Have you ever met someone who just seemed to know everything? They seem to be able to do anything, the world is their oyster, they pick things up incredibly easily and seem to have no issues with motivating themselves to be productive.
It sounds idealistic, but I aspire to be that kind of person, someone who can shape their own fate through sheer strength of will.
I know my writing is cringe, but bear with me.
Pareto Principle
There's this thing called the Pareto Principle, which states that roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of the causes.
Or another way of looking at it is, you only need to know about 20% of a particular skill to extract about 80% of the use from it.
Now this isn't a concrete rule, but it drives a simple and powerful message, you don't need to know everything about a field to achieve great things within it.
Natural Learning
Think back to when you were still in school, some subjects would have always seemed easier than others, you could breeze through them putting in barely a smidgen of effort. It just came naturally to you.
We seem to learn much faster when doing things that we have an interest in, so why not try to apply this to other skills as well?
Rewards and Motivation
It's easy to say that we want to do something just because it's good for us, but realistically, humans are driven by rewards and goals. Let's say you have a particular skill that you want to master, how do you go about getting started?
The first thing you should do is set an achievable goal, or multiple milestones if you can. The faster you can see tangible results, the more motivated you will be to follow through.
Tracking your progress is crucial here, unless you have a mentor, the only way for you to know if you're improving at all is to compare your current self to your past.
If you're a competitive person, surrounding yourself with peers of a higher skill level may prove to be beneficial, as nobody wants to be "worst" in the group.
Also, you need to want to improve, in order to actually get better at your desired skills. Humans are lazy creatures, and often try to take the path of least resistance.
One must learn to embrace the struggle, to enjoy the process of trying, failing, and getting stronger.
Everything you do, makes you better
Have you ever stopped doing something for a while, only to come back later and discover that you're suddenly somehow better at it?
I'm sure there are plently of studies and debates out there about why this is, ranging from things like stress, burnout, creativity, energy, etc.
This may be a strange take, but I'm fairly convinced that the brain does some kind of magic when we stop for a while and try other things.
It may seem like common sense to try and focus solely on one skill at a time in order to improve effectively, but I've found that diversifying the allocation of my time and effort into multiple skills often proves to be more effective.
However, anaging burnout is important, burnout is easily one of the biggest obstacles when it comes to self-improvement. Sometimes, it's better to just take a step back, take a breather, and just go do something else.
Intuition and Pattern Recognition
When you do something for long enough, it becomes second nature. How often do you find yourself having to stop and intentionally think to plan your entire day at work or school?
Usually, you just don't. You just do it, over and over again, until it's just another part of everyday life.
The same applies to our skills and knowledge, practise the art enough, and it becomes a part of you.