One of my favorite books I've read this year was "the first 20 hours" by Josh Kaufman, where he outlines how you can become quite skilled in almost anything within just twenty hours of intentional learning.
This book reminds me of a lot of the 80/20 rule, where you spend 20% of your time to make 80% of the progress, and Josh Kaufman illustrates this very eloquently.
The basic principle is you spend 20 hours of focused and dedicated learning regularly, where you take apart what you want to learn and find the few "core" things within that skill. Then break each of those into subsets of smaller skills that you can practice and self-correct to do them almost perfect before moving to the next. He sights many examples of people excelling in concise periods of time and identifies that the first 20 hours of focused learning typically gets you 80% of the way. It's not at an elite level, but you can get surprisingly good with very little time.
The 20-hour method has actually been one of the core backbones to many of the projects I take on and skills I try to pick up. I don't set myself with exact hours, but I've found that I can get quite a bit of learning new things just by being intentional about learning and growing when I take the time to do that.
Key takeaways:
1) Intentional learning is the key to developing skills faster
2) 20-hour method uses focused specific skill-building techniques to master subjects
3) I've found the 20-hour method works really well for picking up new skills extremely quickly in my own life