Part 1: Why should I care about building a skill?
How do I build a skill? This was one pressing question which I had in my head when I started my Ph.D. Given that I am assigned duties which I have to fulfill such as learning lab instruments, carrying out experiments which I have promised to my supervisor to make progress towards my thesis, making update reports and a lot more. My undergraduate background is not from chemistry and now I have to deal with a lot of chemistry. Naturally, I must learn it on my own. However, since the need for learning few chosen chemistry topics, a skill I must build gradually, is not urgent at this moment, it is hence often overlooked. Additionally, there are many more skills which I feel are important for my thesis in later years or as long as I am in academia. So how do I make time and learn a new skill? I am sure a lot of us who are doing a job in today’s world will also have the same question.
However, most of the jobs today do not give a standardized way to build a skill you want, and thus we tend to ignore it altogether. The jobs today’s world are quite different from the jobs thirty or forty years ago. For instance, the skills needed for a factory worker who works in a wrist-watch assembly line will be to master working with tweezers in assembling small gears and screws. And the way to hone his skills was also straightforward -to keep practicing it and get better and better every day. The skill building in these kinds of jobs is very similar to the way a sportsperson or a musician work. For instance, when you build muscle in the gym or you practice playing violin, you have to be as consistent as possible. At the same time every practice session should nudge you a little outside your comfort zone to push your limits to hone your skill.
However, this ” training” approach is very vague or missing in most of the jobs (especially in academic research) we do today. One reason is most of the jobs today require more cognitive skills than the hands-on or practical drill needed in a factory worker, sportsperson or a musician. The way most of the jobs are designed in today’s world requires the employee to master a few sets of skills. But “how” do we acquire these skills is ill-defined. And we as employees tend to ignore learning the essential skills or work towards it only at the last minute when it is utmost needed. James Clear explains this argument in his book atomic habits, by arguing that most of the skill (or for the same matter, habits) take time to build and hence the reward is not immediate (details of this argument is very long and hence interested readers can dig the same in the book atomic habits). Another, popular argument which people give the lack of passion to work for a skill. Cal Newport in his book,” So Good they can’t ignore you” debunks this idea and argues that passion is built over time only when you start to improve your skills.
Part 2: A better approach to build a skill
Most of the steps mentioned here will overlap with the “trainer mindset” which sportsperson or a musician practice. The first step will be to schedule your skill training over the week in such a way that your skill training is as regular and consistent and possible; even if each session is only for 30 minutes. Scheduling your time for building a skill is like a pre-commitment to yourself, and you might even feel guilty if you break this commitment. Additionally, this pre-commitment removes any initial activation barrier you might have and the routine, if followed long enough, transforms into a habit.
The second step is to ensure that you are away from distractions and can reach intense focus levels. As Carl Newport and Chris Bailey both argues, every distraction involves a cognitive switching penalty. To make the explanation easy, you can imagine your brain as being a RAM of a computer. As an example, if you are delved into learn Python programming language as your skill and your colleague just disturbs your for 2 minutes to talk about the group meeting tomorrow, your brain has to do excessive loading and unloading. As soon as your colleague asks something, and to process his thoughts, your RAM must be cleaned to load the context of group meeting. As soon as your chat is over, your RAM must be cleaned again to load the content of your Python programming back in. This switching need not be 100% efficient and can sometime can consume lot of your time and attention.
Finally, you must have enough energy for your training in the allocated time. Every individual possesses different energy levels throughout the day. So, you will have to find a time that is best for you. For example, the best times to work for a night owl and an early bird will be totally different.
All of the three ingredients, time, focus and energy, are necessary to work towards your skill building. As Chris Bailey argues in his book, The productivity project,
The quality of output you produce = time × energy × focus
PART 3: how do I know if I am making progress?
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”
-Peter Drucker
Since skill building can take long times (months or years), a short-term feedback or measurement system is essential to know if you are on track. An easy lead measure (definition) you can and should keep tracking your number of training sessions in a calendar by making crosses. Additionally, you might note the time (in minutes) or effort (in terms of the difficulty level you cleared) you devoted per session. So how do you know your progress? You are making progress as long as you do not break the consistent streak of the cross marks. Additionally, if you also note your time or the difficulty level, you also know how fast is your progress. Marking the crosses in a calendar sounds an old-school technique, however, it serves as an immediate reward here. Looking at an unbroken streak for last 5 sessions will motivate you to keep the streak going. Seeing the streak of 21 days will drive your motivation levels to even higher levels.
I have been following these tips myself for the past two months, and have already started to notice some difference in terms of the skill needed in the long run. I hope as a reader you find these tricks helpful and if you would like to share even better strategies to build a skill, you are most welcome. Thanks to my friends (Tan Vin and Mei Yu) in validating some of the ideas I presented. To close this post, I would like to mention a quote by Archilochus which fits very well here.
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
– Archilochus
Refernces:
- Newport, Cal. Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Hachette UK, 2016.
- Bailey, Chris. The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy. Random House Canada, 2016.
- Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Hachette UK, 2016.
- https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
Verma Vivek 