Deconstruct and Prioritise the Sub-Skills
Break the big skill apart and practise the pieces you'll use most.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
This framework takes a big, intimidating skill and splits it into its component sub-skills, then focuses practice on the ones used most. Kaufman uses golf — driving off the tee and putting on the green are entirely different movements — to show most skills are collections, not single things. Because some sub-skills appear far more often, practising those first gives the best improvement for the overall skill. It's the 80/20 principle and the 'critical few' applied to learning.
Origin
Deconstruction is steps one and two of Kaufman's rapid skill acquisition method, refined across his own experiments. He connects it to widely known ideas — the 80/20 principle and the critical few — that all point to concentrating effort on the small bundle of components that matter most.
Core principles
- 01Most skills are bundles of smaller sub-skills performed together.
- 02Some sub-skills are used far more often than others.
- 03Practising the highest-frequency sub-skills first maximises improvement in the whole skill.
- 04A small, critical few components drive most of the useful performance.
How to run it
- 1
Break the skill into sub-skills
Analyse the skill to see whether you're doing one thing repeatedly or performing several distinct sub-parts, and list them out.
Pro tip Think of golf: driving and putting are separate skills that happen to share a game.
- 2
Find the high-frequency components
Determine which sub-skills are used most often, because those give the greatest return on practice for the whole skill.
Pro tip A little targeted research surfaces the critical few quickly.
- 3
Practise the critical few first
Front-load practice on the most-used sub-skills to make your early hours maximally effective and efficient.
Pro tip Skip trying to learn every possible component — chase the pieces that level you up fastest.
In the wild
In his TED talk Kaufman showed that a handful of core chords appear in nearly every song, so he learned those first instead of every possible chord.
→ He could play a wide range of songs quickly by mastering the small set of highest-frequency chords.
Common mistakes
Treating a composite skill as one thing
Attacking the whole skill at once ignores that it's made of separable sub-skills, some far more valuable to practise than others.
Practising low-frequency components first
Spending early hours on rarely-used sub-skills wastes the highest-leverage practice window.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone learning a composite skill who wants the fastest path to visible competence.
Not ideal for
Simple, single-motion skills with no meaningful sub-components to separate.
From the transcript
“many skills are actually bundles of smaller sub skills that you're doing together”
“you practice the sub skills that you're going to be using the most first because that's going to give you the best improvement for the…”
From the episode
Josh Kaufman Teaches How to Acquire Any Skill in Just 20 Hours