When was the last time you learned a new skill?
Learning new things is hard for everyone and as adults, we are severely out of practice and avoid new skills like they’re toxic.
I have tried many times to learn how to code. I started writing code when I was about 10 or 11 years old and throughout high school, I continued to study but then switched to a degree in journalism, politics, and philosophy at university.
I stayed in the technology field and have built businesses that require a knowledge of developing and the surrounding skills but I am not a developer by any definition.
If like me, you are in your 30’s then you were probably taught the worst version of learning; you were forced to learn things out of a textbook that you didn’t enjoy and had no interest in. I spent years learning physics and chemistry in high school but knew with absolute certainty that I was never going to be able to apply the formula in my daily life. It was laborious and I scraped through high school science with a 35% pass. I was bored because I hated it.
Throughout your teen years, you are told what to study, how to study it and where it may be applicable. We are not allowed to follow our passions. We are forced to engage in a pre-defined world of lessons, rules, and passing grades. That is not true the second you leave school but oddly, no one tells you that you are now free to learn anything you want to learn.
Unfortunately, we are also so tired after 12 years of force-fed lessons that the fatigue drives us away from learning. Our curiosity is broken by the system that is meant to equip us for the world.
Recently I learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. That took me two solid weeks of practice and Youtube lessons. It was hard for the period that I was learning but I figured it out. The satisfaction that I gained from this tiny skill made me think about how little of my time and effort I spend learning something new.
I now have a list of things that I want to learn over my lifetime. The list includes really simple things like playing the harmonica and piano through to the most complex like learning to speak mandarin.
I spend too much of my time doing mindless things that I either know how to do or don’t enjoy or want to do (like occasionally binging too much on Netflix).
It’s very easy to become complacent when you have a certain set of skills that you refine over decades but for me, there is nothing that compares to feeling like a complete amateur when learning a new skill. I love the feeling of overcoming the gap from complete newbie to competent and then occasionally on to proficient and even sometimes expert in something random.
I challenge you to think about the last time you learned a new skill from scratch. Was it in high school? University? A decade ago or more? Go out and learn something new. Be curious about the world around you, the people you know and what skills they have and how you can grow your engagement with the world.
Just in case you need permission to learn something absolutely useless but completely fulfilling, here it is. This is the permission you were waiting for.
Go out and fulfill your curiosity. Learn something new today!