essay on learning a new skill

Essay on Skill Development

Students are often asked to write an essay on Skill Development in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Skill Development

Introduction.

Skill development is a vital part of personal growth. It involves learning new abilities or improving existing ones to enhance performance.

Importance of Skill Development

Skills are essential for success in life. They help us solve problems, work efficiently, and achieve our goals.

Types of Skills

There are many types of skills, such as communication, problem-solving, creativity, and teamwork. Each skill can be developed with practice.

In conclusion, skill development is a lifelong process. It equips us with the capabilities needed to navigate life effectively.

250 Words Essay on Skill Development

Introduction to skill development.

Skill development refers to the process of identifying one’s skill gaps and developing and honing these skills. It is vital for personal, professional, and economic growth. In an ever-evolving world, the ability to adapt and acquire new skills is crucial to meet industry demands and personal goals.

The Importance of Skill Development

Skill development is a tool to enhance both productivity and employability. It fosters adaptability, paving the way for lifelong learning and continuous improvement. In the professional sphere, developing skills can lead to career advancement and job security. On a macro level, it contributes to the economic development of a nation by improving the quality of its workforce.

Methods of Skill Development

Skill development can be achieved through various methods like education, training, and practical experience. Modern methods include e-learning platforms, which offer flexibility and a wide array of courses. Internships and on-the-job training are practical ways of acquiring industry-specific skills.

Challenges and Solutions

Despite its importance, skill development faces challenges like the rapid pace of technological change and a lack of awareness about the need for continuous learning. To overcome these, a mindset shift is required where learning is seen as a lifelong process. Governments and educational institutions need to promote skill development programs and provide access to quality training.

In conclusion, skill development is a vital aspect of personal and professional growth. By embracing lifelong learning and leveraging available resources, individuals can enhance their skills, adapt to changing environments, and contribute to societal progress. It is a shared responsibility between individuals, educational institutions, and governments to promote and support skill development.

500 Words Essay on Skill Development

Skill development refers to the process of identifying one’s skill gaps and developing and honing these skills. It is vital because the development of skills fosters employability and will help you navigate the rapidly changing work environment. In today’s age of digital disruption and constant innovation, skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and complex problem-solving are more valuable than ever.

The importance of skill development cannot be overstated. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the demand for new skill sets and competencies is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, 50% of all employees will need reskilling. Skill development is not just about acquiring new skills but also about enhancing existing ones and learning to adapt to a constantly evolving work environment.

Role of Education in Skill Development

Education plays a pivotal role in skill development. Traditional education systems, however, often fail to equip students with the necessary skills to navigate the modern workplace. It’s important for educational institutions to integrate skill development into their curriculums, focusing on skills like critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, and digital literacy. It’s equally important for students to take charge of their own skill development, seeking out opportunities for learning beyond the classroom.

Skills for the Future

The future of work is uncertain and unpredictable due to rapid technological advancements. According to the World Economic Forum, the top skills for the future include complex problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence, judgement and decision making, service orientation, negotiation, and cognitive flexibility. These are the skills that will drive the future economy and determine individual success in the job market.

The Role of Governments and Corporations

Governments and corporations also have a significant role to play in skill development. Governments need to invest in education and training programs that equip citizens with the skills needed for the future. Corporations, on the other hand, need to invest in training and development programs for their employees, helping them stay relevant in their roles and adapt to changing job requirements.

In conclusion, skill development is an ongoing process that everyone must engage in to stay relevant in today’s fast-paced world. It requires a collective effort from individuals, educational institutions, corporations, and governments. By focusing on skill development, we can prepare ourselves for the future of work, fostering a workforce that’s adaptable, innovative, and ready for whatever comes next.

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• Essay on Importance of Skill Development
• Essay on Youth Development
• Essay on Slum Area Development

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• Dear Life Kit
• Life Skills

Learning a new skill can be hard. Here's how to set yourself up for success

Rommel Wood

Andee Tagle

This is one of my favorite questions to ask people: What was the last thing you taught yourself how to do?

I (Rommel) like it because the answers are usually less about the actual skill and more about the motivation behind learning it. It's a question I leaned on a lot when I was booking contestants on the NPR game show Ask Me Another .

But I don't really get to ask it anymore. Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s and I'm not meeting as many new people these days. The pandemic might also be a factor. Plus, Ask Me Anothe r recently ended, and it got me thinking about my time on the show and "the question" that so often cracked people open in a really interesting way.

A Knitter, A Rock Climber And A Mixologist Teach Us How To Find A Hobby

So I reached out to some former contestants to see if they remembered their answers. Sam Cappoli learned how to drive a car with a manual transmission, AKA "a stick." Amy Paull was training herself to do a pull-up. Cappoli's motivation was to finally learn how to do something his mom tried to teach him as a teenager. Paull's motivation was to gain strength so she could become a better escape room teammate. But there is more to both of their stories. Sam realized that he couldn't learn how to drive from just watching a few youtube videos and a shoulder condition made Amy re-evaluate her goal of pullup dominance.

Explore Life Kit

This story comes from Life Kit , NPR's family of podcasts to help make life better — covering everything from exercise to raising kids to making friends. For more, sign up for the newsletter and follow @NPRLifeKit on Twitter

It can be incredibly gratifying to harness mastery of a skill. But, why is learning new things so hard?

Maybe it's because we need to rethink how we go about learning. Here are some tips! Figure out what it is that you want to learn. Then...

Set yourself up for success

In addition to asking former Ask Me Another contestants "the question" I also turned to my 3-year-old daughter and asked her what was the last thing she learned how to do? She was quick to tell me she can turn on the lights all by herself. After a couple of years of attempts, she is now tall enough to reach a switch and has mastered the fine motor skills it takes to grip a switch and flip it on and off. It's a skill relevant to her but also to everyone — we just don't necessarily think of it as a skill anymore.

Rachel Wu is an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. She studies how we learn over the course of our lives. Wu says it's easier for kids and babies to learn new things because their whole lives are centered on learning. Babies are incredibly open-minded. They want to learn everything because everything is relevant to them.

Sewing your own clothes can be empowering. Here's how to get started

Wu says we can learn from that by asking, "is the thing I'm trying to learn relevant to my life?" Next, find yourself an instructor — someone who is really good at breaking up the things you want to learn in approachable ways.

Then, give yourself a realistic timeline to learn something new. Using babies as an example — we don't expect newborns to be able to communicate the second they are born. It often takes a baby at least a year to start accumulating a pen of recognizable words in their vocabulary. Give yourself the same amount of time to learn something as you'd give a child to learn it too.

Keep tinkering with the challenge at hand

If you're struggling to stay motivated, or feel like you're hitting a wall in your progress, stop and adjust your process. Play around with your method by introducing a new path to learning.

Take Wu, for example. She's learning how to speak German. She takes classes on the campus where she works, but she also started watching one of her favorite TV shows, The Nanny, dubbed in German and slowed down to 50%.

" The Nann y was nice because it teaches you more everyday language, and phrases that you would encounter on a daily basis," Wu says.

Yes, you can lift weights! Here's how to overcome gym intimidation and start training

She uses this handy trick with Pixar films and with listening to German audiobooks for kids.

Tinkering is part of it but so is accepting that you'll need to be open to possibly starting over.

Shots - Health News

Feeling artsy here's how making art helps your brain.

Take Nell Painter. Painter is a retired professor at Princeton. She wrote a book called, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over . When she was in her 60s she earned a bachelor's degree and an MFA in painting. She says an exercise she learned during an early art class really helped her adjust her relationship with her work and mistakes.

She would draw and draw, look at the model, and draw some more trying to get it right, Painter says. Then the teacher would come and tell her to "rub it out and draw it again, 10 inches to the right." Once again, Painter would draw and work to get it right, and then the teacher would say rub it out and draw it 10% smaller.

"The lesson is you can rub out your work," Painter says. "It doesn't all have to be a [masterpiece.] It doesn't all have to be right, and it doesn't all have to be saved. ... You can rub that sucker out."

Don't be afraid to make mistakes

We don't like making mistakes. But when you're learning something, mistakes are an important part of the process.

Manu Kapur is a professor of learning sciences and higher education at ETH in Zurich Switzerland, where he writes and teaches about the benefits of renormalizing failure and the idea of productive failure. He says the struggle to let yourself make mistakes is really hard.

A Field Guide for Fledgling Birders

"It's a constant effort to tell yourself that 'This is something I do not know. I cannot possibly expect myself to get it immediately,'" Kapur says. "when I'm struggling, I just need to tell myself that this is exactly the right zone to be in and then to do it again and again and again. And until such time, you just become comfortable with being uncomfortable because you're learning something."

So, if you're worried it's too late to start that new language class or the fear of failure has stopped you from picking up that instrument, this is your sign to put your caution aside and just get started. Failure will likely be a part of the process, and that's okay. It's the trying — and the learning — that counts most.

The audio portion of this episode was produced by Andee Tagle, with engineering support from Stuart Rushfield.

We'd love to hear from you. If you have a good life hack, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected]. Your tip could appear in an upcoming episode.

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How to Master a New Skill

We all need to get better at something.

We all want to be better at something. After all, self-improvement is necessary to getting ahead at work. But once you know what you want to be better at — be it public speaking , using social media, or analyzing data — how do you start? Of course, learning techniques will vary depending on the skill and the person, but there are some general rules you can follow.

• Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, cohost of the Women at Work podcast , and the author of two books: Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict . She writes and speaks about workplace dynamics. Watch her TEDx talk on conflict and follow her on LinkedIn . amyegallo

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Is It Really Too Late to Learn New Skills?

By Margaret Talbot

Among the things I have not missed since entering middle age is the sensation of being an absolute beginner. It has been decades since I’ve sat in a classroom in a gathering cloud of incomprehension (Algebra 2, tenth grade) or sincerely tried, lesson after lesson, to acquire a skill that was clearly not destined to play a large role in my life (modern dance, twelfth grade). Learning to ride a bicycle in my early thirties was an exception—a little mortifying when my husband had to run alongside the bike, as you would with a child—but ultimately rewarding. Less so was the time when a group of Japanese schoolchildren tried to teach me origami at a public event where I was the guest of honor—I’ll never forget their sombre puzzlement as my clumsy fingers mutilated yet another paper crane.

Like Tom Vanderbilt, a journalist and the author of “Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning” (Knopf), I learn new facts all the time but new skills seldom. Journalists regularly drop into unfamiliar subcultures and domains of expertise, learning enough at least to ask the right questions. The distinction he draws between his energetic stockpiling of declarative knowledge, or knowing that , and his scant attention to procedural knowledge, or knowing how , is familiar to me. The prospect of reinventing myself as, say, a late-blooming skier or ceramicist or marathon runner sparks only an idle interest, something like wondering what it might be like to live in some small town you pass on the highway.

There is certainly a way to put a positive spin on that reluctance. If you love your job and find it intellectually and creatively fulfilling, you may not feel the urge to discover other rooms in the house of your mind, whatever hidden talents and lost callings may repose there. But there are less happy forces at work, too. There’s the fear of being bad at something you think is worthwhile—and, maybe even more so, being seen to be bad at it—when you have accustomed yourself to knowing, more or less, what you’re doing. What’s the point of starting something new when you know you’ll never be much good at it? Middle age, to go by my experience—and plenty of research—brings greater emotional equanimity, an unspectacular advantage but a relief. (The lows aren’t as low, the highs not as high.) Starting all over at something would seem to put you right back into that emotional churn—exhilaration, self-doubt, but without the open-ended possibilities and renewable energy of youth. Parties mean something different and far more exciting when you’re younger and you might meet a person who will change your life; so does learning something new—it might be fun, but it’s less likely to transform your destiny at forty or fifty.

In “Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over,” Nell Painter, as distinguished a historian as they come—legions of honors, seven books, a Princeton professorship—recounts her experience earning first a B.F.A. at Rutgers and then an M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design while in her sixties. As a Black woman used to feeling either uncomfortably singled out or ignored in public spaces where Black women were few, she was taken aback in art school to find that “old” was such an overwhelming signifier: “It wasn’t that I stopped being my individual self or stopped being black or stopped being female, but that old , now linked to my sex, obscured everything else beyond old lady .” Painter finds herself periodically undone by the overt discouragement of some of her teachers or the silence of her fellow-students during group crits of her work—wondering if they were “critiquing me, old-black-woman-totally-out-of-place,” or her work. Reading her book, I was full of admiration for Painter’s willingness to take herself out of a world in which her currency—scholarly accomplishment—commanded respect and put herself into a different one where that coin often went unrecognized altogether, all out of exultation in the art-making itself. But her quest also induced some anxiety in me.

Painter is no dilettante: she’s clear about not wanting to be a “Sunday Painter”; she is determined to be an Artist, and recognized as such. But “dilettante” is one of those words which deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults. Many of us are wary of being dismissed as dabblers, people who have a little too much leisure, who are a little too cute and privileged in our pastimes. This seems a narrative worth pushing back against. We might remember, as Vanderbilt points out, that the word “dilettante” comes from the Italian for “to delight.” In the eighteenth century, a group of aristocratic Englishmen popularized the term, founding the Society of the Dilettanti to undertake tours of the Continent, promote the art of knowledgeable conversation, collect art, and subsidize archeological expeditions. Frederick II of Prussia dissed the dilettanti as “lovers of the arts and sciences” who “understand them only superficially but who however are ranked in superior class to those who are totally ignorant.” (They were, of course, wealthy, with oodles of time on their hands.) The term turned more pejorative in modern times, with the rise of professions and of licensed expertise. But if you think of dilettantism as an endorsement of learning for learning’s sake—not for remuneration or career advancement but merely because it delights the mind—what’s not to love?

Maybe it could be an antidote to the self-reported perfectionism that has grown steadily more prevalent among college students in the past three decades. Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, the authors of a 2019 study on perfectionism among American, British, and Canadian college students, have written that “increasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own,” and are worried that others will judge them harshly for their perceived failings. This is not, the researchers point out, good for mental health. In the U.S., we’ll be living, for the foreseeable future, in a competitive, individualistic, allegedly meritocratic society, where we can inspect and troll and post humiliating videos of one another all the live-long day. Being willing to involve yourself in something you’re mediocre at but intrinsically enjoy, to give yourself over to the imperfect pursuit of something you’d like to know how to do for no particular reason, seems like a small form of resistance.

Tom Vanderbilt got motivated to start learning again during the time he spent waiting about while his young daughter did her round of lessons and activities. Many of us have been there, “on some windowless lower level of a school huddled near an electrical outlet to keep your device alive,” as he nicely puts it—waiting, avoiding the parents who want to talk scores and rankings, trying to shoehorn a bit of work into a stranded hour or two. But not many of us are inspired to wonder, in such moments, why we ourselves aren’t in there practicing our embouchure on the trumpet or our Salchow on the ice. This may speak to my essential laziness, but I have fond memories of curling up on the child-size couch in the musty, overheated basement of our local community center reading a book for a stolen hour, while my kids took drum lessons and fencing classes. Vanderbilt, on the other hand, asks himself whether “we, in our constant chaperoning of these lessons, were imparting a subtle lesson: that learning was for the young.” Rather than molder on the sidelines, he decides to throw himself into acquiring five new skills. (That’s his term, though I started to think of these skills as “accomplishments” in the way that marriageable Jane Austen heroines have them, talents that make a long evening pass more agreeably, that can turn a person into more engaging company, for herself as much as for others.) Vanderbilt’s search is for “the naïve optimism, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions—the unencumbered beginner’s mind. ” And so he tries to achieve competence, not mastery, in chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and making. (He learns to weld a wedding ring to replace two he lost surfing.) He adds juggling, not because he’s so interested in it but because—with its steep and obvious learning curve (most people, starting from scratch, can learn to juggle three balls in a few days) and its fun factor—juggling is an oft-used task for laboratory studies of how people learn. These accomplishments aren’t likely to help his job performance as a journalist, or to be marketable in any way, except insofar as the learning of them forms the idea for the book.

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Vanderbilt is good on the specific joys and embarrassments of being a late-blooming novice, or “kook,” as surfers sometimes call gauche beginners. How you think you know how to sing a song but actually know only how to sing along with one, so that, when you hear your own voice, stripped of the merciful camouflage the recorded version provides, “you’re not only hearing the song as you’ve never quite heard it, you are hearing your voice as you’ve never quite heard it.” The particular, democratic pleasure of making that voice coalesce with others’ in a choir, coupled with the way, when friends and family come to see your adult group perform, “the parental smile of eternal indulgence gives way to a more complicated expression.” The fact that feedback, especially the positive kind stressing what you’re doing right, delivered by an actual human teacher or coach watching what you do, is crucial for a beginner—which might seem obvious except that, in an age when so many instructional videos of every sort are available online, you might get lulled into thinking you could learn just as well without it. The weirdness of the phenomenon that, for many of us, our drawing skills are frozen forever as they were when we were kids. Children tend to draw better, Vanderbilt explains, when they are around five years old and rendering what they feel; later, they fall into what the psychologist Howard Gardner calls “the doldrums of literalism ”—trying to draw exactly what they see but without the technical skill or instruction that would allow them to do so effectively. Many of us never progress beyond that stage. Personally, I’m stuck at about age eight, when I filled notebooks with ungainly, scampering horses. Yet I was entranced by how both Vanderbilt and, in her far more ambitious way, Painter describe drawing as an unusually absorbing, almost meditative task—one that makes you look at the world differently even when you’re not actually doing it and pours you into undistracted flow when you are.

One problem with teaching an old dog new tricks is that certain cognitive abilities decline with age, and by “age” I mean starting as early as one’s twenties. Mental-processing speed is the big one. Maybe that’s one reason that air-traffic controllers have to retire at age fifty-six, while English professors can stay at it indefinitely. Vanderbilt cites the work of Neil Charness, a psychology professor at Florida State University, who has shown that the older a chess player is the slower she is to perceive a threatened check, no matter what her skill level. Processing speed is why I invariably lose against my daughter (pretty good-naturedly, if you ask me) at a game that I continue to play: Anomia. In this game, players flip cards bearing the names of categories (dog breeds, Olympic athletes, talk-show hosts, whatever), and, if your card displays the same small symbol as one of your opponents’ does, you try to be the first to call out something belonging to the other person’s category. If my daughter and I each had ten minutes to list as many talk-show hosts as we could, I’d probably triumph—after all, I have several decades of late-night-TV viewing over her. But, with speed the essence, a second’s lag in my response speed cooks my goose every game.

Still, as Rich Karlgaard notes in his reassuring book “Late Bloomers: The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace,” there are cognitive compensations. “Our brains are constantly forming neural networks and pattern-recognition capabilities that we didn’t have in our youth when we had blazing synaptic horsepower,” he writes. Fluid intelligence, which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one’s feet, favors the young. But crystallized intelligence—the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise, and Fingerspitzengefühl —is often enriched by advancing age. And there’s more to it than that: particular cognitive skills rise and fall at different rates across the life span, as Joshua K. Hartshorne, now a professor of psychology at Boston College, and Laura T. Germine, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, show in a 2015 paper on the subject. Processing speed peaks in the late teens, short-term memory for names at around twenty-two, short-term memory for faces at around thirty, vocabulary at around fifty (in some studies, even at around sixty-five), while social understanding, including the ability to recognize and interpret other people’s emotions, rises at around forty and tends to remain high. “Not only is there no age at which humans are performing at peak at all cognitive tasks,” Hartshorne and Germine conclude, “there may not be an age at which humans are at peak on most cognitive tasks.” This helps Karlgaard’s case that we need a “kinder clock for human development”—societal pressure on young adults to specialize and succeed right out of college is as wrongheaded and oppressive on the one end of life as patronizing attitudes toward the old are on the other.

The gift of crystallized intelligence explains why some people can bloom spectacularly when they’re older—especially, perhaps, in a field like literature, where a rich vein of life experience can be a writerly asset. Annie Proulx published her first novel at the age of fifty-six, Raymond Chandler at fifty-one. Frank McCourt, who had been a high-school teacher in New York City for much of his career, published his first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” at sixty-six. Edith Wharton, who had been a society matron prone to neurasthenia and trapped in a gilded cage of a marriage, produced no novels until she was forty. Publishing fiction awakened her from what she described as “a kind of torpor,” a familiar feeling for the true later bloomer. “I had groped my way through to my vocation,” Wharton wrote, “and thereafter I never questioned that story-telling was my job.”

In science and technology, we often think of the people who make precocious breakthroughs as the true geniuses—Einstein developing his special theory of relativity at twenty-six. Einstein himself once said that “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.” A classic paper on the relationship between age and scientific creativity showed that American Nobel winners tended to have done their prize-winning work at thirty-six in physics, thirty-nine in chemistry, and forty-one in medicine—that creativity rose in the twenties and thirties and began a gradual decline in the forties.

That picture has been complicated by more recent research. According to a 2014 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which undertook a broad review of the research on age and scientific breakthroughs, the average age at which people make significant contributions to science has been rising during the twentieth century—notably to forty-eight, for physicists. (One explanation might be that the “burden of knowledge” that people have to take on in many scientific disciplines has increased.) Meanwhile, a 2016 paper in Science that considered a wider range of scientists than Nobelists concluded that “the highest-impact work in a scientist’s career is randomly distributed within her body of work. That is, the highest-impact work can be, with the same probability, anywhere in the sequence of papers published by a scientist—it could be the first publication, could appear mid-career, or could be a scientist’s last publication.”

When it comes to more garden-variety late blooming, the kind of new competencies that Vanderbilt is seeking, he seems to have gone about it in the most promising way. For one thing, it appears that people may learn better when they are learning multiple skills at once, as Vanderbilt did. A recent study that looked at the experiences of adults over fifty-five who learned three new skills at once—for example, Spanish, drawing, and music composition—found that they not only acquired proficiency in these areas but improved their cognitive functioning over all, including working and episodic memory. In a 2017 paper, Rachel Wu, a neuroscientist at U.C. Riverside, and her co-authors, George W. Rebok and Feng Vankee Lin, propose six factors that they think are needed to sustain cognitive development, factors that tend to be less present in people’s lives as they enter young adulthood and certainly as they grow old. These include what the Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” the belief that abilities are not fixed but can improve with effort; a commitment to serious rather than “hobby learning” (in which “the learner casually picks up skills for a short period and then quits due to difficulty, disinterest, or other time commitments”); a forgiving environment that promotes what Dweck calls a “not yet” rather than a “cannot” approach; and a habit of learning multiple skills simultaneously, which may help by encouraging the application of capacities acquired in one domain to another. What these elements have in common, Wu and her co-authors point out, is that they tend to replicate how children learn.

So eager have I been all my life to leave behind the subjects I was bad at and hunker down with the ones I was good at—a balm in many ways—that, until reading these books, I’d sort of forgotten the youthful pleasure of moving our little tokens ahead on a bunch of winding pathways of aptitude, lagging behind here, surging ahead there. I’d been out of touch with that sense of life as something that might encompass multiple possibilities for skill and artistry. But now I’ve been thinking about taking up singing in a serious way again, learning some of the jazz standards my mom, a professional singer, used to croon to me at bedtime. If learning like a child sounds a little airy-fairy, whatever the neuroscience research says, try recalling what it felt like to learn how to do something new when you didn’t really care what your performance of it said about your place in the world, when you didn’t know what you didn’t know. It might feel like a whole new beginning. ♦

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By David Remnick

By Adam Gopnik

By Leslie Jamison

8 Tips for Learning a New Skill

3. never forget why you're doing it..

Posted November 28, 2023 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Why Education Is Important
• Find a Child Therapist
• Setting a clear goal and breaking a skill into smaller components can help people learn new skills.
• Practice for a new skills should be thoughtful, slow, and deliberate rather than rushed.
• A growth mindset is the belief that abilities are developed with effort.

Learning new skills can be a great way to keep an aging brain in shape. There is great joy in reinventing yourself by discovering unfamiliar areas of expertise. Here are some general guidelines for how to learn a new skill (Vanderbilt, 2021).

1. Establish learning goals. Having a clear goal in mind before you begin your journey is essential. Giving yourself something to work for is a great way to give meaning to your study. Having narrow and precisely defined goals and questions is far better than broadly defined goals and questions. Well-defined and achievable goals fuel motivation.

2. Start small. Breaking the skill into small chunks and mastering them one at a time until the act becomes automatic is an effective way of learning. Smaller goals are easier to reach and increase your motivation. Small steps make the skill seem easier in the beginning.

3. Remember why you’re doing it. It is important for people to shield their crucial goals from competing goals during goal pursuit. One way to accomplish this is by reminding yourself of its importance. Obstacles such as self-doubt can deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults. Negative self-talk can manifest in a variety of ways (e.g., w hat’s the point of starting something new when you know you’ll never be great at it?’, or ‘It is too late’, etc.). You are learning a new skill for your personal growth (Painter, 2019). Learning new skills changes the way you think or the way you see the world. For example, learning to play an instrument changes the way you listen to music.

4. The power of intrinsic motivation . Do something because you love it. Intrinsic motivation refers to wanting to do something for its own sake. The focus is on the pleasure that arises from the act of doing something rather than achieving some ultimate goal. Activities such as music and the arts, reading, intellectual discovery, sports, and a host of other fulfilling pursuits are often sustained by the joy of the activity itself.

5. Mental representations. A mental representation shows you what you are supposed to be doing. Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual performance. For example, in music, mental representation (how the piece should sound) allows expert musicians to duplicate the sounds of a piece that they want to produce while they play. Students with better mental representations of the music are better at correcting mistakes in practice.

6. Thoughtful practice. Thoughtful practice is purposeful and knows where it is going and how to get there. Practicing a suboptimal technique could lead to suboptimal results. Being deliberate requires you to slow it down. When you work slowly, things become simpler. New information needs to be learned slowly. You don’t perform better when you speed through a course.

7. Adopt a growth mindset . A "growth mindset" refers to the belief that abilities are not fixed but can improve with effort (Dweck, 2006). Just because you are not immediately good at something doesn’t mean you won’t be eventually. We’re bad at everything before we’re good at it.

8. Take advantage of being an adult learner. As we age, we are more likely to take a step back and see the big picture. As we age, we tend to forget the details of events more readily than when we were younger. At the same time, we do an excellent job extracting the point, or the general theme, of those same events. While young children pick up new skills more easily, they also have more trouble with seeing the big picture and controlling their impulses.

The take-home lesson is that to keep our minds sharp in older age we need to engage in new challenges. Lifelong learners get great satisfaction from pushing themselves to develop new skills.

Facebook /LinkedIn image: JLco Julia Amaral/Shutterstock

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.

Painter, Nell (2019). Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over . Counterpoint Press.

Vanderbilt, Tom (2021). Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Vintage Books.

Shahram Heshmat, Ph.D., is an associate professor emeritus of health economics of addiction at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

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Learn How to Learn: 4 Repeatable Steps to Master Any New Skill

A real-world guide to mastering any new skill

“I never want to see another test again.”

That was my first thought when I finished my last exam in my Master’s program. I had been learning for nearly 20 years, and I thought I was finally finished. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

We’re constantly learning new skills from the moment we enter this world to the moment we leave. It occurs in both formal capacities (in school or on the job) and in informal capacities (the perfect technique for grilling a steak from your buddy).

As Tony Robbins describes, learning is in fact a skill, one that can be improved :

“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.”

The increasing amount of self-taught professionals (developers, musicians, designers, etc) is a testament to how perfecting the art of learning can change your life. The big question is, of course, how? How do you get better at learning? How can you build a coherent plan to perfect a new skill?

Fortunately, you don’t have to start from scratch. Here’s your four-part game plan complete with advice from master learners like Tim Ferriss, research on expertise and skill acquisition, and a bit of my own personal experience.

To be successful, you need to be selective in the skill you’re trying to master. Picking the wrong skill can sabotage your success from the start.

Make sure it’s applicable

In 2010, I started dabbling in building websites. I was blindly copying and pasting PHP code I found on the Internet. As a result, I frequently brought my site down with bad code and had to pay a developer $20-$30 to fix each new issue. This wasn’t a sustainable habit in the long run. I then spent a few weeks learning some basics so I could fix most problems myself. The learning part was easy because it applied to something I was interested in (building websites) and directly solved a problem I was facing.

That’s lesson number one:

The perfect skill either solves a problem you’re facing or scratches an itch you have. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself lacking the motivation and perseverance necessary to be successful.

Be very specific

Specific goals are easier to visualize and lend themselves to 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 learn how to code. Specific : I want to learn CSS positioning so I can redesign some elements of my website.

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 applicable to my situation than others?
• When I look at individuals that have mastered this particular skill, what aspects of their performance most intrigue me?

Make sure you’re in love with the process, not just the outcome.

Geoff Colvin, author of Talent is Overrated , has spent years exploring high performers across a variety of skill sets. He’s found one question that predicts how good someone will get at a particular skill:

The question that ended up being the most predictive of skill was “How long are you going to be doing this?”

Learning is a frustrating process. You’re guaranteed to experience obstacles along the way that make it seem as though giving up is the best solution. There are two ways to fight this inevitability before you even get started.

The first is to pick a skill where the road to mastery is as exciting to you as the finish line . For example, if you’re entering medical school for the sole purpose of landing a six-figure salary, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Sure, the paycheck is nice, but successful doctors enjoy helping patients more than anything else. Research consistently shows that, while a focus on long-term goals can motivate us to get started, 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 play guitar can be broken down into a progression of learning five separate songs arranged from easiest to hardest. Each successful song represents a checkpoint to celebrate progress.

In school, your teachers were responsible for building lesson plans and making sure you were headed in the right direction. When you’re teaching yourself though, you’re on your own. That can be a daunting prospect when you’re just getting started.

Here are 3 strategies you can use to make sure you’re learning the right things in the most effective way possible:

Deconstruct and select

Tim Ferriss is renowned for his learning abilities. He markets himself as a “human guinea pig,” and has accomplished some impressive feats like learning to play the drums in five days (and performing live with Foreigner on stage). Tim champions the DiSSS method , which stands for Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes.

Deconstructing a skill and Selecting the most meaningful pieces to the puzzle make the impossible seem manageable. To start, Tim asks a basic question:

“What are the minimal learnable units, the LEGO blocks, I should starting with?”

If your goal is to learn JavaScript, for example, you could spend months learning every bit of syntax (similar to grammar rules but for code) imaginable. However, with just the basics of variables, comparison operators, and if/then statements, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish. Suddenly, a monumental task (learning JavaScript) is infinitely more manageable. In fact, when I talked to a handful of developers at a recent meetup, they all universally agreed that new coders spend too much time on learning syntax and not enough time actually coding.

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.

Find a mentor

When you’re unfamiliar with a skill, it can be exceptionally hard to determine which parts of a particular skill are worth learning right off the bat. To circumvent this issue, find a mentor to help you along.

I’ve found that most successful individuals are willing to pay it forward and help out. However, have specific questions in mind to save you both time. Here are some question to help start the conversation:

• Thinking back to when you were just getting started, what parts of your skill were the most frustrating to learn? Now, which of those do you use on a daily/weekly basis and which have you forgotten?
• What parts of your skill did you worry about the most when you were getting started that you now feel are unnecessary?
• When looking at other experts in your field, what specific capabilities help you distinguish experts from non-experts?

Here’s a resource for more actionable advice on how to ask potential mentors for help the right way .

Stop learning and start doing

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. - Albert Einstein ( via )

Learning is only valuable if, at some point, you actually need to apply what you learn and start doing, the earlier the better. In fact, practicing a skill results in much faster progress than reading or watching tutorials. As Daniel Coyle states in his book The Talent Code :

Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it.

Once you have the basics down, start putting them into practice in whatever way you can. When you’re new to a particular skill this can be difficult. It’s hard to know what’s possible. Ferriss recommends using a technique called Reversal:

The process of looking at the final product of your skill and backtracking to find the best way to begin a task.

In learning PHP, I started by downloading well-built WordPress plugins. By looking at their code, I could get a better feel for formatting and sequencing. Then, I would try to rewrite snippets of the plugin from memory and compare my result to the finished product. As a result, I was able to learn while working in a real-world environment.

Benjamin Franklin used a similar technique to improve his writing skills . He would sit down with copies of The Spectator , a British culture and politics magazine, and take detailed notes of the articles. Then he would take the notes and try to recreate the sentences in his own words, comparing his writing to the originals to see where he could improve in style and prose. He went on to be one of the most influential writers in American history!

Practice makes perfect.

That might be true, but all practice is not created equal. Ultimately, it’s not how much you practice, but how smart you practice that determines how well you perform.

Practice differently

As Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking With Einstein , explains, amateurs and experts practice very differently:

Amateur musicians… tend to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros tend to work through tedious exercises or focus on difficult parts of pieces.

Experts use deliberate practice, focusing on specific elements of their trade and working on them specifically until they improve. As an example, if you’re trying to improve your short game in golf, playing a round of 18 isn’t likely to improve your performance. A better solution would be to hit a few buckets of balls aimed at a target 50 yards away.

Practice is an imperative part of building any skill, but the practice needs to be specific. Identify the fundamental components of the skill you’re learning that you struggle with the most. Find ways to address those areas in a focused way.

Tighten feedback loops

You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen:

“You won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring.” – Joshua Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein

Learning to play the piano well would be virtually impossible if you only played while wearing noise-canceling headphones. How would you know if you were improving?

Feedback is vitally important to the learning process. It helps you evaluate how well you’re doing and identify areas for improvement. Faster feedback is always better. For example, if you had to wait two hours to find out whether you made a free throw, you would have already forgotten any technique adjustments you made on that particular shot.

Obtaining feedback isn’t always easy. When you’re just starting to play piano, you know immediately when you’ve made a mistake. However, if you’re trying to go from mediocre to great, self-assessment can be difficult. Here are some tips for getting quality feedback on your work:

• Share work publicly . It’s incredibly scary to share your work with others particularly experts in a given field, but it’s absolutely essential for improvement. If you’re learning to code, for example, create a project in GitHub and ask a developer colleague (or your newfound mentor) to do a code review.
• Be specific . When asking for feedback, be very specific. If you’re writing a program in JavaScript, asking, “How does the code look to you?” is too broad. Instead, pick a specific element and ask for direct feedback: “This was a tricky aspect I struggled with. How would you have handled it?”
• Ask for negative feedback . We often ask questions in a way that either yields no helpful feedback or only positive remarks. For example, when I used to teach group fitness, I would ask, “How did you guys enjoy class today?” Unsurprisingly, I either received no response or some vague nods. I only received helpful feedback when I directly asked for it: “What is one aspect to today’s class that could have been improved?”
• Don’t make it about you . I’ve found it helpful to remove yourself from the question when asking for feedback whenever appropriate. In the previous bullet point, I’m asking for feedback on the class not my specific performance. Framing the question as “What is one thing I could have done better in class today?” makes the feedback more personal. Depending on who you’re asking, I’ve found that this can make the person hesitant to provide critical feedback.

Spread out your training

When you first start learning a new skill, the temptation is to go all out dedicating every waking moment to your new passion. It’s not surprising that this type of approach quickly leads to burnout. Dedicating all of your energy towards one activity isn’t sustainable for the long-term.

Avoiding burnout is just one of the many benefits to spreading out your learning. For example, research on students found that spreading out studying over time was one of the most effective learning strategies for increasing test performance.

Try to reign in your enthusiasm coming out of the gate. Allow yourself to indulge in your newfound curiosity, but make sure your class/practice/training schedule is realistic and sustainable.

You could have the perfect skill in mind, narrowed down to a specific segment that is directly applicable to your life. However, if you give it up after two days, you won’t make any progress.

Make a plan

Ramit Sethi, author and creator of IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, recommends using recommitment psychology to set yourself up for success:

“Sit down, take out your calendar, and do the math. When exactly are you going to practice? What are you going to give up, reschedule, or stop doing to make the time?”

If you’re going to take on learning a new skill, something else is going to have to give. Failing to plan ahead can cause trouble down the road when your schedule is packed, and you have to pick between a handful of priorities. Plans help you to solve problems before they arise.

Personally, learning and self-development is my highest priority of the day. As a result, I do it first thing in the morning. That way, if the rest of my day goes sideways, I know I’ve at least spent 30 minutes improving myself in some measurable way.

Tell others about it…maybe.

Sharing your goals with a close friend or even your entire social network can help keep you accountable. Right? Not so fast. It could actually hurt your progress more than help. A study published by New York University demonstrated when we tell someone about a goal, we assume a “premature sense of completeness regarding the…goal.” We unknowingly ease up.

One way to avoid sabotaging yourself is to state your goal as a commitment rather than progress towards the finished product . The former publicly commits us to an attitude, which we’re less likely to change later on. The latter hints we’ve already taken steps to achieve our goal, which might cause us to slack off.

Commitment : “I will run a marathon in 2015.” Progress : “Just signed up for my first marathon! Can’t wait to run Chicago in October.”

While the statements convey the same overall idea, the first statement makes a firm commitment to the end product. The second statement indicates we’ve already made progress (signing up) and lures us into a false sense of accomplishment.

Join a group.

Groups offer several benefits when you’re picking up something new like access to a collective knowledge-base and a place to vent your frustrations. They’re also incredibly motivating. Research shows that people working in groups felt higher intrinsic motivation and, as a result, were more likely to persevere at difficult tasks.

Here are some ways to find applicable groups in your industry:

• Ask your mentor what professional organizations or meetups they frequent.
• Search meetup.com at the beginning of each month for meetups that might make sense for you.
• Search for relevant Slack groups that match your interests. Groups don’t have to be in-person.

Getting started - Make sure the skill either solves a problem you’re facing or is directly applicable to your life. Be as specific as you can.

Learning the basics - Deconstruct and select the most applicable parts of the particular skill. Find a way to apply what you’re learning as quickly as possible.

Get better - Make sure your practice is specifically targeted at your weak areas. Pay close attention to feedback and use it to improve performance.

Stick with it - Make sure you set out a plan for how/what/when you’re going to practice. Work on joining a group or (carefully) telling others to increase your chance of success.

I’m still applying these steps to my own pursuit of learning JavaScript. I spent a few weeks learning the basics and even built a small project in GitHub. However, I’m now stuck on the last segment: Adherence.

My current plan is to join more developer-centric groups and publicly push out a new project to push myself into action. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions though! What are your favorite tips for adhering to a task or learning in general? Share them in the comments!

Photo credits: Øyvind Hellenes , Performance X Design

Jeremey DuVall

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The mind-body benefits of learning a new skill

Whether you’re bored, have extra time on your hands or want to get out of a rut, learning a new skill can give you the mental and physical boost you need.

“We’re meant to grow, stretch, extend and expand,” Dennis Buttimer, M.Ed, CEAP, RYT, CHC, a life and wellness coach at Cancer Wellness at Piedmont. “As you learn new skills, you’ll discover more gifts about yourself and improve your confidence and sense of well-being . You can also positively affect others with your new skills .”

Reasons to learn a new skill

It gives you motivation. A new hobby or skill can give you the motivation you need to get out of bed in the morning. During this pandemic, most of us are spending more time at home and are physically isolated from many loved ones . This can take a toll on our mental health. Learning a new language, practicing an instrument or tending to an herb garden can give you energy, joy and a sense of purpose.

It helps beat boredom. Doing the same thing every day can get boring and sap your zest for life. While trying something new requires more effort than turning on the TV, the benefits are numerous.

It boosts confidence. “If you engage in a new skill, you’re going to thicken the brain’s prefrontal cortex,” says Buttimer. “As you develop a new skill, you’ll gain courage and confidence, which helps you override fear and anxiety. You’ll feel more empowered.”

It keeps you healthy. “ Learning is great for your brain at every age,” he says. “As you take on a new skill, the mind begins to reshape itself because the physical brain is malleable. Previously, it was thought that it was only malleable until adolescence. However, now the research shows it can keep changing throughout our lives and for the better, so you have fewer fear responses and a more positive mindset.”

It helps you be flexible. By consistently educating yourself and trying new things, you’ll learn you’re capable of change and growth, which keeps you open to new opportunities in life. “Learning a new skill can get you out of a rut. If you don’t learn new skills, you can start to wither a bit mentally and physically because you’re falling victim to the same habits and mindsets again and again,” Buttimer explains.

It can benefit others. Think about how your new hobby or skill can help others at work, at home or in your community.

It can boost your happiness. “When you learn a new skill, you increase your level of happiness ," he says. “It was thought for a long time that a person’s baseline happiness couldn’t be lifted. It turns out that you can keep influencing your level of happiness. As you learn a new skill, you can boost it. You won’t be euphoric all the time, but you’ll lift your sense of well-being.”

How to make the most of learning a new skill

Consider your “why.” It doesn’t matter if a new skill is for work or play – you’ll get benefits either way. Think about what you hope to gain from learning a new skill. Do you want to pass the time, reduce stress, improve your career or boost your health? Once you know what you hope to gain, you can determine which skill you’d like to learn.

Explore possible subjects. Once you know your “why,” start exploring potential topics. If you want to improve your health, maybe you want to learn how to practice meditation or yoga or grow a vegetable garden.

If you want to pass the time by doing something other than watching TV, think about something that you’ve always secretly wanted to do, suggests Buttimer. Maybe you’re not a musical person, but you’ve always wanted to play the piano. Why not start now?

If you know you want to do something, but aren’t sure where to start, look at what’s trending right now, such as knitting, studying a new language, bread-making, coding, calligraphy or graphic design.

Consider your learning style. If you’re a visual learner, sign up for a video-based class. If you want to take a deep dive into a subject, look for a course instead of a one-time class. If you learn best by reading, stock up on books at the library. If you learn best by listening, download some podcasts or an audiobook. Do what works for you.

Take a compassionate approach. Learning a new skill is supposed to be something positive in your life. While it may feel challenging, especially at the beginning, it’s important to take a compassionate approach . You don’t have to do it perfectly; just be open and receptive.

“You could affirm to yourself, ‘I’m being open and receptive to learning this new skill while holding it loosely. This will be fun and positive. Some setbacks are normal when learning something new, but all is well,’” suggests Buttimer. “Depressurizing the situation is important.”

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Productivity

Productivity tips

7 strategies for learning new skills

Sure, it might be trickier for an adult to dedicate the same amount of time to learning as, say, an eight-year-old with no responsibilities, but given the right environment and the right mindset, people can learn new skills at any age. For example, at the ripe age of 30-something, I learned a new language, learned how to knit, and even became skilled at writing with my non-dominant hand—all equally important life skills. 

If you've been wanting to learn a new skill or even strengthen existing ones, here are the seven tried-and-trued strategies I used to boost my expertise—and how you can, too.

Set clear goals

Adopt a growth mindset

Use active learning strategies

Use different learning mediums

Learn from someone with more experience

Take frequent breaks

Why is it important to learn new skills? 

I could write an entire article devoted to this question, but that's not why you're here. However, if you'll entertain me, here are three of the most compelling reasons I keep yearnin' for more learnin'. 

Brain fitness 

When I get out of bed, my body makes so many snaps, crackles, and pops you'd think I was pouring milk over a bowl of Rice Krispies. That's why my main goal for working out is simply to build enough strength and mobility to keep moving efficiently—and with fewer aches and pains. The same mentality applies to learning a new skill: I view it as a fun way to keep my brain sharp and healthy for as long as this world will have me. 

Career flexibility and advancement 

If you've spent any time on LinkedIn, you've likely seen your fair share of stories detailing rescinded job offers and layoffs. And if you, like me, have been fortunate enough to keep your job, you may have asked yourself, "How can I make myself a critical part of this team?" This is where having a diverse set of skills can be a true asset. 

Let's take Zapier's secondment program , for example. To meet Zapier's 2023 hiring needs, a full team wasn't required. But to avoid laying off a portion of our Talent Acquisition team, Zapier was able to leverage their various skills and experiences to add value to other business-critical departments. 

A diverse skill set also keeps you adaptable to change. For example, the onslaught of artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting nearly every job. And while the fear of being replaced by AI is very real , if you have the skills to learn a new skill, you can actually learn to embrace AI at work —not fear it. 

Tip: If you're a software engineer—or an aspiring one—AI is undoubtedly going to change the game for you. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Here are a few ways you can make your work even more fulfilling and effective with AI . 

Confidence boost  

I haven't pored through the research, so you'll have to trust my gut (and yours) on this one. But think of what it takes to even approach learning a new skill. It often means stepping out of your comfort zone and pushing past any self-doubt. That knowledge alone fills me with a sense of pride and accomplishment—and I hope it does for you, too.  

7 strategies to help you learn new skills

If you've ever struggled to learn something new, let's get one thing out of the way: you're the furthest thing from alone. Even the "greats" struggled their way to the top. Now that we're on the same page, let's dive into the seven strategies you can use to learn a new skill or enhance the ones you already have.  

1. Set clear goals

There's an episode of The Office where one of the main characters, Michael Scott, literally declares bankruptcy to make all his money problems magically disappear. But as his colleague points out, "you can't just say the word 'bankruptcy' and expect anything to happen."  

Similarly with goals, simply saying (or declaring) that you're going to learn something, doesn't just make it so. Instead, set a SMART goal ( S pecific, M easurable, A chievable, R ealistic, and T ime-bound), so you can get clear on what you're trying to achieve. 

Now take your goal one step further by writing it as an affirmation. Here's how: 

Use "I" statements. Make these goals personal to you. 

Make it positive. Write your goal in terms of what you want to achieve—not what you don't want. 

Write it in the present tense. Write your goal as if it's happening now instead of in the future. This will encourage you to work on achieving the goal immediately rather than putting it off. 

For example, instead of the goal, "I will stop working as a law clerk, and I'll no longer have to commute for an hour into the office each day," your affirmation might be, "I work from home as a software developer for a video game company." 

But don't stop there. Once you set your goal, create an actionable, trackable plan to help you make progress towards it. 

Tip: As venture capitalist John Doerr puts it, "a plan is only as good as its implementation." With your plan in hand, use these tips to help you build the necessary daily habits to achieve your goal.  

2. Adopt a growth mindset 

It can be daunting to learn a new skill. You might be tempted to tell yourself, "I wish I could, but I don't have the talent to do [insert skill here]" or "it's too late" (which, for what it's worth, it's never too late ).  

This is where adopting a growth mindset comes in. The term, which was originally coined by academic scholar Carol Dweck, refers to a way of perceiving challenges and setbacks. In Dweck's words : 

"Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts)." 

Let's say you wanted to join the circus as a trapeze artist (I can't be the only one). If you believed that only people born with the gift of strength, flexibility, and not wanting to hurl when thrown around 50 feet in the air could successfully make it, you likely wouldn't bother even attempting to swing upside down. But if you believe that there's room for you to develop the necessary skills, you'll put in the effort to learn, which, in turn, helps you build the required skills. 

3. Use active learning strategies 

Let's say you're studying quantum physics (um, wow!). Now imagine if the only way you learned about it was by listening to your teacher go on and on about atoms and subatomic particles. Not only would this type of passive learning put you to sleep, but you'd probably have a hard time developing any true understanding of the material. 

Enter: active learning strategies. At its core, these strategies require you to engage in different hands-on activities, such as group discussions and role-playing, to promote a richer understanding of the content. Why? Because knowledge sharing benefits everyone . It forces you to truly process a subject, examine it, and nail the fundamentals.  

This strategy doesn't always have to go from theory to practice either. You can also reverse the order. 

Let's say your goal is to hit one out-of-the-park home run. You have the strength and the hand-eye coordination, but for whatever reason, your hits just keep coming short. Instead of continually swinging and missing, you could listen to renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the physics (i.e., the theory) behind a near-guaranteed home run. After that, you can take another swing. 

4. Use different learning mediums 

There's a popular theory that people have unique learning styles. I've definitely uttered, "I'm more of a visual learner" once or twice in my life (mainly to stop my friends from trying to explain complex board game rules to me). But learning styles are flimflam . 

Instead of confining yourself to only one learning method, try this approach, courtesy of Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia: 

"Think of everyone having a toolbox of ways to think, and [ask] yourself, which tool is best [for the job]?"

Take learning a new language, for example. To learn how to write in Japanese, the best tool for the job might be a Japanese grammar textbook. But if you want to improve your listening and verbal skills, reading a textbook won't be as effective as, say, chatting with a native speaker. 

In an age where so much information is available at your fingertips, don't limit yourself to just one book or course. Mix things up!

5. Learn from someone with more experience

There are many times when I've written something where the words feel just off—but I can't quite figure out how to fix it. This is where it can be helpful to get feedback from someone with more experience. For example, if I'm writing for a new-to-me medium like video scripts, I'll ask my teammate Krystina to review my work. Because of her many years working as a public radio journalist, she's quick to spot potential tongue twisters and uneven beats.

If finding a mentor or asking someone for feedback makes you a little uneasy, I'll give you one of the best pieces of advice I've ever received: just ask. Worst case scenario, they say no, and you're no worse off. 

Tip: If you want to improve your writing, but human feedback isn't readily accessible, try asking AI for feedback instead. Here's how to create your own personal writing coach . 

6. Practice 

This one might seem obvious, but let's clarify the difference between two types of practice that are key to building a new skill: 

Rote learning . This involves memorizing information based on repetition. For example, reciting the French alphabet from A to Z over and over again. 

Deliberate practice . This involves intentional, goal-directed rehearsal paired with applying your learning to different situations. For example, pronouncing a randomized mix of French vocabulary using your base knowledge of how to pronounce each individual letter. And if a combination of letters is particularly tricky for you, you might seek out more words containing those combos to improve your fluency. 

While rote learning might help you, say, recite the French alphabet super fast, it won't, by itself, help you achieve verbal proficiency. Instead, this is what deliberate practice and applying your knowledge to varied, real-life scenarios will help you achieve.

One final note: it's tempting to practice what you're already good at, but be intentional about also practicing your weaknesses . Make time for it. For example, I'm very comfortable reading in French (to myself), but I'm significantly less comfortable speaking French out loud. So when I practice in my language learning app, I force myself to do more speaking exercises than translation ones. 

Tip: Feeling meh about practice? Try these practical tips to start doing the work you need to do—even when you really, really don't want to . 

7. Take frequent breaks

Ever get stuck doing a drill or a task? When this happens, my initial response is to double down on my efforts. For example, I might continue doing American Sign Language (ASL) fingerspelling exercises even if my fingers are tired and seemingly operating with a mind of their own. 

But a more effective response would be for me to take a break. Otherwise, I risk repeating the same mistakes, practicing incorrect movement patterns, and setting my progress back.  

While it seems counterintuitive, taking frequent breaks is just as important as practicing regularly. Done strategically, breaks can reduce brain fatigue and boost your performance . 

Tip: Create a structured schedule that incorporates a mix of focus periods and breaks. The Pomodoro technique is a great approach for tackling exercises that are less exciting (like practicing piano scales) or tasks that require little thought. For other tasks that require creativity, innovation, and/or problem-solving, try the more flexible Flowtime technique . 

Bonus: Keep a record and reflect on your progress 

Ever since I saw my high school French teacher write on the chalkboard with both hands, I've been dead set on becoming ambidextrous. Unfortunately for me, true ambidexterity is rare . But that hasn't stopped me from pursuing the ability to skilfully write with both my hands.

I've been actively working on this for over two years now, but there are days when I'll look at my left-handed writing, deflate a little, and think, "Well, it looks like a second-grader wrote this." But then I compare it with earlier writing samples, and I can quickly see how far I've come. 

This is the value of tracking your progress . It gives you a clearer representation of how far you've come, reminding you that you're doing something right. 

Tip: If you're someone who's motivated by a little friendly competition, why not create a personal best challenge bot ? It's a fun way to measure your progress and see how you stack up against the most important competition: yourself. 

Reframing failure 

To be abundantly clear, none of the above tips will immediately take you from novice to expert. (If it did, I'd be touring with Cirque du Soleil right now and signing autographs with my left hand instead of writing this article.) 

You're going to make mistakes along the way—we all do. And at the first sign of "failure," you might be tempted to doubt your abilities and stop learning altogether. 

But what if you reframed your failures as feedback? Let's go back to baseball as an example. If I keep hitting high fly balls, which are usually easier to catch, that "failure" is simply telling me that my bat is getting too far under the ball. I need to swing earlier or adjust my stance to increase my chances of hitting a nice line drive.  

This type of reframing is the same strategy former NASA engineer Mark Rober uses to trick your brain into learning more . And hey—if it's good enough for a NASA engineer, it's sure as heck good enough for this wannabe circus performer. 

Related reading: 

The best way to learn technology? Click all the buttons

4 strategies to keep building skills for your career

When to give up on a goal—and how to do it

7 mental models to help you make better business decisions

This article was originally published in 2017 by Farheen Gani. The most recent update was in April 2023.

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The key to learning a new skill? Wanting it badly enough

Learning is all about motivation. When we really want to learn something, we generally succeed, even when the going gets tough

I magine I gave you a book full of words, numbers and strange symbols – 150-odd pages of the stuff. Some of the things relate to each other in obvious ways, others not so much. Now suppose I’m going to test you: 50 questions about the contents of that book, how do you think you’d do?

Well, if you can drive a car, chances are you’ve already done very well: those of you who passed the theory test recently will have got at least 43 out of 50 questions correct. That’s just one everyday example of the average person’s capacity to learn something that appears complex at first. Despite recently making the questions tougher, the DVLA still reports that the test has a pass rate above 50%.

Now, why do you think all those people learned so successfully? I don’t have an official answer, but we can probably discount any notion of the Highway Code being a particularly compelling read. It’s far more likely to do with the fact that those taking the test – very often teenagers – see a driving licence as their ticket to freedom. When we really want to learn something, we generally do.

That may seem glib, but it holds true. Every hobby we’ve ever taken up had a learning curve. If we kept at it long enough to become skilled, we most likely did so because we enjoyed it. It might not have even felt like learning.

We don’t just perform these mental feats for pleasure either – think back to every time you scraped a good grade at school when it really mattered.

The common thread is motivation. I wouldn’t dare claim it’s the only thing you need – there are plenty of other factors at play – but without it, you’re going nowhere fast.

Allow me to use myself as an example. I’m Matthew, and languages are my thing. I’ve been learning them all my life, and I’m starting to lose count of how many I speak (it’s not a memory problem, but rather a semantic one – at what point can one really claim to speak a language?). Let’s say it’s somewhere around 20, and I’m fluent in about 10 of those.

What makes me special? Well, nothing. I just love languages. I learned each of my languages because I sincerely wanted to. That doesn’t mean I ever thought “Spanish is great, I’m going to learn it,” and then went right ahead. Even I’ve never been quite that crazy about the nitty-gritty of semantics and syntax. I learned Spanish because we were planning a holiday and thought it would be fun to speak to people in their own language. I was nine at the time. Each subsequent language had its own reasons, some personal, some cultural, and some fairly nonsensical. Not one was ever vaguely linguistic.

So, how can we apply this thinking about motivation to other things?

1. Make it personal

Think of a subject you hated at school. If you had no interest in it, you probably found it difficult . If something has little or no importance to you, you’re already fighting an uphill battle when you attempt to learn it. So make it fit your life .

If it’s too late to choose your topic wisely (or you never had a choice in the first place), you can at least work with what you’ve got. Need to learn about business but you’re more the artistic type? Learn about the business of art, or just keep in mind that good business sense affords you a greater degree of artistic freedom later on.

2. Make it matter

Make sure you know why you’re learning in the first place . “I’ve spent too long on this course to fail now,” you might say. But that, along with many others, is a terrible reason to do anything. Think about why you started the course or task in the first place – what’s the end goal? A career you want? A deeper connection with someone you care about? A new life abroad? Those are better starting points.

3. Make use of it

This bit of advice can be applied to languages more readily than to some other areas, but it still works elsewhere. The trick is to make sure you recognise your own success by using what knowledge you have, as you acquire it . In my case, that often means ordering food in a new language with broken grammar and poor pronunciation (see the video below). For a budding photographer, it might mean taking snaps around the house to practise the fundamentals they’ll need later on.

4. Make it entertaining

If you’re studying a language, this is easy – just go out (or online) and speak to people. Really, if you’re learning just about anything practical – and not at medical school – “give it a go” is pretty solid advice.

Your chosen topic needn’t be something that lends itself to fun activities in an obvious way, though – you can make a game of just about anything . Try learning with a partner and making a competition of it , or just cutting out some flash cards and challenging yourself.

5. Commit yourself

Regardless of what you’re learning, or what else you’d rather be doing, just get stuck in. After all, who ever regretted learning anything?

Matthew Youlden ( @MatthewYoulden ) is a linguist, lecturer, translator, interpreter and polyglot. He started teaching himself languages as a child and now works as language ambassador for the language-learning app Babbel. With the right tools, he believes that anyone can learn a new language.

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Learning Skills Enhancement Essay

Types of learning skills, tools to enhance learning skills, how to incorporate new learning skills, time management, how adult learners differ from the rest of the society, why learning is the foundation to life.

As an adult, there are some basic leaning skills that one should be aware of in the learning process. The first learning skill that can be valuable for adults is lectures. In this case, the learner would be expected to be in a classroom setting with the teacher. This learning concept is very popular when learning about new concepts. Tutorials are also popularly used in some of the cases. When using the tutorials, the learner will be expected to make notes based on the personal understanding of the concepts presented in the tutorials.

Group work is another popular approach that is common among adults. In this case, learners would sit and share their views about a given topic in order to enhance their knowledge. A learner can also engage in private readings in the library. These skills can be used together in order to enhance the ability of the learner to grasp what is being taught.

There are some tools that are always used to enhance learning skills. One of the widely used tools in the current society is the internet. The internet has valuable information that can be used by a leaner to enhance his or her knowledge on a certain topic. Books and tutorials in the library also form an important tool for learners. Some advanced schools use video-conferencing for distant learners or in cases where the lecturer is unable to travel to the physical classroom (Boulay, 2009).

Sometimes it may be necessary to incorporate new learning skills. A learner must determine the best approach of incorporating these new skills. The best way of doing this would be to determine how the skills are related to the current learning skills. This way, it will be easy to come up with a way in which they can be integrated in order to come up with a superior approach of learning (Seo, 2012).

Basic skills to use time properly

Time management is a critical issue for an adult learner. The learner must have a strategy that explains when it is appropriate to conduct private studies, engage in group work, or take time to rest in between the studies. The best way of doing this is to develop a timetable. The timetable will define all the activities that a learner needs to engage in so that he or she can balance class work and other chores.

How to combat stress

Sometimes stress may affect a learner. It is necessary to come up with strategies that are helpful in combating stress. The best way that a learner can use to combat stress is to plan all the activities. The learner will also need to break the assignments into smaller manageable and less stressing tasks.

Procrastination

Procrastination is one of the worst mistakes that some learners make in their academic life. Every task should be completed in time, and the temptation to procrastinate any academic work should be avoided by all means possible.

Age is one of the fundamental factors that differentiate adult learners from other learners in the society. Most of the adult learners always find themselves in class with much younger people, some as young as their own children. However, they are expected to ignore the age factor in order to be academically successful.

In most of the cases, the priority of an adult learner is not academics. They always have families to care for which is their top priority. This always affects their academic performance as they try to balance between family life and academic work (Reischmann, 2004).

The mind set of an adult learner is also different from the young learners. While the young learners may have undefined ambition that they want to achieve through their academic life, the adult learners always have specific reasons that make them go back to class at advanced ages.

Learning is the foundation to life, and this is one of the main reasons why some adults always go back to class. Through learning, research into new fields is made possible. All the fields in education require research in order to sustain the changes taking place in the society.

Intelligence

Through the learning processes, one is able to enhance his or her intelligence, making it easy to survive in the current society that has become very challenging.

Credibility

Learning also enhances the credibility of a person to hold certain positions in life. For instance, if one is a leader, having the right education makes him credible for the position, and earns him some respect among the followers.

Learning like an adult is different from other forms of learning in the society. The age factor and the responsibilities that an adult has pose serious challenges that a normal learner may not experience. This may affect the performance of the adult learner if corrective measures are not taken.

Boulay, D. (2009). Study Skills for dummies . Web.

Reischmann, J. (2004). Andragogy: History, Meaning, Context, Function . Web.

Seo, H. (2012). Social Behavior & Personality. International Journal of Management , 40 (8), 1333-1340.

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Learning Skills

Much has been said and written about the importance of learning. But what does it really mean?

At its most basic, it means being open to new experiences and ideas, and allowing ourselves to grow from what we encounter in the world.

Children are like little sponges. They learn from everything that they encounter, whether mud, toys, books or people. Everything is an opportunity for experimentation and therefore for learning.

As adults, it can be hard to remember and recapture that excitement about the world but that is what is needed for successful learning.

This page explains more about the skills you need for effective learning.

Many people think of learning as studying, but this is not the case. When you study, you do normally learn but learning can go far beyond structured or unstructured studying.

You can learn from any and all experiences in your life.

We recognise this by using phrases such as:

“ I’ve learned so much from having children. ”

“ You wouldn’t believe how much I learned about myself from that. ”

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education.

The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti, Philosophical and Spiritual Writer and Speaker.

You can find more about this on our pages What is Learning? and Lifelong Learning .

Our page on What is Learning? also explains one theory about how we learn, the Procure – Apply – Consider – Transform (PACT) model of learning.

Another useful model, which you can find on our page What is Coaching? is the competence cycle of learning.

If you want to know more about the theory of learning, have a look at our page on Learning Approaches . This sets out the three basic approaches:

• Behaviourist , which expects learners to respond to some kind of stimulus;
• Cognitive , which is concerned with knowledge and knowledge-retention; and
• Humanist , which is concerned with explaining individual experience.

Learning about your Learning

Based on these three approaches, behaviourist, cognitive and humanist, researchers have proposed that we all have different Learning Styles , and put forward two very useful models.

But why are they useful? They are useful because knowing how you like to learn can help you to tailor your experiences so that you learn more quickly and effectively.

You may also be interested in our pages on Myers-Briggs Type Indicators and Myers-Briggs Type Indicators in Practice as these also have pointers for how we like to learn.

Our page on Reflective Practice will help you to think about your experiences and understand more about yourself. Developing a habit of reflective practice will also help you to learn in the future.

Getting Ready to Learn

What else do you need in order to learn?

Research suggests that perhaps the most important skill you need to learn effectively is what is called a ‘ growth mindset ’: the belief that you can learn and develop new skills.

For more about the importance of growth mindset, see our page on Mindsets . You also need to be prepared to work hard, which requires self-motivation .

There are a number of other skills that you will find useful to help your learn effectively :

For example, Time Management and Organisational Skills . But while it’s important to avoid procrastination , none of these are as vital as having the right approach.

With the right mindset, you will set yourself up for learning for life.

While learning is very definitely wider than studying, nonetheless, having good study skills will help you to learn.

These generic and transferable skills help you to get yourself into the right frame of mind for studying, and then study effectively.

Our study skills pages include:

Getting Organised to Study , including finding the best times of day for you, and also making contact with people who can help and support you;

Finding Time to Study , which includes setting a study timetable, setting goals and prioritising;

Sources of Information for Study , which explains the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary sources, and how you can find and evaluate the quality of sources;

Styles of Writing , which explains about different types of documents that you may need to produce;

Reading skills, including Effective Reading and Reading Strategies , which show you how you can develop good habits of reading, enabling you to critique your sources effectively; and

Revision Skills , which help you to review and revise your studying to prepare for examinations and assessments.

How to Write…

If you are engaged in formal study, for example, undertaking a school, college or university course, you are likely to find that you have to produce written assignments.

You may find it helpful to look at our pages on planning an essay , writing essays , writing reports , and writing a dissertation or research project . Our pages on dissertations, thesis and research projects are broken down by section. You will find information about literature reviews, methods, results, discussion and conclusions and recommendations.

You will also find information about Research Methods on SkillsYouNeed, including Designing your Research , and various methods of gathering and analysing data, such as surveys , interviews , and focus groups .

You are also likely to need to learn to take effective notes of what you read or of lectures or other exchanges of information .

Helping Other People to Learn

There are very particular skills required to help other people to learn. Your role in helping others to learn may be formal or informal.

Teachers have a very clear role in supporting learning; see our page on Teaching Skills for more. Many people also use coaches both informally and formally to support their learning: see our pages on Coaching Skills and What is Coaching? for more.

Parents often find themselves needing to draw on all their skills to support their children’s learning. A good starting place for ideas is our page on Coaching at Home .

Another role in which you may be supporting someone’s learning is as a mentor. If you’re new to a mentoring role, have a look at our pages  What is Mentoring? and Mentoring Skills . And if you’re just entering a mentoring relationship as the learner, visit our page Learning from Mentoring for some ideas.

Counselling is also about supporting learning, in its broadest sense.

A Lifelong Skill

Children are naturally eager to learn, even if not to study. But as adults, it can be all too easy to forget that learning remains important.

Those who want to learn are open to new experiences, actively seeking out ways to learn and develop. They retain a keen interest in the world, and always want to know how to improve.

Learning is a lifelong approach and attitude, and it will serve you well if you cultivate it.

Further Reading from Skills You Need

The Skills You Need Guide for Students

Develop the skills you need to make the most of your time as a student.

Our eBooks are ideal for students at all stages of education, school, college and university. They are full of easy-to-follow practical information that will help you to learn more effectively and get better grades.

Continue to: What is Learning?

June 29, 2023

To Stay Sharp as You Age, Learn New Skills

Older people show significant cognitive benefits from learning, provided they have the opportunity to do so

By Rachel Wu & Jessica A. Church

Jovana Mugosa

In most adults, learning and thinking plateau and then begin to decline after age 30 or 40 . People start to perform worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as processing speed, the rate at which someone does a mental task. The slide becomes steeper after 60 years of age.

These changes are often ascribed to normal aging. But what if instead they represent something more like the “summer slide” that schoolchildren experience? Every year teachers and parents observe how summer vacations lead some children’s academic progress to backslide. During the COVID pandemic, many students missed the equivalent of at least seven to 10 weeks of in-person learning because of remote or reduced schooling. The resulting academic losses were uneven, with kids of different ages, abilities and resources being affected in varied ways .

Interrupted learning may not only affect children. After formal education and job training ends, many adults experience years, if not decades, of reduced or nonexistent learning opportunities. That’s a much longer pause than eight to 12 weeks of summer break or even a few years disrupted by a pandemic.

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Our work suggests that the cessation of learning is indeed a setback for adults—but we have also found that this decline can be addressed. A three-month intervention we designed enhanced participants’ memory and attention so drastically that their abilities came to resemble those of adults 30 years younger at the program’s end. And amazingly, they continued to improve long after the classes were over.

[ Read more about the benefits of lifelong learning in later years ]

In this intervention, we provided an encouraging learning environment to 33 older adults between 58 and 86 years of age. Before and after this three-month intervention, we tested participants’ cognitive abilities, including attention and working memory. (The latter capacity helps people hold information in their head for tasks such as remembering the digits of a new phone number.) Older adults in this program were assigned three classes that met weekly, each session lasting two hours, to learn three new skills. Course options included singing, drawing, iPad use, photography, Spanish language learning and music composition. Once a week, we discussed issues related to learning barriers, motivation and successful aging with our participants.

Over the course of the intervention, people significantly improved their cognitive scores for memory and attention. In a follow-up study, we discovered that the participants had not only maintained their gains but had improved further: their cognitive abilities after one year were similar to those of adults 50 years younger . In other words, giving these seniors a supportive and structured three-course routine—much like an undergraduate student’s schedule—seemed to eventually improve their memory and attention to levels similar to that of a college student.

We are still investigating why cognitive scores continued to climb after the program’s end, but one possibility is that the experience encouraged these adults to continue learning and practicing new skills in daily life.

To be clear, we do not think that formal education is the only or most important way to support learning. Our idea is to instead create enriched environments for older adults, especially for those with few resources, so that they can increase both real-world skills and cognitive abilities over the long term.

If, as these studies indicate, interrupted learning is indeed a common feature of adulthood, many important implications follow. Researchers avoid the phrase “learning loss” when discussing childhood and adolescence because “loss” implies that the learning cannot be recovered. Older adults, meanwhile, are often assumed to be on a downward slope with unrecoverable loss. “Use it or lose it,” the saying goes. Our work suggests that we need to apply a more hopeful mindset and vocabulary when discussing older people—much like that used for childhood or early adulthood. Decline, as we so often see it, may not be inevitable.

We can also set new priorities for older learners. In childhood we focus on the gain of particular skills , such as reading and math. By contrast, cognitive aging research has often focused on maintaining or increasing more general abilities, such as those related to attention and memory, typically through cognitive training, leisure activities and exercise. Older adult research tends to emphasize skill learning only after daily functions start to decline.

For those who have limited time or resources, encouraging new skill learning, as our interventions have done, may be especially advantageous. In later years many personal and societal changes—such as moving out of state to be closer to family members, switching jobs or coping with physical distancing from loved ones—make learning new skills necessary to adapt and succeed. For example, taking a class to improve technological skills could aid seniors’ success in an increasingly digital world, helping them use telehealth or online banking platforms.

The question is no longer whether we should pursue learning as adults but rather how society can optimize the environment to maximize opportunities. Educators and scientists know quite a bit about how to do this for children and adolescents, and we can adapt that knowledge to enhance existing opportunities and develop new challenging, useful and inclusive learning opportunities for adults. Researchers who work on the developmental and aging ends of the life span should share perspectives and communicate findings with one another. Finally, societies could provide resources and opportunities—particularly for older adults who are underserved or disadvantaged—to ensure that everyone can benefit from lifelong learning.

Let’s shift the conversation in adulthood from a focus on staving off loss and decline, or merely maintaining what people have, to a discussion of learning, growth and thriving.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to  Scientific American’s  Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at  [email protected] .

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the  author or authors are not necessarily those of  Scientific American.

A version of this article with the title “Stay Sharp as You Age” was adapted for inclusion in the October 2023 issue of Scientific American.

Want to learn a new skill? These two essays might inspire you to get started

Learning a new skill is a great way to bolster your personal development. And it doesn't hurt your professional marketability. A new skill or even a new hobby could also just be something you want to do, for yourself, and no one else. But, sometimes getting started can be tough. Check out these two essays for some inspiration

True Grit: How One Designer Taught Himself to Draw and Became an International Artist

In this piece , we look at the journey of  Alán Ramiro Manning  and his personal goal to learn how to draw. Readers will get to see how the young designer applied himself and went from a complete novice to a prolific illustrator through sheer determination and grit. If you've ever wanted to embark on a crazy path to do something new in your life, this is the story for you.

Career Evolution Through Autodidacticism and Accelerated Learning

This essay looks at the world of accelerated learning and autodidacticism, or the art of self-learning. You'll read about two friends who learned four languages in a year, the psychology of the self-learner, and there is also an awesome scene from an awesome movie.

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Life skills essay.

Look at the essay about life skills and do the exercises to improve your writing skills.

Instructions

Do the preparation exercise first. Then read the text and do the other exercises.

Preparation

Check your writing: multiple choice

Check your writing: reordering, check your writing: gap fill typing, worksheets and downloads.

What do you think are the most useful things to learn at school? Does school prepare you well enough for the real world?

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What Students Are Saying About Learning to Write in the Age of A.I.

Does being able to write still matter when chatbots can do it for us? Teenagers weigh in on an essay from Opinion.

By The Learning Network

With artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT that can generate prose for us, how much should we care about learning to write — and write well?

In “ Our Semicolons, Ourselves ,” the Opinion contributor Frank Bruni argues that, for a multitude of reasons, communicating effectively is a skill we should still take seriously. “Good writing burnishes your message,” he writes. “It burnishes the messenger, too.”

We asked teenagers what they thought: Does learning to be a good writer still matter in the age of A.I.? Or will the technology someday replace the need for people to learn how to put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard?

Take a look at their conversation below, which explores the benefits of learning to express oneself, the promise and perils of chatbots, and what it means to be a writer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the conversation on our writing prompts this week, including students from Glenbard North High School in Carol Stream, Ill.; Hinsdale Central High School in Hinsdale, Ill. and New Rochelle High School in New Rochelle, N.Y .

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

Many students agreed with Mr. Bruni that learning to write is important. Some pointed to the practical reasons.

When you write any sort of persuasive essay or analysis essay, you learn to communicate your ideas to your audience. This skill can then be applied to your daily life. Whether it’s talking to your teachers, writing an email to your boss, or sending a text message to your friends, writing and communication is a fundamental ability that is needed to clearly and concisely express yourself. This is something that A.I. cannot help you with.

— Mara F.R., Hinsdale

In order to write, we must first be able to think on our own which allows us to be self-sufficient. With the frequent use of A.I., our minds become reliant on given information rather than us thinking for ourselves. I absolutely believe that learning to be a good writer still matters even in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

— Jordyne, Ellisville

I firmly believe that learning good writing skills develops communication, creativity, and problem-solving skills. A.I. can also be used as a tool; I have used it to ask practice questions, compare my answers, and find different/better ways to express myself. Sure, having my essay written for me in seconds is great, but come time for an interview or presentation later on in my life I’ll lack the confidence and ability to articulate my thoughts if I never learn how.

— CC, San Luis Obispo County

I, being a senior, have just finished my college applications. Throughout the process, I visited several essay help websites, and each one stressed this fact: essay readers want to hear a student’s voice. ChatGPT can write well-structured essays in two minutes, but these essays have no voice. They are formulaic and insipid — they won’t help a student get into UCLA. To have a chance, her essays must be eloquent and compelling. So, at least until AI writing technology improves, a student must put in the work, writing and rewriting until she has produced an essay that tells readers who she is.

— Cole, Central Coast, CA

Others discussed the joy and satisfaction that comes with being able to express oneself.

While AI has its advantages, it can’t replicate the satisfaction and authenticity which comes from writing by yourself. AI uses the existing ideas of others in order to generate a response. However, the response isn’t unique and doesn’t truly represent the idea the way you would. When you write, it causes you to think deeply about a topic and come up with an original idea. You uncover ideas which you wouldn’t have thought of previously and understand a topic for more than its face value. It creates a sense of clarity, in which you can generate your own viewpoint after looking at the different perspectives. Another example is that the feeling of writing something by yourself generates feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. The process of doing research about a topic for hours, to then come up with your own opinion. Or the feeling of having to use a dictionary to understand a word which you don’t know the meaning of. The satisfaction and authenticity or writing by yourself is irreplaceable. Therefore, it is still important to learn to be a good writer.

— Aditya, Hinsdale

You cannot depend on technology to do everything for you. An important factor of writing is expressing yourself and showing creativity. While AI can create a grammatically correct essay, it cannot express how you feel on the subject. Creativity attracts an audience, not being grammatically correct. Learning to write well-written essays without the assistance of AI is a skill that everyone should have.

— Aidan, Ellisville

A few commenters raised ethical concerns around using generators like ChatGPT.

I feel that even with AI, learning how to be a good writer still matters. For example, if you’re writing a college essay or an essay for a class using an AI generated thing, that is plagiarism, which can get you in a lot of trouble because it is against the law to take something that is not yours and try to make it seem like it is your writing. So I believe that learning how to be a good writer still matters a lot because if you want to get into a good college or get good grades, you need to know how to write at least semi-well and make sure the writing is in your own words, not words already generated for you.

— jeo, new york

There are obvious benefits, and I myself have used this software to better understand Calculus problems in a step by step format, or to answer my questions regarding a piece of literature, or time in history. That being said, ethics should be considered, and credit should be given where credit is due; as sources are cited in a traditional paper, so should the use of ChatGPT.

— Ariel, Miami Country Day School

Writing is still an important skill, but maybe not in the same way it has in the past. In an era of improving AI, topics such as grammar and spelling are less important than ever. Google already corrects small grammar mistakes; how long till they can suggest completely restructuring sentences? However, being a good writer is more than just grammar and vocabulary. It’s about collecting your thoughts into a cohesive and thoughtful presentation … If you want to communicate your own ideas, not just a conglomerate of ones on the internet, you’re better off just writing it yourself. That’s not to mention the plethora of issues like AI just making stuff up from time to time. So for now at least, improving your writing is still the best way to share your thoughts.

— Liam, Glenbard West High School

Several students shared how they use A.I. as a resource to aid, rather than replace, their own effort.

I think AI should be a tool for writers. It can help make outlines for writing pieces and it could help solve problems students are stuck on and give them an explanation. However, I think the line should be drawn if students use AI to do the whole entire assignment for them. That’s when it should be considered cheating and not be used.

— Sam, Hinsdale, IL

Sometimes I use A.I. programs such as ChatGPT to help with typing and communication. The results vary, but overall I find it helpful in generating creative ideas, cleaning up language, and speeding up the writing. However, I believe it is important to be careful and filter the results to ensure accuracy and precision. AI tools are valuable aids, but human input and insight are still needed to achieve the desired quality of written communication.

— Zach, New Rochelle High School

As of now, A.I. is not capable of replacing human prose effectively. Just look at the data, the only A.P. tests that ChatGPT did not pass were the ones for English Language and English Literature. This data lays bare a fact that most students refuse to accept: ChatGPT is not able to write a quality essay yet. Now that many schools are loosening restrictions regarding the use of generative A.I., students have two options: either they get back to work or they get a bad grade for their A.I.-generated essay.

On the other hand, there is another alternative that is likely to be the best one yet. A good friend once said, “A.I. software like ChatGPT solves the issue of having a clean sheet of paper”. By nature, humans are terrible at getting anything started. This is the issue that ChatGPT solves. As Bruni asserts, “Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear.” This is true, but ChatGPT can help students by creating a rough draft of what those ideas might look like on paper. The endpoint is this: while students are likely to keep needing to become good writers to excel at school, A.I. technology such as ChatGPT and Grammarly will become additional tools that will help students reach even higher levels of literary excellence.

— Francisco, Miami Country Day School

But some thought we might not be far from a future where A.I. can write for us.

I think that AI will eventually replace the need for the average person to write at the level that they do. AI is no different than every other tech advancement we’ve made, which have made tasks like writing easier. Similar concerns could have been raised with the introduction of computers in the classroom, and the loss of people having great handwriting. I don’t think the prospect should be worrying. AI is a tool. Having it write for us will allow us to focus on more important things that AI is not yet capable of.

— zack, Hinsdale Central

AI is becoming wildly accessible and increasingly more competent. The growth of this sector could mean more students find their way to an AI site to look for an answer. I agree that this could spell trouble for student intelligence if passable answers are so readily available. But you might want to consider the students themselves. The majority are hardworking and smart, not just smart about subjects in school, but about how using only AI for their work could end badly. Students will probably not use the newborn tech first hand until it is basically errorless, and that will take some time.

— Beau, Glen Ellyn, IL

Even so, there were students who doubted that technology could ever replace “what it means to be a writer.”

I don’t think AI will fully be able to replace humans, no matter how much time we as a society take to implement it into everyday life, as they are still just a bunch of numbers and code, and the complexity of a human and the intricacies of our emotions, our thoughts, and feelings, along with what makes each of us an individual, someone that matters, proves that humans will never be able to be fully replicated by AI, and that the most emotion-centric jobs, such as writing, and most fields in art, will forever be, or should forever be, dominated by the experiences and emotional complexity of humans.

— Liam, Hinsdale

AI uses data from the internet it gathers and then puts together a paragraph or two, while it may be able to do this faster than any human, it does not have any authenticity. If it is pulling its information from the web where someone has said something similar, the data found may be biased and the AI would not care. Yet some people still insist it’s the future for writing when in reality, AI will probably not come up with an original idea and only use possibly biased data to give to someone so they can just copy it and move on and undermine what it means to be a writer.

— John, Glenbard North HS

I have never personally used ChatGPT as I believe no robot can recreate the creativity or authenticity humans achieve in writing … Even with growing advances in technology, AI can only create with the information it already knows, which takes away the greatest quality writers have: creativity.

— Stella, Glenbard West

In my opinion, learning to be a good writer absolutely still matters in the age of AI. While artificial intelligence can assist with certain aspects of writing, such as grammar and syntax checking, it cannot replace the creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence that we human writers bring to the table. Another reason is that storytelling, persuasion, and the art of crafting a compelling narrative are skills deeply rooted in human intuition and empathy. A good writer can connect with readers on a personal level, inspiring thoughts, feelings, and actions. AI may enhance efficiency, but it cannot replicate the authentic voice and unique perspective that a human writer brings to their work.

— McKenzie, Warrington, PA

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Growth and Development — My Experience of Learning a New Language

My Experience of Learning a New Language

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Updated: 5 December, 2023

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Works Cited

• Gardner, R. C., & Lambert, W. E. (1972). Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning. Newbury House Publishers.
• Dörnyei, Z., & Ushioda, E. (2011). Teaching and Researching Motivation (2nd ed.). Routledge.
• Brown, H. D. (2007). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (5th ed.). Pearson Education.
• Cook, V. (2008). Second Language Learning and Language Teaching (4th ed.). Routledge.
• Ellis, R. (2008). The Study of Second Language Acquisition (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Larsen-Freeman, D., & Anderson, M. (2013). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2013). How Languages are Learned (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
• Nation, P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.
• Schmitt, N., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (1997). Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, and Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press.

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