Cover Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Believe in them and let the sky be your limit!
I’ve lost count of how many skills I’ve learned in the past 3 years. Back then, I made it my mission to learn three new skills every month. For the most part, I’ve followed that zealously for two years and mostly keep consistent months after.
After learning all these skills, I’ve come to understand how learning works and developed techniques and strategies to get better at it. I’ve imparted these through my writing and some light coaching, with mostly mild success.
Shocking? Not really.
For example, give me Tiger Woods’ clubs and tell me his techniques and there’s no way in hell I will ever reach his level. I could learn to learn like him and other pro athletes, however, but most of it wouldn’t come from so-called hacks.
To learn like a pro, you have to have a set of beliefs. Beliefs are not fixed but are damn hard to change. It takes a lot of trust and repeated exposure to an idea before we start to believe it.
If you have previously read about my approach of learning three new skills a month and tried it for yourself, why did you do it? Did you follow through?
Probably not, right?
If you read about someone’s extreme morning routine and tried it, you probably didn’t follow through either.
The reason is you didn’t have the same set of beliefs as the person you’re trying to mimic.
While not all beliefs will work to make you a great learner, the following will.
1. “I know I can grow”
There are two camps:
Those who think they can get better at things; and
Those who know they can get better at things, no matter what it is.
Guess which camp I’m in now?
It wasn’t always so. Heck, I may not even have been in any of these two camps for many skills. I was a software engineer and video game producer. If you asked me to do anything else, I felt powerless.
When I set out to learn three new skills in a month, I decided to pick at least one skill I thought I could never do. For me, that was drawing. I decided to learn about sketching, line art, and colouring using photoshop.
Previously, I would try and give up after a few drawings. But now I forced myself to focus on the process and keep going for a month. Surprisingly, I liked my results after 8 days only. My growth within the 30-day period went way beyond what I expected.
The click happened to me while I was drawing. If I can draw, what else can I do that I thought was impossible for me previously?
I knew I could grow then. And I did grow and continue to.
2. “I can achieve it on my own”
Most people feel powerless with their learning and think they absolutely need a guide to help them. With school, we’re used to having a teacher tell us what we’re supposed to learn. As adults, we grew complacent and expect the same for our continuous learning.
The reality is that a guide is only valuable when you use them as a guide. The learning still has to happen on your own. After all, the connections need to be created in YOUR brain!
A great learner views learning material and teachers as tools to help them in their own learning. They consume content at their own pace and make their own learning plans. After all, who knows you more than yourself?
Raise your discipline. Realize it’s possible to achieve things on your own. Go out there and prove yourself you’re capable!
3. “I enjoy learning”
A great learner learns for the sake of learning. They find joy in the process, the growth, and the results. They don’t chase a mark. They don’t try to impress anyone. They don’t seek a reward at the end. They just love it.
When I built the second iteration of SkillUp Academy, people were asking me what was their reward for committing to learning skills.
I was baffled!
“What do you mean?” I thought. Learning IS the reward.
Close to 80 percent of the users asked for rewards for their own learning. I realized then that they simply had a different belief I had.
Once you start to view learning as something enjoyable, you will start to open doors. You’ll wake up early because want to do it, not because there’s a reward at the end.
4. “I don’t care for perfection”
Perfection is impossible to achieve because it doesn’t exist. In a recent piece by Erik Hamre, he told the incredible story of Eliud Kipchoge, the first man to break the 2-hour mark for running a marathon.
Can you imagine running a marathon in under 2 hours?
Well, now we have proof that it’s possible. Is it perfect? No. It will never be perfect. A few years from now, someone will beat that.
Outside of high-performance activities, if you’re not a surgeon, you don’t need to aim for perfection. One of my favourite quotes is the following:
“The future belongs to those who learn many skills and combine them in creative ways.” — Robert Greene
According to David Epstein, in his book Range, Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist. They never aimed to be perfect scientists, they aimed to be great learners.
5. “I know that asking the right questions is more important than knowing the answers”
The more I learned, the more I realized I know nothing. And I love it! That pushed me to be more curious than I’ve ever been.
On a daily basis, strange questions pop into my mind about the inner workings of basically anything. Things that the rest of the world has accepted as truth. I ask my wife: “Why do you think ‘x’ works like that?” She never has the answer. No one really does.
A great learner questions everything. They make their own judgment in the validity of what they learn. They’re often wrong but they don’t give up. They refine their questions and start asking better ones. In the process, they get better answers but know that it’s not what matters.
When I asked myself: “how can I become more self-aware?” I came up with the most comprehensive answer anyone has likely ever come to. This all came together by asking questions and never accepting that one answer was better than another.
Everything You Need to Know
If you want to be a great learner, you have to firmly believe in those statements about yourself:
I know I can grow.
I can achieve it on my own.
I enjoy learning.
I don’t care for perfection.
I know that asking the right questions is more important than knowing the answers.
If you can’t say all of the above with certainty, don’t worry about it. You can learn to believe them, just like you can learn to believe in anything else. Just know that changing your beliefs is not something you can do overnight.
You can do this!