Learn new skills, they say.

Use this time wisely they say.

Every website is trying to get you to sign up for their (not quite so) free courses. Learn how to code in HTML, learn how to become an online marketer, learn how to hula hoop in space.

All this noise can cause more anxiety than it does actual growth.

Wehi has made an easy five step guide to learn a new skill. This blog focuses on your productivity and your mental health to keep you effective and happy.

Here is Wehi’s simple five step guide to learning a new skill:

Pick one skill

Trying to learn multiple skills of once is a guaranteed recipe for failure. Picking one skill increases the amount of time you have to give to the learning process. But how do you pick what skill to learn first?

Try this experiment.

Make a list of 1-5 skills you are interested in learning.

Now, rank them from 1-5 in terms of business effectiveness. Some great questions to ask are:

• Which skill will help you to work faster? 

• Which skill would improve the quality of your product?

• Which skill would help you to communicate the benefits of your product?

• Which skill are you most motivated to learn?

Writing a list of for and against choosing this as your one skill will clear your thinking process dramatically.

I have done the experiment here to help you. Here is my explanation.

I want to learn video editing. I believe it would improve the quality of our online content. It would expand the services marketing services that Wehi can offer. I would enjoy experimenting with a new way of creating content. But it wouldn’t help me to work faster. It would probably increase my workload and decrease my output. The opposite of what we are aiming for.

At the same time I want to learn more about coding. I understand the basics but I often get jealous of Carlo’s expertise. It wouldn’t help me work faster but it could increase the quality of our products. Ultimately, why should I learn to code when Wehi already has an expert coder?

I want to learn a better way of analysing content. Whether it is Wehi’s original content, social media data or information about a competitor. I would like to know more about gathering this information in one place. I can then use this data to share information with customers during consultations. This will increase our sales and the quality of our customer’s experience.

I want to learn Italian. It will help build sales in the European side of Wehi Web. And because, well, who doesn’t want to learn Italian?

As much as I may want to. As much as I might enjoy it. I cannot learn these three skills at the same time. Even in this slow period it would not be feasible and it would not result in effective learning.

Many of these are what are known as vanity projects. Investments of resources that would make me feel good or look good but would not help Wehi to grow. That is why this thought experiment is necessary; because there are so many good excuses to invest our valuable time poorly.

I have ordered these skills in terms of how they would most help Wehi to grow here

1. Analysing data

2. Increase HTML knowledge

3. Video editing

4. Learn to speak Italian

I have chosen analysing data as the skill I will develop.

Why?

Will this skill help me to work faster? Yes, being able to gather data in one place will remove guess work in marketing, social media and copywriting. 

Will this skill improve the quality of your product? Definitely, it will allow me to draw conclusions from data so that Wehi can continually refine our products and services. 

Will this skill improve my ability to communicate the benefits of your product? Yes, accurate data will be able to communicate the benefits of a product more efficiently that any sales pitch. 

Am I motivated to learn this skill? 100%, as boring as it sounds I have always enjoyed gathering data and figuring out how to use it to improve my content.

That is the productivity argument for focusing on one skill. Now, here is the most important reason:

YOUR MENTAL HEALTH.

Focusing on a singular task avoids a sense of information overload. It gives you more mental energy for your skill. It prevents you from judging yourself for not mastering every skill you planned to.

Picking one skill will keep you motivated and effective.

Break it down

In business as in learning we must look at the next productive step that we can take. The most actionable step is to start.

But where to start?

The best thing you can do is to break down a subject into actionable chunks.

Most people don’t start a skill because they feel there is too much to learn. They look at the end result as a terrifying monolith. How could they ever master this skill? Mastery is about experience. The only way to gain experience is to start. But, before we start we need to break our goal down.

Let’s take my goal of being able to present information to my customers in a clearer fashion. This is a daunting and ambiguous target. So I need to break it down.

I can’t learn everything about analytics at once. So I break it down into workable chunks. Analytics can be broken down into:

• Psychology of statistics

• Collecting social media data

• Presentation of data

• Analytical tools

The easiest and smallest brick that I can start with is Tools. There are dozens of analytical tools online. Which is the easiest entry point tool for me to learn as a beginner? I have picked Google Sheets. Why? Because it is an entry point tool that will give me the skills to work with more complex tools later.

Now I can break it down even further. 

Google Sheets has dozens of online video tutorials. These tutorials will be broken down into modules.

Now I have a digestible stream of chunks that I can tackle one at a time. Rather than facing a huge subject I have an eight minute video on YouTube that I can follow along with.

I haven’t just made something intimidating into a manageable chunk.

I have reversed engineered a road map to success. I can now tick off my achievements one by one knowing that I am moving closer to my goal of improving our business.

This leads nicely to my third point...

Block out time

It is natural in a personal and business context to ask; how long will this take? Do I have the time for this? 

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

An awful cliche for a copywriter to use; but it is true.

Large often inflate and take a larger investment of time and resources than you planned. In coding and web design this is called feature creep. It happens in copywriting. And it will happen to your project too. You may now be asking; why then start if this skill is going to balloon out of control?

There is a second part to the above cliche.

Rome wasn’t built in a day but they were laying bricks everyday.

I’m not going to pretend I remember who said this. But it is a sentence I regularly have to remind myself and Carlo.

You don’t have to lay a load of bricks. You don’t have to lay big bricks. But you have to lay a brick everyday.

You get to choose your schedule. You can block off a few hours every week or 15 minutes a day. Consistency is the key here. 

This has two effects.

1. It builds your confidence and self-image. How you see yourself and your project throughout this process is just as important as how much knowledge you gain. Blocking out time makes this journey part of who you are. If you see yourself as a learner you will not stop until you gain the skill you set out to learn. This is an attitude you can take with you into all parts of your business.

2. When something goes wrong, which it will, you won’t notice. Focusing on the micro allows you to ignore the macro. If your project doubles in size unexpectedly you won’t care. All you will need to worry about is completing your 15 minutes of study a day.

The learning process is not one task. It is a journey. A journey whose success depends on your commitment.

Set yourself a project and fail

Imitation is a core step in the learning process but you must make the most important and scary one of them all.

Doing it.

The best way to learn anything is to apply. Having a project gives a concrete problem that you can apply your mind to. It highlights the areas that you understand and those that you need to concentrate more on.

Until I began contributing to this blog I was an English tutor who had read a few autobiographies by his favourite authors. It wasn’t until I set myself this blog as a project that I moved into actually being a writer.

This project can take any form.

Learning about HTML - build a basic website. Learning business writing - write a blog. Learning graphic design - design a poster for a fictional company.

A project gives you a realistic understanding of your capabilities. You can read a thousand articles and follow a hundred YouTube tutorials but until you can apply this knowledge independently you are copying rather than learning.

Remember what we are aiming for here is a practical skill not abstract knowledge.

It is okay if you make a mistake. The point here is to allow mistakes to happen. The project will give you a meaningful understanding of your capabilities, current knowledge and how you best learn. 

Think of failure as free feedback.

Carlo likes to remind me:

Sbagliando si impara.

Which I am told means:

No better teacher than failure.

Failing teaches you more about your learning process than success. Mistakes made during your project will show you how to learn faster. This makes you more efficient at practice. Every mistake that you make on your project puts you closer to your end goal; learning a new skill that benefits your business or project. 

You are not trying to fail. You are trying to complete your project to learn your chosen skill. 

Failure is just an added bonus.

Have fun

Acquiring a new skill or area of knowledge is about more than gaining the explicit knowledge.

It is about growing as a person. 

This reads like an attempt at an overly sweet conclusion.

 It is not.

Gaining a skill is not just an investment in your business. It is an investment in yourself. Which is ultimately an investment in your business long term.

You are going to fail on this journey. You are going to not understand something for a long time. You will make mistakes. Then, just as you think you have learnt from them you will make the same mistake again. And probably again.

The one thing that is going to pull you through the difficult periods is your enjoyment of this skill.

I mentioned above that one of the skills I am vaguely interested in is deepening my knowledge of HTML. The key word here is vaguely. I would enjoy this at first. Then I would hit a brick wall in my learning which is natural. But then I would have no great desire to smash through this wall. And even if I did I would not get the same level of satisfaction I would from my number one skill.

I have currently hit two speed bumps with my new skill. They are:

1. The presentation of my data - it just does not look professional enough to share with clients.

2. My mathematics - I am a writer by training and intermediate calculations take me longer than they should

MaybeI should have broken my skill down into even smaller chunks?

Notice how I said speed bumps rather than obstacles. This is because I am enjoying this challenge. I will find a way of learning these skills and when I do I will get a warm feeling inside I would not have for other skills.

Enjoyment is just as much a factor as increasing value.

Doing anything you enjoy places you in the minority. So many people are learning skills that offer them little personal or business growth. Picking something that gives you enjoyment and value is a skill in itself. A skill that will help you and your business to grow consistently in the future.

Conclusion

Carlo and I are using this time to develop our skills. You can find about where we have been focusing our efforts here in a recent blog.

Comment below with the skills you are trying to develop now!

Struggling with a specific skill? Contact us here or message us on our social channels.