72 Fast Skills People Swear Made Their Lives Easier

How long it’ll take you to master a skill will depend on, well, the skill itself, how much effort you put in, and how you apply yourself. However, you don’t necessarily need to perfectly master a skill or spend 10,000 hours honing it, to get use out of it.

Josh Kaufman, the author of ‘The First 20 Hours: How To Learn Anything… Fast!’ explained to Forbes that most people are “deeply disturbed” by the idea of being bad at something, even if it’s temporary.

“When you try something new, you’re usually very bad, and you know it. The easiest way to eliminate that feeling of angst is to quit practicing and go do something else, so that’s what most of us do.”

The optimistic thing is that, even though you’ll probably be awful at something in the early hours of doing it, you can quickly improve your skill with even a little bit of persistence and intelligent practice.

According to Kaufman, you could try learning a new skill by first precommitting to putting in at least 20 hours of practice. That way, you’ll find it easier to keep going even if things seem overwhelmingly difficult.

Next, learn just enough about the core concepts of the skill to apply it. And you can always break your learning program up into smaller, more manageable parts. Realistically, after those 20 hours, you’ll become reasonably competent in that particular skill.

Kaufman stressed to Forbes that the idea of mastering a skill can be counterproductive because it might stop you from exploring it in the first place. Instead, you could focus on having fun if it’s a personal hobby or on performing well enough to get meaningful results if it’s a career skill.

On top of that, you don’t even have to master every skill that you learn.

“I believe that developing new skills in a way that allows you to perform well enough for your own purposes is – by far – the most common and valuable purpose of skill acquisition. Based on my research, reaching that level doesn’t take anywhere close to 10,000 hours – you can usually achieve the goals you set yourself in around 20 hours of deliberate practice,” he told Forbes.

Which of these life-changing skills do you think you’d like to prioritize? Do you think you’ll pick any of these up in the near future? What new things do you think you’d like to learn this year? What are the most essential skills that you’ve learned that you think absolutely everyone should know? Let us know!