You may have heard it said that you need 10,000 hours in order to master a skill. But more and more people believe that to be proficient, the key is to learn the most important parts of the skill, not necessarily everything.
This follows the quote by Tony Robbins:
One skill you want to master in this day and age we live in, if you want to have an extraordinary life, is the ability to learn rapidly.
1. Prepare
To be successful, you need to be selective in what you are trying to master. The perfect skill should solve a problem you are facing, or something you would like to see change. Otherwise, you will find yourself lacking the motivation and perseverance necessary to be successful.
2. Be very specific
Specific goals are easier to visualize and help you form a clearer path to success than their vague counterparts. To set yourself up for success, narrow your skill down as much as possible.
Vague: I want to be a better student
Specific: I want to make a connection between every topic I learn, and how it can be applied in real life
Here are two questions to help you break down larger skills into smaller, clearer objectives:
- What specific problem am I trying to solve by learning this skill? Are there certain aspects of the skill that are more important than others?
- When I look at those who have mastered this particular skill, what aspects of their performance impresses me most?
3. Make sure you are in love with the process, not just the outcome
The question that determines how well you will learn a new skill is: “How long are you going to be doing this?”
Learning is a frustrating process. You will experience obstacles along the way that make it seem as though giving up is the best solution. There are two ways to fight this, even before you even get started.
The first is to pick a skill where the road to mastery is as exciting as the finish line. For example, if you want to study Medicine for the sole purpose of landing a six-figure salary, you are setting yourself up for failure. Sure, the paycheck is nice, but the most successful doctors enjoy helping patients more than anything else.
Research shows that a focus on long-term goals can motivate us to get started, but it actually leads to less enjoyment of the process itself. In contrast, focusing on the immediate enjoyment of learning a new skill actually makes us more likely to stick with it.
The second is to plan out celebration points along the way to take pride in your progress. Taking time to recognize small achievements is key to maintaining long-term motivation.
For example, learning to get better at Math can be broken down into a progression of solving five problems daily arranged from easiest to hardest. Each correct answer represents a checkpoint to celebrate progress.
4. Break it down
Every skill can be broken down into a series of segments. Your goal is to identify those segments, and determine which ones are absolutely necessary for success. Focus on those first. In doing this, you should apply Pareto’s Principle which says that:
80% of the results you get are determined by 20% of the effort you put in
Your goal then, should be to separate the 20 percent of your learning materials that will give you 80 percent of the result.
5. Find a mentor
When you are unfamiliar with a skill, it can be really hard to determine which parts of a particular skill are worth learning right off the bat. Hence, in order to achieve mastery faster, your first step should be to consult those who have achieved the results you seek, and model the path they have already carved out.
Modeling allows you to achieve more in a much shorter period of time. And it’s possible to get almost any solution that’s out there in the form of books, videos, or someone in your network of friends and family.
Most successful individuals are willing to help out. However, have specific questions in mind to save you both time. Here are some question to help start the conversation:
- What parts were the most frustrating to learn when you started? Now, which of those do you use regularly and which have you forgotten?
- What parts did you worry about the most at first, that you now feel were unnecessary?
- When looking at other experts in the field, what specific capabilities help you distinguish experts from non-experts?
Watch this page for the concluding part of the series.
