Day 9 - Skill Trees


A skill tree is a visual representation of sub-skills required to learn a larger skill. It’s an ongoing document where you record your progress and learning material.


Skill trees help address learning pain points in three different ways, they: (1) raise your self-awareness, (2) channel your focus, and (3) guide your learning.


Skill trees raise your self-awareness because they force you to go deep into the sub-skills you’ve previously acquired and those you need to learn. When you build your skill tree, you map out all the sub-skills required, as well as your current proficiency level in each of them.


Once you’ve mapped everything out and you know how good you are at the different sub-skills, you can start to understand where your time should be focused.


And once you know where to channel your focus, you can start planning and executing.


This section will focus on how to build skill trees using mind mapping tools. The one I’m currently using is MindMeister.com. You can also try Ember.ly.

Skill Trees differ from regular mind maps because it's not meant to be studied. It tells you what you need to get better at, but not exactly how. It's a document you keep updating as your proficiency increases. You can even collaborate with others, but at its core, it's all about YOU.


Here are the three steps required to build a high-quality skill tree:


Step 1. List the concepts, facts, and procedures


In Ultralearning, Scott H. Young defines the terms this way:

  • Concepts: Anything that needs to be understood.

  • Facts: Anything that needs to be memorized.

  • Procedures: Anything that needs to be practiced.


Before you set out to build the tree for the first time, try to get the big picture by listing anything you can come up with. Divide it into three columns:

Involve other people in the exercise and be sure to do as much research with the help of Google (see above) and YouTube.


For example, in the workshops I do, we always come up with a lot more ideas when in a group. We spend two minutes brainstorming individually, then we regroup and share our ideas. It’s amazing the things others think of that you haven’t thought of and vice versa.


Doing this exercise with others always gives you more clarity. If you can’t find anyone to do it with, feel free to join our online version of the SkillUp workshop.


Step 2. Build the tree


My skill trees usually look something like that to start with:

After a brainstorming session, we came up with these concepts, facts, and procedures:

By analyzing the skill tree above, I’m sure you can recognize some patterns. You can see that different things might make sense to group together. In a previous workshop, we grouped things together this way:

Doesn’t this look more organized already?


One thing I like to do is keep the procedures/actions on the right. These are the sub-skills you’ll be practicing. I leave the concepts and the facts on the left. These are the things you’ll study and research before and during your practice.


I like to add an extra step here: highlight what you want to focus on. My strategy is to dedicate 15 hours of time to learn a new skill every month. When I look at my skill tree, I try to identify what I think I can learn within 15 hours of study and practice.


See the difference:

Highlighting will help you channel your focus on the right things to study or practice while being aware of the other things you might be required to learn later on or have learned already.


Step 3. Self-assess and share


The last step is very important. Now that you have a skeleton for what the skill looks like once broken down, you want to rate yourself on your proficiency on each node. I use a scale from 0–4:

  • 0 = I know nothing about it

  • 1 = I’m a beginner

  • 2 = I’m good

  • 3 = I’m very good

  • 4 = I have nothing else to learn


Here’s an example:

My strategy is to go from the last layers first. For the parent node, I simply average the sub-nodes’ score. Let’s analyze this one as an example:

I first started with Steering, Balance, etc. Once all of those were ranked, I jumped to Visual-motor skills and applied simple math:


(2 + 2 + 1 + 3 + 2 + 3) / 6 = ~2


So I put 2. I average up or down on gut feeling mostly.


Here are two more ideas you can think of:

  • Share the template with your friends, spouse, coworker or family and ask them to rate you on the different sub-skills. Sometimes what we think of ourselves isn’t what others think of us.

  • Make two versions for yourself: (1) where you are right now and (2) where you want to be after your practice or study.