If you’re anything like me, you have an active brain that is constantly pumping ideas and a ton of skills that you want to master. For a long time, I’ve wanted to write this post for anyone who has been putting off learning a technical, unfamiliar, or otherwise challenging skill because it’s a subject that has had a tremendous impact on my life.
Just 4 years ago, I was working a job that I hated and felt like I had no trajectory. I felt that I was a smart person, but I didn’t hold the skills necessary to get me into a job market that I desperately wanted to be in. I decided to give data analytics a try. It’s an incredibly challenging field — I had to learn the fundamentals of theoretical and applied statistics as well as computer programming in order to get started. I never would have thought that these are topics that I would be able to grasp. Since I took the first step towards learning them, though, my life has never been the same.
The following 5 tips and tricks have been absolutely invaluable in my quests to learn new skills, and I think that they will help you as well. Without further ado, let’s get started!
Understand your learning style
Even though I learned the basic concepts behind major learning styles in high school, I didn’t come to fully understand the gravity and importance of it until college/early adulthood. Many of my friends were audial learners, and I often felt that something was wrong with me when I just couldn’t pick things up during lectures the way that they could.
With time and experience, I came to find that I simply learned differently than they did. I’m a kinesthetic learner, so simply listening to lectures or reading passages in textbooks would never work for me. What does work for me is taking detailed, verbatim notes on a topic, and then writing further notes in my own words.
This discovery helped me tremendously in school, but it has also helped me to find the best ways of learning new skills — I can listen to people talk or read guides, but I won’t really learn until I get some hands-on experience.
Learning styles differ from person to person. Knowing your own personal learning style is a great step to take when taking on the challenge of learning a new skill.
Be okay with being bad at things
One of my favorite quotes comes from Jake the Dog in an episode of the cartoon Adventure Time. In an effort to reassure another character that he shouldn’t expect perfection right off the bat, he says “Sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something.”
While the show as a whole is quite ridiculous, those words have stuck in my mind for years. It is so important to allow yourself time to be bad at things, and to own the title of “bad at it”. We will never be truly great at anything the first time we try it, and we should never expect ourselves to be. I know that I can be my own worst enemy when it comes to instant perfection, and I’ve found it’s important to remember that practice is the thing that ultimately brings perfection.
Don’t give up too early
The following point builds upon the last. It is SO EASY to give up once things don’t work out, especially in today’s world. We have been conditioned to expect instant gratification, and when things are challenging in the learning process our progress can be slow. Therefore, it becomes very easy to perceive time spent struggling as as wasted effort.
It is important to remember that progress takes time and practice, and that one doesn’t become a master of anything overnight. I’ve found that when I allow myself time to learn, I am shocked at the growth that I end up observing over a given period of time.
Always remember why you started
In my life, I’ve found that nobody ever takes a big chance and/or puts themselves in a position of perceived inferiority without a reason to do so.
There is always a reason that we start the process of learning. I’ve found that when I’m struggling with motivation or frustration in my learning process, it is incredibly helpful to take a step back and recall the reason that I started the process in the first place. Generally, there is an end goal that you are trying to achieve. If that goal is important enough to get you started on the learning process, it’s likely to be enough to keep you going when things get especially tough.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help
There are a thousand reasons why people tend to suffer in silence instead of asking for help. For me, as well as for many, I fear the judgement from experts on the topic. I don’t want to harm my ego by being judge as idiotic or inferior. At times, I also feel that my question isn’t worth the time that the expert in question would need to take in order to answer it.
In reality, though, I have found that people are usually happy to help in answering questions or providing advice if you’re willing to ask them. They are usually willing to take the time to help you out so you don’t have to go through the same struggles and anxiety that they did. If their schedule doesn’t allow for the time to be taken to answer your questions or explain a concept in detail, I have also found that they are happy to refer you to someone else that can help.
In many cases, the only thing causing unnecessary stress rooted in struggling is our own fear of rejection and/or judgment. Smart people generally want to help. Don’t be afraid to reach out to them.
I genuinely hope that these tips help you to learn a skill that you’ve been avoiding. I promise that you will feel better as a result, and it could dramatically change the trajectory of your life. I’m all about finding ways to help other women get ahead in this world, and this is my way of doing it. Thank you so much for reading, and please keep in touch with ways that you apply these tricks in your learning process!
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