The Skill We Need To Learn Today To Get Better At Anything Tomorrow

What if I told you that it’s possible to learn anything you want in just 20 hours?

Be it learning a new language, playing a new instrument or understanding a technical tool. Any skill that you want to learn can be learned without you feeling overwhelmed or lost.

Are you feeling skeptical about this?

That’s perfectly okay. Because being a self-improvement junkie who is always on the lookout for ways to accelerate my learning, I was even more skeptical than you.

But after being able to learn two of my most desired skills – playing the piano and editing photos using Adobe Lightroom, within a month, I became a believer.

As it turns out, there is a prerequisite to learning any new skill. And that prerequisite is learning how to learn.

Unfortunately, most of us were never taught about it in schools and colleges. But there is no age limit to learning new things. We can always start today and we can always start right now.

Let me tell you how.  

Why does this matter?

Robert Greene says

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”

It’s no wonder than that world’s most forward thinkers who are incidentally also the world’s richest people, dedicate a significant amount of their time to learning new skills.

From Bill Gates to Elon Musk, all top performers of the world, dedicate at least an hour every day to learning, practicing or reading.

We have limited time in this world to thrive and become successful. Hence, it logically concludes that our results would greatly depend on how we invest that limited time.

This is true today more than ever because we are citizens of a knowledge economy. Because if you are not learning something new consistently, we are at a risk of becoming stagnant and eventually obsolete.

The only way we can succeed consistently is by being deliberate about learning new skills.

So, the questions that we should be asking are

“How do we become deliberate about learning?

Is there a way to learn new skills fast?

What is the most important skill to thrive tomorrow?”

Learning How to Learn

One of my favorite activities in life is to constantly try and learn new things.

You see, I am a big geek.

So, I love the excitement of getting my hands dirty, fiddling around with new concepts and tools and making progress through trial and error.

However, this is a supremely overwhelming activity.

In the initial stages of learning any new skill, we all are grossly incompetent. We are so bad at doing even the basic things that it’s just shameful. And we don’t like that feeling.

This happened to me when I tried learning Photoshop.

I failed miserably. I couldn’t wrap my hand around the innumerable tools and shortcuts and what not. It ended up as a total disaster. And because of that experience, I was always afraid to try it again.

Add to that, popular research showed that

“It takes 10,000 hours to learn any new skill.”

It was already overwhelming before and now this huge-ass number of hours made it intimidating too.

That was when I came across a Ted Talk by Josh Kauffman, titled “The first 20 Hours – How to Learn Anything?”

This video was enlightening and encouraging because it debunked the popular myth of 10,000 hours. More importantly, it introduced me to the idea of learning how to learn.

And it changed my life.

Just to show you how here is a video of me playing the Harry Potter tune on piano. Something I could have never imagined I could do before a few months.

If I could rank different skills in the order of their importance, the top skill would be “The Skill of Learning How to Learn.”

Think of it in terms of Lego Bricks.

If we understand how to mix and match the basic blocks of Lego, we can pretty much build anything we want. Our imagination is the limit.

Similarly, if we understand how our brain works and understand how it forms neural connections, we can leverage that knowledge.

Eventually, we can get better at anything we want and learn to thrive and succeed consistently in this knowledge economy.

How to learn this skill?

This is such an important topic that if it were upto me, I would write a full-length book on this subject. However, that is a goal for the future.

In the meantime, I want to suggest some brilliant online resources, created by experts in the area of neuroscience, to help you get started today.

To start with, I would recommend everyone who wants to improve their learning skills to get enrolled in the following Coursera course.

Learning how to Learn by Barbara Oakley.

It’s free, massively popular and has been consistently ranked the number one course on Coursera.

Barabara Oakley is a distinguished neuroscientist who talks about powerful mental tools like “Chunking” and “The Pomodoro Technique”, which enable effective learning.

The entire course is about 12 hours, which means you just have to dedicate 30 minutes of your time for 24 days. You can even take a few weekends off.

From personal experience, I can tell you that this course will fundamentally change the way you approach learning.

Apart from helping you learn new skills, it will also help you improve your memory, avoid procrastination andincrease your focus.

For people who are like me and prefer to read books, there is a book called “A mind for numbers” by Barbara Oakley.

It contains the same concepts that she explains in the Coursera course with more examples and stories.

Conclusion

Use these amazing resources to kick start your learning journey.

Once you become aware of how our brain functions and start applying these mental tricks, I promise you will see a massive improvement in your learning abilities.

I am also planning to take individual concepts and share some personal experiences around them to help you contextualize and understand better.

You can signup for my newsletter to receive those updates as soon as I post them.

I hope this helps.

Happy Learning!