20 skills in a year

If you put in little more than 1 hour a day to improve a skill you would have 400 hours to play with in a year. That is enough to spend 20 hours on 20 different skills. In a single year. This guy learned to play and sing basically all radio top hits and then perform it on a stage in exactly 20 hours.

Imagine that: A year from now you could be make yourself understood in a new language, be fairly proficient ina a physical skill like juggling, walking a tightrope or doing handstands, perhaps play an instrument or two. Acoustic guitar? Piano? Harmonica? You could do some basic origami or be able to analyse the economy from a text-book macroeconomic perspective. I guess that within the 20 hour limit you would learn most there is to know about building a house, including how to plan for electricity, water, ventilation, roofing, insulation etc.

Actually you would easily be able to do all of the above better than most people you know already by next summer. You would still have room for ten more skills within that time period. And we are still only talking about cutting out one hour each day of watching the news for a second time or re-runs of Friends or Seinfeld. How about eating comfortably with Japanese sticks or identifying the 100 most common sushi pieces, or making sushi?

A friend encoureged me to list which 20 skills I would want to learn. Unfortunately I can't even think of 20 things I want to learn. Actually that is one reason I have quit my job; to release my curiosity. Anyway, here are ten skills I am interested in:

Languages (NB that even if you can "get around" after 20 hours of focused learning, I would still want to put in more hours in each language)

Spanish
Italian
Japanese
Dutch
Finnish
Russian


Physical

Handstands
Wave surfing (requires waves)


Other
Coding (robot control, face recognition, understanding beauty, computer trading)
Piano

Added later, after the original post

Oil painting
Understanding the brain architecture
Photography
Composing music