Are you looking to learn new skills quickly? Whether it’s mastering a language, developing your coding skills or taking up a new hobby, the process of learning something new can be daunting. But with some proactive approaches and strategies in place, you can pick up any skill faster than ever before.
In this post, we’ll share five tips that will help you learn any skill quickly. From breaking down goals into smaller tasks to building habits that lead to success, these tips are sure to give you the knowledge and confidence necessary for mastering any challenge. Huge shout out to Colby Kultgen for the inspiration of this series. Let’s get started!
1. Break Down Your Learning Objectives
Before attempting to learn a new skill, break down your learning objectives into manageable chunks that you can easily comprehend.
Break down the skill to understand the underlying principles, concepts, and how they all fit together. This gives you a roadmap for what you need to learn and how to best approach it.
Try the 80/20 Rule or the Pareto Principle: The Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) is a rule that says that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. The most focused 20% of your effort goes towards 80% of your work. It means that if you focus on doing the most important things first, you can learn new skills quickly. Josh Kaufman has a wonderful TED Talk on the subject.
2. Choose The Right Resources & Timeframe
Selecting the right resources (i.e., AI, books or YouTube tutorials) and timeframe are essential when trying to learn something quickly. Taking regular breaks throughout the day can help refresh mental energy and provide motivation to keep moving towards the end goal.
3. Stay Motivated & Focused
A lack of motivation will make it difficult to stay focused on the task at hand and could result in taking longer than necessary to gain the desired skillset.
Find your ideal state of deep focus to keep motivation high. Deep focus is a state of intense concentration on one specific task without allowing distractions or being easily diverted. It involves blocking out all external stimuli, such as noise and other people, in order to stay focused on the task at hand. Deep focus helps increase productivity and achieve a greater sense of accomplishment. Find a time of day that works for you. Ask yourself: When am I the most energetic? When do I feel the most creative?
4. Take Notes & Ask Questions
Taking notes while reading or watching videos allows you to revisit certain topics if needed, asking yourself questions during lectures or online forums is a great way of staying engaged with your studies.
Learn enough around the new skill to self-correct. Once you’ve developed a basic understanding of the skill, start practicing. As you practice, pay attention to areas of weakness, where you’re making the most mistakes, and what you need to work on to improve.
Try the Feynman Technique: The Feynman Technique involves breaking down the skill into smaller parts and learning each part one at a time. Once you understand all of the pieces, you can put them back together and practice until you’ve mastered the skill.
5. Practice, Practice, Practice!
The best way to ensure success after learning something new is by practicing what you learned so that it becomes deeply ingrained in memory as an applicable skill set for future use.
Pro Tip: Eliminate practice blockers. Create an environment that sets YOU up for success!
The biggest takeaway here in to put in effective practice time. Be deliberate with your practice. Set specific goals, gather immediate feedback, push yourself forward. Remember your why and keep focus on your goal to learn any skill quickly!
Time To Get Started!
Learning a new skill can be daunting and time consuming. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With the right approach and techniques, you can learn almost any skill faster than you think.
We’ve covered five tips for quickly picking up new skills, so you can get ahead of your competition and take the proper steps towards achieving your goals. In reality, it only takes about 20 hours to get reasonably good at a new skill. The only thing left to do now is to get started. You got this!
Check out other inspiring articles on the Mattie Hacks Marketing Blog. Hope you enjoyed!