If this thought ever crossed your mind...
“I wish I could teach myself a new skill, but I’m not sure how can I do it with everything else that’s going on in my life."
You’ve come to the right place. Let’s start with a story of how I taught myself to cook.
I was a little over 16 when I moved across the world on my own. As with most teenagers at that age, “cooking” was not on the list of my skills at that time.
By the time I realized the small rural town I arrived at only had a single American-Chinese restaurant — that served pretty mediocre stuff, to say the least — it was too late to regret that I didn’t ask my mom to train me when I still lived with her.
So, I decided to solve that problem myself. “How hard can it be? Just mixing and heating up some stuff, right?”, were the questions I asked my naive self back then.
Turned out that it was pretty hard.
I prepared hellish and unhealthy dishes for months straight — with whatever I could buy on a limited budget, combined with whatever frozen ingredients I found in my host family’s fridge. Charred salty chicken stripes, mixed veggies cheese ramen, undercooked rice with over-flavored hamburger patties... the list goes on. It wasn’t great, and I’m surprised I never managed to poison myself even once. But I didn’t stop attempting; I either had to do it or I had to eat the crappy school cafeteria food.
It paid off spectacularly when I finally had access to a kitchen in my rundown college apartment as well as a bigger budget from my part-time job. The things I put on the table became less terrible tasting over time. Eventually, it got to the point that even my friends would begin to ask me to bring my signature dishes to gatherings.
Twelve years after I decided to step into the kitchen, I now have a menu of over a hundred items in my head. Aside from watching others cook and reading recipes, I had never taken a formal cooking lesson. It was all just doing a little bit everyday and putting the accumulated knowledge to test, time after time.
(I’d like to think that my wife is happy about it, too, given that I’m in charge of the dinner on most days.)
Having told my story above, there are three lessons we can take away from it:
Learn by living. Whatever it is, the best way to learn something is to fit it into an inseparable part of your lifestyle.
Get into a habit first. You may not need a clear plan or goal to get started, but you must work out how to keep yourself moving forward. A habit is one reliable way to achieve that.
With a habit, so comes consistency and repetition. You will make mistakes and face many failures, but you will improve over time as long as you persist.
I should mention that this isn’t a one-time wonder — consciously or not, I have since used the method to learn these skills:
As I moved away from my parents earlier than most, I hadn’t gotten my hands on a steering wheel until later in adulthood. I took some lessons, but that didn’t help me to get over the anxiety; I still couldn’t drive on my own. It was ultimately the frequent short trips to the neighborhood grocery store that got me used to the driver’s seat. (I had no choice! I needed the ingredients to make dinner!)
Having focused on tech topics in school, I never picked up enough visual arts knowledge. To make up for that, I practiced about half an hour everyday for two years and I did make some pretty good progress in return.
I have dabbled in Japanese for a long time — textbooks, apps, video lessons... you name it. But somehow, none of them clicked; I just couldn’t comprehend anything substantial in real life scenarios. It wasn’t until recent months that I begin to have breakthroughs. How? I decided to read daily news and listen to talk shows entirely in Japanese.
When I was drafting the last article on the value learning to program, I kept asking myself what was it that I really wanted to express — that realization is well encapsulated in this quote:
The main lesson I want to hammer home is the idea of self-reliance. If you are willing to put in the hard work, there is a surprisingly long list of things in the world that you could teach yourself to do.
While I’m sure that there many faster and more effective methods to develop new skills, they almost always hinges on the matter of resources. To put it in different way: the more you want to expedite your learning process, the more money you will need, both in terms of paying for high quality training and materials. If you do have the means to do so, then of course, it makes no sense to opt for the slower path.
As most of us know, though, money is often an issue than it is not; you may some money in your pocket to buy an old textbook, but that 1-on-1 in-person course that costs a few thousand dollars is probably out of the picture.
If that’s the case, my approach below should teach you how to learn any practical skill in this world — not necessarily in a very efficient fashion, but will guarantee some amount of success. Patience is all you need. (And thanks to the abundance of resources on the internet these days, teaching yourself is easier now than ever.)
That said, note that I wrote “practical skill”. I have never attempted to use this to learn anything like theoretical physics or neurosurgery. As useful as those disciplines are, I’m not sure if it’s realistic to figure them out on your own. But then again, I have no doubt that many of you are much smarter than I am. Feel free to surprise me.
Should you have a study or training plan to start with? I don’t think that’s the right question to ask, at least not at first.
The formation of a habit is your first checkpoint before anything else. Without having the habit built into your life, I don’t see how it’s possible to follow through with a regimen that’s going to take at least several weeks or months to show results.
(If you’ve ever used Duolingo — their “daily streak” mechanism is employing exactly the same principle to help you stay on track when studying a new language.)
So, instead of worrying about whether to have a “plan” or not, think of what will help you to stay on your course in the grand scheme; you can have the most elaborate plan in the world, but it still won’t mean a thing if you can’t put it to use.
The fundamental purpose of planning is setting up a structure that you can follow, but a structure isn’t necessarily the right choice for every pursuit, nor that everyone prefer to abide by a structure. Similarly, a plan that’s too concretely laid down might drag you down — it will cause you immense stress when it starts to go off track. (Notice I wrote “when” and not “if”. Disruptions are inevitable in life. You should always expect them.)
How about learning goals? It’s good to consider them early on and write down some thoughts, since they could serve as guide points along your journey. The issue is that you can’t accurately predict your progress based on your current knowledge.
You can always update your goals as you move forward — I’m just saying that it’s not useful to think too hard on them in the beginning.
Let’s take how I started drawing, for instance:
I doodled aimlessly and intermittently for a while, and I soon realized I wasn’t going anywhere with it, so I decided to dig around for free courses or guides, which led me to Proko and Draw A Box. (Great resources, by the way.)
After two to three weeks of trial run, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t have the will power to actually stick with my original plan of “finish one chapter and draw one full sketch everyday” — I was already working a full-time job then, and some days I was just too drained to be able to do anything productive after coming home at 8PM.
After some more rounds of experimentation, I arrived at the habit that stuck with me for a little over seven hundred days: spend 30 minutes per day at the minimum to draw anything. If I had the energy and motivation, I would pace myself and make an attempt to push the boundary; if I don’t, I will just relax by listening to music and draw basic line art and shapes as practice.
(Mind you, my original end goal was to become part-time illustrator within three years. I quickly abandoned that and just focused on practicing my skills. Tunneling onto that target would’ve demotivated me long before then.
I decided to take a long pause on the habit when I began my master’s studies. Turned out that having to spend 60-70 hours a week on graduate-level coursework was more challenging than working full-time.)
The habitual approach can work out in two ways: either you set a minimum time window that you must put the skill to use, or you tie it to an activity that you must do in most days. You do want to give yourself a realistic promise, one that you can keep no matter what life throws at you. “At least thirty minutes at some point” is quite reasonable, “one hour in the evening” might be pushing it, and “two hours from 10PM-12PM” is almost asking to fail.
Barring a health related or emergency situation, you have to follow that routine as much as possible. That’s the only way to ensure you can keep making progress. You can’t just cheat by thinking to yourself that you don’t feel like doing it, or that you’d rather spend the day partying with your friends. Once you start finding excuses, the more you will begin to skip... until the day comes that you finally give up.
Remember, our aim is take skill building seriously. We aren’t just toying with a hobby; it’s supposed to be challenging. You have got to commit to engrave the foundation into yourself. If you can’t even do that, then nothing else will come after it.
Notice that I did mention the use of guides above. In general, I would recommend to go with a beginner’s guide of some sort. If the author or instructor is worth his or her salt, it will save you from running around the circle. Not only the guides are (typically) constructed in sections, which should help you tackle topics in bite-sized portions, it may also point you towards other useful resources down the road.
The only exception I would emphasize about my method is safety. You don’t want take unnecessary risks when it comes to the use of machines and sharp tools — the bigger the tools involved, the more you should think this through. It’s never worth to save a few hundred dollars when the potential exchange is severe physical injury.
(I wouldn’t have chosen to practice driving on my own if I hadn’t gone through at least a few practice sessions with an instructor. They costed a bit, but they taught me invaluable lessons on defensive driving and proper operations of a motor vehicle.
And the part that I omitted from my first story above? I figured how to use kitchen knives by cutting at the snail’s speed... just so you know, that’s not the smartest nor the fastest way to learn how to use those gigantic “knives”.)
At this point, you might be asking:
But there are hundreds and thousands of guides out there, which one should I use?
I suggest to look up the most frequently recommended books or courses — ask around online communities or read about their reviews on video sites — and just choose one or two that look the most promising to you. Commit yourself to study a single guide at a time and only switch to different ones if you absolutely have to (e.g., you found out the content is really outdated). Why? Because you will get pulled into different directions if you refer to too many ones simultaneously, and because they are rarely structured to present the topic in the same order and style.
(If your concern is that you might end up choosing a wrong one... do not worry. Assuming you’ve taken your time to do the research and get a wide range of opinions, you will end up with a list of choices that’s more or less similar in terms of quality; the rest is a matter of taste. You will have to be extremely unlucky to end up with something that’s full of crap.)
The important thing here is to be honest to yourself and don’t rush. (This is a good tip in general.) Ask yourself these questions whenever you’re done with a section or topic:
Do I really understand this well enough?
Am I going to review this later if I don’t quite get it now?
Any answer besides “definitely yes” is worth rethinking. At the end of the day, you are the one responsible for your own learning; you hurt nobody else by taking shortcuts.
There is still so much more to talk about the topic of learning and I would be boastful to claim that my method here is all you will ever need.
For example: how do you turn the beginner-level knowledge and turn it into an expertise ? Or, speaking of learning plans: how can you take apart a complex skill tree — such as home-building — into a manageable course that you can keep working on over the years?
That said, following my suggestions should be enough to put things in motion. Oftentimes, the two biggest obstacles that people have to overcome is taking the first step forward and continuing down that path. Once you have built up a momentum, it becomes surprisingly difficult to not keep going.
(Oh by the way, this is the same approach that I’m using to work on my writing skill. “At least half an hour everyday to research, draft, or edit blog articles” is the rule I have been following for the past four months, counting from the publication date of this piece.)
I’m gonna borrow Ira Glass’ quote here to wrap up this entry:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met.
It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”