How to Master Any Skill by Deconstructing It

Skill Development Expert Profile — Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss is a prolific self-experimenter who calls himself the human guinea pig. His fascination with learning skills is extensive, and he has developed a specific method to increase the rate of learning, to make time to learn more skills.

Some of his achievements include going to the semi-finals in the world championships of tango, having a podcast with over 400 million downloads, and he’s the best-selling author of books such as The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Chef and Tribe of Mentors.

Tim focuses on how we can copy the world’s fastest learners, and with a framework he describes as optimal minimalism, his goal is to help people learn new skills as quickly as possible. His primary focus is on the first phase of the learning process, bringing people from beginners to intermediate performers. This is where you can make the fastest progress when learning skills.

But he also claims that it’s possible to go from beginner to world-class in 6–12 months (the only issue is that he defines world-class as the top 5–10% of the general population, which probably wouldn’t be my definition of world-class.) But, it’s certainly possible to improve very fast if you follow his guidelines.

DiSSS Method

To improve skill learning, Tim has come up with the DiSSS method, a framework that can be applied to anything from language learning to sports. DiSSS stands for Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing and Stakes. The overlying principle is to simplify and remove unnecessary obstacles, to improve a skill as fast as possible.

Deconstruction

To deconstruct a skill means to break it down into smaller pieces so that you can choose what to focus on. You want to break a skill into its component parts and then prioritise those parts depending on the goal you want to achieve.

Every skill consists of many sub-skills, which can make it intimidating at first. Tennis, for example, consists of various strokes such as backhands, forehands, volleys and serves. But to become a good player, you also need to learn good footwork, tactics, reading your opponents shots and so on. If you try to learn everything at once, it will be overwhelming, so it’s beneficial to break the skill down and focus on a few sub-skills, for example, only backhands and forehands to begin with.

By taking something large and breaking it down into smaller pieces, you improve your chances of succeeding. If you want to improve your cooking skills, you may have realised that the skills consist of shopping, prep, cooking and cleanup. What can you do to focus only on cooking? Or perhaps prep and cooking? A solution could be to agree with your housemates/family/spouse that if they do the shopping and wash the dishes, you will do the cooking. Albeit doing the dishes will not improve your overall cooking skills.

In the deconstruction phase, you should also identify why you might fail before you even start learning. Tim advises you to think of the reasons you may quit and reasons that others have failed in the past. If you can avoid these problems at least for the first five sessions, you improve your chances of succeeding significantly.

Selection

The objective of this step is to identify the core sub-skills you need to learn. By taking the most crucial parts of a skill and learning them exceptionally well, you can improve faster.

Your goal is to use the 80/20 principle (Pareto) to identify the 20% that will give you 80% of results.

For language learning, this means learning the most used words and phrases, to faster become conversational. By finding the most common phrases and the most used grammar examples, you can quickly start practising. You want to identify the 2000 most used words in a language, which give you 95% of the words that are commonly used.

By identifying the most crucial sub-skills, you can quickly go from a beginner to having a functional level where you can practice your skill.

Sequencing

In the same way that it’s essential to identify the core skills, you also need to decide in which order you should learn them. Some skills are necessary for others, and some have a kind of synaesthesia that makes them work well together.

It’s wise to learn the most fundamental skills first and learn them well. Fundamental skills are those that you perform most often and have the most impact on your performance if you know how to perform them.

In football, this could be your ability to make a short inside pass or dribble the ball. In cooking, it could be understanding the most basic cooking techniques and ingredients. In chess, it could be understanding how the pieces move and tactics to win.

If you haven’t learnt the basics well, it won’t matter that you’ve mastered some small fancy, but rarely used skill. If you want to improve fast, it’s beneficial to focus on improving those skills that matter most.

Stakes

Stakes may be the solution to help you follow through on your plans to learn a new skill. If there are no consequences when you skip practice, it’s easy to give up on your goals and be lazy.

Having stakes means that there will be consequences if you don’t practice. If you don’t follow through, you can, for example, pay a set amount to an anti-charity. An anti-charity is the type of business that you would least like to give money to. Something that goes completely against your values.

To hold you accountable, you need to find a referee. This could either be a merciless friend or a site such as stickk.com. If you don’t stick to your plan, the money will go directly into the bank account of your anti-charity. StickK claims that follow-through increases by 2–3x, when you apply stakes and a referee to the goal you want to achieve.

You can also add positive incentives by rewarding yourself when you reach your goal. The main goal is to pick the stakes that are most likely to help you achieve your goals. Increasing the stakes may be a solution if you’ve struggled to follow through on your commitments in the past.

Take home message

The DiSSS method helps you break down a skill and focus on how to improve a skill fast.

• In the deconstruction phase, you break the skill down into sub-skills and find out what could potentially stop you from practising.
• In the selection phase, you chose which parts of the skill are essential to improving.
• In the sequencing phase, you make a plan on the order you want to practice the different sub-skills.
• If you struggle to follow through, stakes can help you stay on course to reach your goals.

In my view, the DiSSS method is a great addition to help you learn a skill faster. But it’s not sufficient. To improve your skill learning, it’s also necessary to get a thorough understanding of how deliberate practice works. Then you can speed up your progress by applying the DiSSS method. Good luck with your skill learning!

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