How to learn new skills - Guide
How to learn new skills. The basic idea is quite simple, but yet I want to go broader into it. After all, you want to gain as much value as possible from my experience. If you don't want to read a new article, assume you are not ready yet.
I have tried many skills in my 30 years of life. Be it art, design, writing, foreign language or martial arts.
As a creative person, it is my "modus operandi" to acquire new information, add a new skill to my repertoire or refine to a higher level to achieve my desired outcome. Growth therefore is always present.
I will not focus on the technicality of various skill sets but on the core "mantra" or "paradigm" of life itself. It comes down to understanding the nature of man - different from beast. This is not a motivational message, but to lay out the foundation which already exists in every one of us and you may not be able to see it due to "artificial" self-doubt.
My learned skills are displayed in chronological order and some are developed in parallel. Some are to a good level and some are closer to mastering.
i have a bad writing - but this is something i do not care about at all
You can see my interests were very different from one another. Not a single tree branching out, but multiple different types of trees which branch out. Why am I showing this to you? To make you understand, that you can learn unrelated areas and you are not bound to be really good at only one thing.
To be able to learn a variety of skills you need to have a flexible mind and as well a flexible personality. A flexible mind does not constrain itself into hard patterns. A flexible mind can change its melody like a classic musical peace of Schubert. Changing in rhythm, tonality, and tempo in various instruments. Or as the late great Bruce Lee said "Be like water, my friend".
Bruce Lee Be As Water My Friend (youtube.com)
A flexible personality is more akin to fluidly adapting the emotional state you need to a task. Sometimes you need to be comfortable not to be 100% you. What do I mean by that? Imagine you are an actor and you have the role of an 80's action hero: A determined, cocky demeanour with the hang to risk and a loud mouth. You know you are not a cocky action hero, but to act like one to do your action hero stuff. And quite frankly most people adapt to various circumstances. At work, you are someone serious and professional who does not fool around. At home, you are a goofball with your spouse and being sentimental. If it was the other way around, you'd have a hard time. But you adjust yourself to whatever you are surrounded with. The same goes for acquiring new skills. You have to think about what character trait might be an obstacle and what is supportive. People with a liberal mindset tend to have an easier time altering themselves temporarily.
Does talent matter?
I can imagine this is one of the first questions everyone has. Short answer: There are no short answers. Not everything in life has a short answer. This question needs its own dedicated article. Therefore I say - whatever you believe - if no work is put behind what you want the results will be the same whether or not you are a genius Einstein or a bumbling Homer Simpson.
The brain craves to learn
"Life-long learning" is not a fancy statement of the modern professional career life. Humans are by nature capable of acquiring, analyzing and inheriting information to the last breath on earth. Why? Simply this is what we are. As birds sing and moles dig, humans learn. A belief when we stop learning and thinking, we seize to exist as humans. Would you not agree, that a tiger who fails to hunt prey is a failure in being a tiger?
A brain constantly seeks novelty. Even that of an animal. An innate desire of our brain to receive new information. Be it reading a book or seeing the next video when scrolling through social media. If the brain does not satisfy its desire for novelty, it withers away like a flower without water.
Good knowledge is any type that produces goods and creates is feeding our human spirit. When you start with anything useful, you will sooner or later reach a useful level. Doubt has no place here. All you need is to start and it's often easy to figure out how to start.
Process is king - Goal is just a servant
Prepare your mind before every actionable plan: Do every step with intent. Do not just practice something for the sake of practising, really declare an intention to understand and analyse a specific thing which improves your skill. Calligraphy masters do not move an inked brush over a surface for the sake of displaying a letter or character, but to give a specific feeling to the strokes. A good Karate student differs from a bad one by the thought they put into every punch. A good student tries to understand every inch of his movement by understanding how his muscle fibres tense and relax. How the various parts of the body contribute to increasing the velocity for the biggest and safest impact. There is another saying of Bruce Lee "I do not fear the man who practiced 1.000 kicks one time, but the man who practiced one kick 1.000 times."
But I will even say, that 500 intentionally practised kicks are better than 1.000 kicks without a determined intent. The more precisely you formulate your intention, the better your mind focuses on what to pick up in the process.
Set reasonable goals
Want to fill an art gallery in the National Museum? Forget it. This is too abstract for your brain to comprehend. First sketch out for TODAY what you want to paint on an empty canvas. This should be your goal in a day-to-day frame. This is something your mind can imagine to execute. No normal person's brain can set goals in such dimensions without losing steam.
Enjoy the process - if you can.
You don't have to, but it is highly advised. Sometimes you cannot enjoy everything you want to learn for various reasons: A learning step might demand more from you than you initially were willing to sacrifice in time and energy. Or something just does not work out smoothly and is a real pain in the arse considering how little use it might have.
Learning to enjoy the process is almost a mental skill in itself. It is a skill check for your mental aptitude.
Obstacles and plateaus
The journey of learning is never linear. The learning curve usually starts steep and flattens out on higher levels. Why? Simple: Your progress from level 0 to 1 is infinitely more than from 99 to 100. Not only that, you will reach plateaus where you feel you make barely any progress. Feeling like on a treadmill grinding and grinding but barely anything moves. This will happen sooner or later. It usually happens after you get the fundamentals and approach the really advanced stuff. Here people tend to lose their motivation to learn as the brain quite frankly does not get its novelty satisfied. Then people give up feeling it's not that fun anymore and seek all kinds of explanations as to why they see no progress and give up. The explanations are commonly "Maybe it is not the right thing for me."
or "I simply don't have the talent."
How to unstuck
But what do you do when you are not a quitter but neither want to be stuck forever on the plateau? Various things: Try a different approach. Ask someone for advice who has experience in that skill. Review all the things you already know step by step and check if you have overlooked anything small and vital. Get your head free, go away, do something unrelated and come back later.
How to aim ahead? Way to target.
Variant A: Target based - artificial progress
It means you set yourself a specified reasonable short-term target. A target for example a language-level certification a technical function or a set time frame. Anything you can think of which can be determined.
As a media designer, it is not unusual for me to hit a block where I cannot proceed with a project due to a lack of particular skill. I then set a single target to learn a new function of a new software just to overcome the block to reach my goal. It happens so often, that I already know that every new project will involve a new learning.
Variant B: Passion based - natural progress
This one is a bit hard to determine, but it is mostly coming from a deeper intention - it is more of an overarching vision which wants to satisfy a desire or fill a void. It is not a definite target. You basically keep practising a skill until you feel satisfied with the level you envisioned to have. This might be like being able to play songs on a guitar, speak a foreign language on a conversational level, or understand physics.
For example, I have a desire to learn a new language. It feels like "there could be more". I do not know yet what language I want to add to my language pool. All I know I want to fill a felt void and satisfy the desire to be "more".
Or another analogy: You desire to ace your bachelor and your target is to set daily study time frames.
The actual process - How does "learning" work?
Trial and failure. That simple. You start something and in 90% of the cases you will fail it on the first try. That's normal for everything in existence. Except maybe for earthquakes - they do not fail. [Enjoy my humour]
You repeat the process and each time you get a better understanding and do it slightly differently till it gives a useful or interesting result.
Variant A - Craft-based skill
Step 0: Observe others
Step 1: Act and repeat their teaching AND observe yourself doing that.
Step 2: Analyze your findings.
Step 3. Filter out the mistake in preparation for the act.
Repeat the process.
Variant B - Knowledge-based skill
Step 1: Learn from existing information
Step 2: Confirm the new information by rephrasing it into your own words.
Step 3: Learn the same information from a DIFFERENT source.
Step 4: Compare your findings with the two sources to be sure you understood.
Repeat the process.
Mastering a skill
The process of becoming a master in a skill is very different. Here it becomes philosophical and this is a level individual to everyone. Before you acquire information from outside sources, this time the source is yourself. At this point, you have such high of a plateau that can hardly be compared to other people because they have nothing to teach you and the individual details make you too different. Here you have to explore your mental capacity deeply and break your limits. Feel the entire essence of yourself and the skill and dissect it and you start experimenting which might even demand from you to leave what you know into spheres you did not imagine would matter.
In the end run of the marathon, you will not worry anymore about comparing yourself.
Do you have the mental capacity and time for it? YES! Maybe…
This is a really good question and I would say: Yes - more than you assume when you stop feeding junk food to your brain. I am now going to address your lifestyle and it has nothing to do with the thing you want to put effort in.
We live in the digital world with an insane amount of toxic information being fed into our senses. 80% of the internet content hijacks our time and brain power. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and more short-lived "content" in an unending stream. Flashing and blinking like a slot machine to keep us busy. If you measured the time that goes in, you'd be in awe looking at the meaningless hours throughout your days. It does not just take away your free time, but also free brain energy. When you wake up and on the way to work and scroll on your phone, your brain's natural desire for novelty gets "satisfied". The satisfaction is the same as eating a bag of chips. It makes you kind of feel like you ate, but... did you really put anything meaningful into your body? The internet is full of time-consuming junk food. If you stop and hold control of your life, you will be able to free extra capacity for whatever you want to learn.
I am a victim of internet junk myself. There is often an underlying deep psychological issue as to why people distract themselves artificially. Here is a good short video of the psychiatrist Dr.K discussing modern problems. How to Stop Wasting Time on Internet (youtube.com)
A small hint: Use your phone's application timer that tracks your daily usage by any app. This will diminish your "reasons" down to mere lazy excuses.
I put a lot of thought into this article and would like to see your results. I am looking forward to hearing from you in the future how far you have gotten. Any more tips I might be able to give you when you tell me more about your situation.