Cover Image: Illustration of Leonardo Da Vinci, likely the most famous polymath in history. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Compiled from learning close to 90 skills in 3 years
When I set out to learn 3 new skills every month in 2017, I only had one expectation: I will become more skilled. Years later, I realized there are a lot more benefits from learning many skills. In this article, I’m showing you 10 that are often overlooked.
1. You’ll discover some of your hidden talents
49% of your traits are given to you at birth. The thing is, no one tells you what they are, so you have to discover them for yourself. That’s the case for your talents.
A talent is something you learn faster than others. Until you try many things, you don’t know what your talents are. Many people reach the end of their lives without having discovered what their talents are. The more things you try, the higher the chance you’ll find out what they are for you.
As a trained software engineer, I never expected to find talent in writing and in photography. It only happened through trying them out for 15 hours each and realizing that I was learning them faster than others and enjoying the process greatly.
2. You’ll use them unexpectedly
The more things you know, the more you can handle random situations thrown at you. You can more creatively solve solutions by combining skills that seem to have nothing in common.
Similarly, you’ll be able to help others using the skills you know. When I lived in Colombia, I had overheard a few people say they wanted to learn how to start an eCommerce and do dropshipping. That was a skilled I had learned a few months prior, so I organized a workshop to show them how to do it.
I had stopped running my store so I never expected to use those skills I had learned before, but it came out of the blue and it was a great experience.
3. You can have a blast learning them
People see skill learning as a chore or as a means to an end. I say that skill learning can be the end. You can learn for the sake of learning. It can be incredibly fun to learn to play a new instrument, learn a new type of dance, or learn to play competitive games.
As a metalhead, I never expected to enjoy learning to Salsa dance, but it was one of the most fun skills I’ve learned. It was challenging and every win made me love it even more.
As someone who’s not competitive at all, I wanted to learn to care about winning against other people. To learn to become more competitive, I decided to learn to play Super Smash Bros and compete online.
4. You will become more interesting
When you analyze your circle of friends and the conversations you have, do you notice how you always talk about the same topics? When you learn many skills, to range of topics you can discuss is much broader.
When you meet new people, it’s easier to connect with them because there’s more chance that you have something in common with them. The more you reveal about the things you’ve learned, the more interesting they’ll find you.
There are two pitfalls to that, however. You have to be careful not to sound too braggy and you may be asked for help more frequently than you have time for. Back in Colombia, my “secret” went out and everyone started asking for my help, which I didn’t have time to do if I wanted to keep working on my own projects.
5. You will starting learning at a rapid pace
This is one of my favourite reasons. When you learn a skill, you’re really learning a library of sub-skills. The sub-skills you learn from one skill transfers to other skills you want to learn.
I call this skill recycling. By learning to tap-dance, for example, you can up your Basketball game (true story). Salsa dancing helped one friend perform better at Ultimate Frisbee and another at running.
With this concept, there’s no such thing as a wasted skill. The bigger your library of sub-skills, the easiest to will become to learn others skills.
6. You will become more open-minded
The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. You’ll start to be more open about different points of view simply because you’ll be more curious about everything.
You won’t take anything for granted anymore and also realize that the world isn’t black and white. You can learn new things, and sometimes, that comes from unexpected places and time. You’ll start embrace that uncertainty.
7. You will build one of the most important habits in the world
When you learn three skills a month like I do, you set yourself up for failure every month. People are afraid of failure, and so don’t do the first steps to learn something new.
When you build the habit of failure, you lose this dreaded fear. You start believe in yourself and knowing that you can accomplish new and difficult things.
That’s even how I started, really. I always thought that as a logical person, I couldn’t draw. So I decided that the first skill I’d learn was to draw using Photoshop. I failed for a few days, but ended up producing much higher quality work than I thought I ever could.
8. Your energy levels will be through the roof
I wake up one and a half hours earlier every morning to practice learning my skills. When I started that habit, I thought I’d be beat by the afternoon because of that.
The opposite happened, my energy levels were through the roof. There are two reasons for that: I worked on skills that used different parts of my brain than what I was using for work, and I had small wins every morning, giving me a boost of energy right from the start of the day.
9. Your confidence will soar
Perhaps as a result of all of the above, your confidence will rise. By realizing that you’re more capable than you thought you were and by accomplishing new feats every day, you’ll feel good about yourself.
In his book High Performance Habits, Brendon Burchard mentions that confidence is the secret ingredient that makes you rise to [any] challenge. I can attest to that.
10. You will get paid in a variety of ways
I used to be paid for one reason: software engineering. After learning a bunch of skills, at one point, I had 12 different revenue sources. When the pandemic hit, I had diversified my income enough that I wasn’t immediately impacted much from it.
That’s the power of having multiple income streams. Diversification is the ultimate tool for financial success, and it applies to skill diversification too. The more skills you know, the more markets you can be in.
Everything you need to know
Here are some of the most important reasons why you’d want to learn many skills:
You will discover some of your hidden talents
You will use them unexpectedly
You can have a blast learning them
You will become more interesting
You will starting learning at a rapid pace
You will become more open-minded
You will build one of the most important habits in the world
Your energy levels will be through the roof
Your confidence will soar
You will get paid in a variety of ways
— Danny
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