I absolutely love taking on short hyper-learning experience projects, where I spend 20-50 hours on a specific topic to drive forward my experience much faster and further intentionally.
I originally picked up this idea from Josh Kaufman's book 'The First 20 Hours' where he talks about picking up new skills with focused and intentional learning. You can become quite proficient in areas you've never worked on before within 20 hours if spent with full focus and energy in them!
One of these projects was to start a business; inception, marketing, manufacturing, creating a web store, and shipping to the customer. My initial intent was to do it all within 20 hours, and I recorded my time with a stopwatch. However, I significantly underestimated how much time it would really take, and I'm now at 40+ hours with a minimum of 15 more to finish the project.
The point of these intense learning experiences isn't to make money or become well known. It's to learn what it takes to start a business and behind the scenes. In this fashion, I will better understand what to do when I eventually start a business for profit. The tight time restrictions force me to only invest my time in the areas that provide the biggest results and not get too caught up in the details.
I won't necessarily need to do all the work for my future business as I can outsource a lot of it. But understanding the terminology and the process behind it will help me find the right resources to follow.
Key takeaways:
1) Hyper-intensive learning experiences with a tangible result can drive forward your understanding
2) Build a mini-course to expand your knowledge of what it would take in the real world
3) I won't necessarily need to know how to do everything down the line, I need to understand it