How To Learn A New Skill Quickly

When I decided to start my first business, I was 17 years old and still in high school. I went to a public school and I never really had any formal experience with starting a business.

As you can imagine, I had to learn a bunch of new things really quickly if I wanted to be successful. Lucky for me, I had two things going for me. I was a really good self-educator and I could pick up things fast.

Many people have wondered how I’ve been able to learn so many different things in such a short period of time. I never realized it, but one of the best skills I have mastered is learning to learn.

In this article, I share my tips on how to learn a new skill quickly:

Break It Down

In 3 months, I had taught myself how to do search engine optimization for Google, Yahoo & Bing. I had no prior background to this, but realized that this was a service my customers really wanted.

Before you can master any skill, you must break it all down. Categorize the various elements of your learning into different jars. You’ll want to have various jars for each level of learning you must do. For example, level one may be fundamentals/basics for something.

You need to have a clear understanding of what you must learn in order to successfully master a skill. You want to categorize each of the skills into different jars based on difficulty and level of importance.

You need to ask yourself what the very minimum you must learn before you can start implementing or taking action. Once you’ve engulfed all the knowledge from those jars and created a segmented plan of what goes into mastering this skill, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Apply It

It’s one thing to memorize something, but it’s a whole another thing to implement it. One of the biggest issues I have with college is that curriculums and classes are focused around memorization instead of implementation.

Once you have the fundamentals down, you’re ready to take action. As you apply your skills, you’ll quickly hit a bunch of roadblocks. Each obstacle may require you to learn something new about this skill in order to get past it.

Do not look at this as a negative thing, but rather as a positive thing. I have found this to be the quickest way of learning. It’s hard to learn about something from A to Z when you don’t know exactly what you’re going to need to know.

By applying your skill, you quickly figure out the lessons that are more important than others. You get to learn on the fly, but you’re guaranteed to actually learn something since you won’t be able to get past the roadblock until you implement it.

Sequence It

Once you start applying your skills, you quickly learn what items are of greater importance to you. Everyone uses skills differently and must learn various areas of a craft. Instead of learning everything from A to Z, you get to sample the playing field a bit by applying yourself.

Now you have a better idea of what things you really need to learn and in what order. Sequence your jars so you can create a lesson plan for yourself on what you need to learn.

Do not stop implementing or taking action to just learn. You learn by doing and that’s the quickest way to master a craft. Continue trying your best to apply the skill and only stop when you’ve hit a roadblock.

Practice It

Just like anything, the more you practice something, the better you will become. You can’t expect to be renowned at a skill immediately after picking it up. You need to constantly practice and improve yourself.

When I started learning SEO, I began working on my own sites. However, I knew I had to raise the stakes if I really wanted to master this skill while getting some practice. I started offering SEO as a service to my clients at a heavily discounted rate.

The stakes were officially raised. I was now responsible for delivering a service to my clients while I had the opportunity to practice and sharpen up my skills along the way. I believe that pressure is the greatest teacher because failure doesn’t become an option at that point.

Conclusion

By applying this simple 4-step process, I have been able to master a handful of new skills over the years. In this article, I shared my tips for how to learn a new skill quickly!

photo credit: Jan Tik via photopin cc