of multiple income streams, including online courses. This week YouTuber and Junior Doctor, Ali Abdaal released his 2020 income that gives information on what that portfolio might look like and how someone might get there. Ali’s income revolves around his Youtube channel, which currently has 1.3 million subscribers.

Ali Abdaal’s 2020 Revenue – £1,013,000

A full-time job as a doctor £22,100 (First seven months of the year only)
Youtube Adsense £100,695
Affiliates £132,471
Sponsors £136,000
Skills share courses including affiliate links £350,000
Online Part-time YouTuber Academy course £220,000
Alumni inner circle membership £53,000

The online part-time Youtuber Academy course and Alumni Inner circle membership

Ali recently launched his first online cohort-based course. The course lasts four weeks and starts at $1495 for the Essential Edition. Premium and Executive editions cost $2495 and $4995 and provide additional features including lifetime access to future courses and further access to Ali and his team. The course’s first cohort had three hundred and sixty students enrol for a total income of £220,000. Ali chose to charge this amount to provide a premium service that would deliver meaningful change in his students. In the video, he explains that people need accountability and community to help them learn from a course in today’s world of unlimited online content. By charging a significant fee for a four-week part-time academy, he can get heavily involved. He delivers sessions live, provides access to himself and his team, and can do much more to help his students make it as creative entrepreneur’s on YouTuber.

If you build an audience over a long period of time who, know, like, and, trust you, then when you start charging real money for a product which is actually good, people will be happy to pay that money and pay for access to you.
Ali Abdaal

The course was so successful that the students asked for ongoing access to the community and Ali. An impressive one hundred and twenty-four students (34% progression rate) have signed up for membership of the Alumni inner circle service. Features of the Inner circle include a monthly coaching call with Ali, guest workshops, additional content, and weekly and daily events.

This idea of building a following via YouTube and social media and then providing access to you via an online course is an interesting one compared to the University model. Large institutions leverage their longstanding reputations and Government protection to attract students and charge them significant amounts of money to provide them with the content, accountability, and community Ali refers to. Courses like this one are beginning to develop sophisticated delivery models and provide motivated students with the skills they require to succeed at work. Will we start to see academics pursuing a portfolio job, working part-time for Universities while building a YouTube follow that they then use to deliver courses directly to students?

Building a portfolio job

Most of us rely almost entirely on a single source of income. This should scare us more than it does. For several years, Ali has asked his coworkers if they would continue to work in medicine if they won the lottery. Half respond they would leave immediately, and the other half say they would go part-time. When asked why they do not become part-time now, the answer is usually related to money. The video gives some useful advice for anyone wanting to start becoming a creative entrepreneur and making some, or all, of their living from the internet.

…If you want to seriously want to get to this level…of making money online, you have to put in large amounts of work over a very long period of time. But the good news is that all of this is really, really fun so it won’t feel like work hopefully.
Ali Abdaal

Ali’s full-time job is a tiny fraction of his full income, and he can hire two full-time employees and another part-time to help run it. He notes that all his various income streams result from posting useful videos to his YouTube channel, twice per week for the last three and a half years.

Like every good thing in life, the progress is slow, but if you keep at it consistently over a very long period of time, then hopefully things will start to compound.
Ali Abdaal

Google Adsense income from short video adverts and banner ads on Ali’s YoutTube videos. Monetising a YouTube channel through Adsence requires a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. He provides the annual growth of this income:

2017 – 59 videos – 1,600 subs – £0
2018 – 88 videos – 120k subs – £12,329
2019 – 62 videos – 450k subs – £33,186
2020 – 98 videos (307 total) – 1.3M subs – £100,695

Once the channel grew and the subscriptions and watch time increased, affiliates through Amazon affiliate links and similar, and sponsorship income started to grow. Again, Ali stresses that this income relies on the success of the YouTube channel. Ali also introduced several Skillshare courses in areas including productivity and study skills that are currently his highest income stream but rely on a massive scale driven by his YouTube channel’s popularity.

Success = work x luck x unfair advantage.

Work in this equation involves consistently publishing content that is as useful as possible. Ali mentions that he is routinely spending upwards of six hours per night, developing his skills, researching, and producing content and has been for the last fourteen years. The luck is the type that comes from putting lots of work to take advantage of the opportunities when they arise. This luck includes the YouTube algorithm. Most of his videos get viewing figures around 20% of his subscription numbers, but his videos’ small fraction will often earn significantly more views. The challenge is there is no knowing which videos will go viral and which will get baseline figures. Unfair advantages are the things that you bring to the table that others can’t. Ali provides the example of when he started making videos and was studying medicine at Cambridge University. He used being a trainee doctor and Cambridge University’s reputation to attract people to his channel before proving himself as an individual. He made videos that played off these two elements to build his early subscriptions. Ali suggests that any new YouTuber works from their unfair advantages to help get their first views and subscribers.

So the challenge for any aspiring YouTuber: Make useful videos, publish them once or twice per week, and do this for at least two years, and you will get success.

Watch the full video on YouTube and subscribe to Ali Abdaal’s channel. Get in touch with me on Twitter to let me know what you think.

Recording high production value Youtube videos

It is possible to get started making youtube videos with just an iPhone, webcam, or an entry-level DSLR. This post is going to cover the equipment needed to produce YouTuber style videos with good production value.

The best camera is the one that’s with you.
Chase Jarvis

There several things that you will want to get right before investing in expensive gear and most of them will take time and skill but little or no money. The first is quality content, you can have high production value, but if your content is weak, then it will be a waste of time. You can’t polish a turd as they say. People will forgive low-quality video, but they cannot ignore low audio quality. Find a quiet place to film, make sure that the mic is not picking up any external noises, and remember the closer the mic is to your mouth, the better the quality will be. Finally, plan your background.

In photography, the term framing refers to how you design what is in the picture. You will notice that academics usually have a bookcase in the frame to infer that they smart, or there might be some plants and exciting objects on a bookcase in the background to set a scene. However you frame your shot, make sure no lines coming out of the back of your head and google the rule of thirds to understand you to position a portrait.

An important point to make is that whatever camera you use will have different resolution settings make sure you set these up to record in the quality you want. An excellent place to start is with a 4K resolution, a framerate of 25fps, shutter speed 1/50, a 1.8 aperture (this will depend on your lens), and a 160 ISO for a cinematic look with a slight blur to the background. You can set up the white balance and picture profile too but read up on the camera you have to get the best quality you can out of it.

The Camera

There are many high-quality cameras targeted at youtube content creators; Sony’s Alpha 7C, the upgrade to the popular Sony A7iii is an excellent choice if you have the budget. Sony has added a rotating monitor and updated the autofocus specifically for video creators. The addition of a Sony 35mm F/1.8 or 25mm F/18 G-Master lenses works well for talking head videos. A quality tripod that can handle the weight of the camera and allow a variety of positions is a good idea. For audio, the ECM B1M mic that connects to the camera via the flash adapter or lapel mic will work, and for lighting an Aperture 120dII with the light dome II softbox will create soft light.

To edit your videos, I suggest Premier pro and access to a stock video library such as storyblocks. A couple of 4+ TB solid-state hard drives will keep everything backed up and be fast enough to edit some video directly off it. However, it is a good idea to have the video stored on your computer during editing to make sure it can be accessed without any lag.

Good luck and let me know on Twitter if you select this gear or an alternative.