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I've had several girlfriends I've met just by casually turning a piece of scrap paper into a flower at meetings.
Becoming a grandmaster-level specialist at something is going to take years and decades of disciplined practice. And it’s well worth the effort. We all have some things we’re naturally good at, and it makes sense to develop our skills throughout our lives. However, learning new skills isn’t quite as difficult as you keep telling yourself, even if different skills require different amounts of effort.
Sure, it gets harder as you grow older, but if you stay curious about the world and keep mentally fit, you’re perfectly capable of learning new things at a quick pace. Luckily, it takes very little time to get pretty good at something.
Josh Kaufman, the author of ‘The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast!’, states that the 10,000 rule, which is a ballpark for how long you need to get really good at something, is misinterpreted by most people. The 10,000 hours is the average that it takes to become an expert in an ultra-competitive field.
On the other hand, if you want to simply get from knowing nothing to being pretty good, it takes just 20 hours. That comes out to roughly 45 minutes of focused practice every single day for a mere month. This is perfectly doable for the vast majority of you, even if you have a super busy schedule.
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“Most of us are deeply disturbed at the prospect of being horrible at something, even temporarily. 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,” Kaufman told Forbes in an interview.
“The early hours of trying something new are always challenging, but a little persistence can result in huge increases in skill. The human brain is optimized to pick up new skills extremely quickly. If you persist and practice in an intelligent way, you’ll always experience dramatic improvements in a very short period of time.”
Kaufman points out that you don’t 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.”
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Weird_Ad_2404:
Oh yeah, it surprises my friends sometimes when I do that. Like dude, I just showed you some basic respect and patience, why are you thanking me?
He stressed that it’s vital to focus on what you’re personally interested in learning right now, not what you think you should do instead. “When you’re naturally interested in a particular skill, you’ll learn extremely quickly, so follow your interests where they lead, and avoid forcing yourself to grind through topics you’re not really interested in exploring,” he told Forbes.
Even if you’re not interested in a particular skill, it may be useful for you in life, work, etc. So, what motivates you can be the result that the skill will bring about rather than the skill itself.
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As per Kaufman, the top three pieces of advice for mastering a new skill are:
- Deciding what you want to be able to do, understanding what skilled performance looks like, and having a clear idea of how good you want to become
- Deconstructing the skill into small, manageable parts so you don’t get overwhelmed and find it easier to start
- Prioritizing the practice of the most important, critical subskills first to increase your performance the most in the fastest way possible
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In fact, the hardest part of the trick these days is acquiring and then explaining to your audience what a phone book even is.
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It’s not enough to work hard. You also need to work smart. Targeted practice is going to yield better results than doing things randomly. Having a mentor, doing research, and getting feedback about your learning process are all huge boosts. That being said, you shouldn’t sacrifice getting ‘stuck in’ for the sake of ‘perfect’ preparation. Learning about a skill theoretically and actually learning a skill are two entirely different things.
You will never feel fully ‘ready’ to start learning something new. Failure is a core part of the learning process, so you need to reframe your mistakes as opportunities for growth instead of personal disappointments. The best course of action for analysis paralysis is, well, taking action. Start learning whatever skill you’ve been meaning to. You’ll be pretty terrible at first. You’ll fail over and over again. But you’ll quickly get better and better as things start to click.
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Basic first aid might be one of those things you will never need really, but even knowing to apply pressure to wounds and stuff a lot of people dont actually understand and they stand there dumbfounded or actually make things worse in an actual emergency.
ABCs and stop the bleeding can literally save people's lives very easily.
Used to work in EMS and you would be surprised by how much of it is really basic stuff that people can do before ems arrives, and actually be useful!!!!!
For example: someone just had their index and middle finger degloved by a press machine.
Guess what the coworker did to help a lot.
They grabbed a roll of duct tape and taped his entire hand up while it was still bleeding.
Always remember how dumb the average person is, and remember than 50% of people are dumber than that.
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Basically each tiny sign is a sound, which represents roughly the position of your mouth and tongue to pronounce it. That makes it easy to memorize already, and then you form 2- to 3-sound characters by combining them.
The main difficulty is learning how to pronounce and distinguish their vowels (there are 10 of them). That is, aside from actually speaking and understanding the language.
The story is cool too, they basically used Chinese characters up until the 15th century or so, then their emperor at the time basically said "nah this s**t is wack" and had this super simple writing system devised.
Hey, Pandas, what are some new skills that you’d love to learn the most, and why? What’s stopping you?
What are the easiest and most difficult things you’ve ever had to learn to do? What skills are you actually learning right now?
We genuinely want to hear your thoughts on this. If you have a moment, share your experiences with us and all the other readers in the comments at the bottom of this post!
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Was always impressed by it, and then I learned it and realised how really insecure most padlocks are.