12 skills you can learn in a week that will impress just about anyone

Thomson Reuters

A competitor solves a Rubik's cube using one hand during the Rubik's Cube European Championship in Prague.

In his 2013 TEDx Talk, "The first 20 hours," author and business expert Josh Kaufman busts the myth that learning new skills takes a lot of time.

Proficiency, Kaufman says, is really only 20 hours away.

Divided into two- or three-hour chunks, that's about a week's worth of practice. As responders to recent Quora threads have attested, that's plenty of time to learn a host of impressive skills.

Here are just a sample of the many you could pick from.