Agile Personal Development

Most of us have a goal of increasing our skills in activities we enjoy. Learning these skills is a fun experience (although sometimes challenging), especially once we reach a level of competence in the skill. But how to do you determine what skills you want to work on? How do you know when you have mastered the skill? How do you learn these skills?

One of my personal goals is to learn a new skill each year. As I started to develop the details of my personal development plan, I realized that ‘learn a new skill each year’ isn’t really specific enough. I started asking the three questions above. Below I’ve outlined a good way to approach this issue.

But before I get to that, let me define the difference between learning a new skill, and becoming proficient at a new subject (which is also something I want to do at least once a year). The WikiAnswers page sums it up best -

“Knowledge is information you have in your head; skill is the ability to use knowledge to actually accomplish something”.

Being knowledgeable about a subject is very different from having skills associated with it. For example, you might know everything about art, such as different artists and styles (knowledge), but when you actually draw something, your family confuses it with something your 2 year old drew at daycare (no skills). Likewise, you may have skills, but no knowledge (knowing how to do something doesn’t always mean you know why you are doing it). With this definition out of the way, let’s get on to the answers to the three questions.

What Skills Should I Learn?

You may already have a good idea of what type of skills you want to learn. However, if you are looking for inspiration, I suggest looking up what courses are offered as part of adult education at your local community college or even online. I’ve also compiled a list of the most popular skills people want to learn (from the top goals on 43Things), I’m sure there is at least one here for you.

• Art & Craft Skills
  • Drawing
  • Knitting
  • Painting
  • Photography
  • Sewing
• Career Skills - [NOTE: Obviously learning new skills for your career is an important objective. Since every career is very different, I won't get into specific skills for each. However, there are some general skills that will help you in whatever career you choose. Here are two sites that have ideas on what employers are looking for. By assessing yourself against these criteria, you may decide to work on those skills that you haven't effectively developed.]
• Cooking
• Driving a Car
• Fitness / Nutrition Skills
  • Eating healthy
  • Exercising
  • Martial arts
  • Meditation
  • Tai chi
  • Yoga
• Gardening (particularly how to grow your own vegetables)
• Geneology (involves research skills and how to make sense of the data you get)
• Home Improvement
• Learning a New Language
  • Arabic
  • Chinese
  • English
  • German
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Latin
  • French
  • Russian
  • Sign language
  • Spanish
• Music / Dance Skills
  • Dancing
  • Playing drums
  • Playing guitar
  • Playing piano
  • Playing violin
  • Singing
• Personal Finance (particularly focused on becoming financially independent or getting out of debt)
• Sports & Outdoor Activity Skills
  • Camping
  • Flying
  • Golfing
  • Hiking
  • Rock climbing
  • Running
  • Sailing
  • SCUBA diving
  • Skateboarding
  • Snow skiing
  • Snowboarding
  • Surfing
  • Swimming
  • Travel
• Technology Skills
  • Ajax
  • C#
  • CSS
  • Java
  • Javascript
  • HTML
  • Linux
  • MySQL
  • Perl
  • Photoshop
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby / Rails
  • Website development
• Writing / Film Skills
  • Blog Writing
  • Film Making
  • General Writing
  • Music Writing / Composing
  • Poetry Writing
  • Screenplay writing

How do I Know When I Have ‘Learned’ a Skill?

Most skills can be broken down into levels of mastery. For example, martial arts have different colored belts that show the level of progress. Drawing skills can be broken down into these categories.  Not all skills have clearly defined skill levels. However, most fall into the following categories:

1. Basic Level - This is the step above having no experience. You’ll need to review how to do things, and may need someone to show you
2. Intermediate Level -  You now have enough skill to do the task on your own, and maybe occasionally get help or review learning materials
3. Advanced Level - You are very competent this skill, and are able to do it on your own and feel confident in your abilities
4. Instructor Level - You have mastered the skill and have enough experience and knowledge that you can teach others how to be successful at it
5. Specialty Skills - Many skills have specialized areas where you can focus and become extremely knowledgeable, like learning a specific type of yoga, or the different types of writing listed above

So how long does it take to learn a skill anyway? You might have heard the general rule of thumb that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. Do the math, that is a lot of practice! You aren’t going to get there by sitting on the sofa watching a couple of hours of TV a night. But what about achieving a basic level of experience? This blog post breaks the 10,000 hours into manageable chunks for different levels of mastery. Applying the recommended number of hours to my categories above, 1 hour will likely be enough to determine whether you still want to study it, 10 hours may get you to the Basic Level, 100 hours gets you to Intermediate, 1000 hours for Advanced learning, and then the 10,000 hours for true mastery. BTW, there is some interesting research into why studying something for 10,000 hours results in expert level performance. I especially like the concept of ‘chunking’, being able to recognize patterns in the data and understand what will happen next. I’ve found this concept to be true in my own career as I have gained more and more experience.

How Do I Learn These Skills?

There are a ton of online courses for most of the popular skills listed above. For example, here are some online courses for genealogy. Here is a great blog post about online courses related to the technology skills listed above. For other skills, you will need to learn them in a ‘hands-on’ environment. Many courses are taught by companies that sell products for activities that interest you (for example, an outdoor activity store may have courses in how to hike, kayak, etc).

The key is to identify what skills you are interesting learning, determine what is required to reach different levels of mastery, choose what level you want to achieve, and then go have fun learning a new skill. I know, it sounds so easy - just get out there and do it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.