Three General Tips for Learning Any New Skill

I’ve been trying to learn a new software platform over the past few weeks, and in the process, I thought it’d be nice to write out some of my thoughts on learning any new skill. 

The following three tips are intended to be skill-specific - meaning they help the most when you are learning something that you do, rather than something that you just know. Both types of knowledge are valuable, but a skill requires you to actively use your hands and mind to produce some type of output. So to me, learning a skill means taking that stored knowledge, practicing a process with that knowledge, and producing some output that arises from the combination of knowledge and process.

Alright, so here’s three things that I try to actively practice when learning a new skill.

Kill the jargon.

I have a love-hate relationship with jargon. I understand its purpose: in a specific industry, you need words that are catered to the problems and tools of the industry. You need these words to be quick descriptors of whatever they are doing or representing. 

But when you are learning a new skill, jargon really sucks. Until you get the hang of the knowledge and the process, jargon feels like a major barrier on your path to learning. When I jump into a new skill and encounter jargon that isn’t quickly understood, I feel like an outsider. Hearing practitioners of a skill use the jargon when you don’t understand it makes you feel incredibly dumb and hopeless. 

So to get past this, I try to kill the jargon. I do this in my head by making my own descriptive phrases that match the jargon. It might seem strange to make up your own words when jargon is already made up, but it really helps. You can link the jargon - which is meaningless until you learn it - to something that has meaning to you. 

An example of this is “keyframe” when I was learning video editing/animation. To me, “keyframe” is super vague, especially in the context of non-linear video editing. When I was starting out, the word didn’t make sense to me and when I would see tutorials where people had to make keyframes, I was instantly confused. I would try to ignore the word and learn its meaning through the context of the tutorial.

When I finally stopped trying to work around the word and actually understand it, I realized that it was very simple, although the name was kind of misleading. I learned that a keyframe is simply a single frame where something happens. That something could be the start of an effect, a title coming on screen, an audio fade, etc. It didn’t matter what the something was - the keyframe just existed to mark the moment when something would change. 

So I used that phrase to kill the word “keyframe” in my mind. Now anytime I would hear it, I would think “the frame where something happens” and I could focus on the task, instead of my confusion over the word’s meaning. Eventually, I was able to drop my longer phrase because I had learned how to keyframe, when to keyframe, what to keyframe, etc. - and using the tool is the ultimate way to learn the jargon. Find a way to understand what the jargon describes, and then start using whatever that thing is. Using keyframes helped me understand the concept better than any phrase or word could have.

But finding a way to kill the jargon and ignore it for a while helped me get to that point.

Keep practice sessions short, try to practice daily.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when learning a new skill. I’ve found that my enthusiasm has the potential to harm me in the early days of learning something. As mentioned above, we learn skills so we can do things. Maybe a new skill will help us make a piece of art we are dreaming about, or communicate more effectively, or allow us to make more money. All of these end goals are worthy, and they all come with a little bit of excitement attached to them. The excitement about the end goal can lead you deep into a new skill where you might quickly find yourself lost. 

Going into a new skill with a goal in mind is great. But if you focus singularly on the goal you will allow yourself to pick and choose pieces of the skill that fit your goal, until that strategy stops working. This is also where your learning will stop.

An example of this from my own life would be when I was learning Photoshop. I would jump into Photoshop with grand designs of artwork I wanted to make. Everything would go great when I had to do simple tasks like color correction and exposure adjusting. 

But eventually, larger projects would require masking, and fine selection, and retouching. I was immediately lost when it came to these concepts and I found this to be incredibly frustrating. If I wasn’t able to figure the problem out quickly, all of my enthusiasm for the project would disappear and I would just be frustrated. 

What do you think happened next? 

I would abandon my vision and quit the project. I couldn’t make the software do exactly what I wanted, because I hadn’t taken the time to understand it, and now my enthusiasm was gone. 

I’ve learned with time that the best investment I can make in a new skill is time. This means that instead of trying to do a huge project without spending any time practicing the skill, I’ve found it is more useful to practice the skill - even when I don’t have a project in mind - and then I’ll have built my knowledge and gained practice that will be invaluable when the next project comes up. 

The best way I have found to use this concept is to find a way to use the skill every day, even if it is just for ten minutes. Longer periods are better, but for daily practice, I would still keep the sessions under an hour. An hour or less keeps you from getting burnt out on the skill before you get to use it. If you find something that you can use your new skill for every day - a technique you can practice, a master you can try to mimic, etc. - you’ll be better equipped when a large project arises. 

“Teach” yourself new concepts using the Feynman Technique.

I’m excited for you if you’ve never heard of the Feynman Technique. You’re about to have your mind altered so learning new skills is way easier than ever. When I first read about it, I was stunned at how simple it was and how valuable it could be when learning anything. I won’t go into detail about the Feynman Technique now, but Thomas Frank has a great video explaining it right here: How to Learn Faster with the Feynman Technique.

The Feynman Technique is a great tool when it comes to learning a new skill or concept because it forces you to use simple language to explain the concept as if you were teaching it to someone else. Doing this will require you to demonstrate that you understand the concepts that are foundational to the one you are explaining, and it will highlight the areas where you need to work on your understanding.

“Keyframe” would be a great candidate for the Feynman Technique. As mentioned above, someone on the outside with no understanding of video editing would likely have no idea what a keyframe is. When you are starting, that “someone” is you. So you could help yourself gain a deeper understanding of this concept by “teaching” it on paper. 

Write the name of the concept at the top of the page, and then go about explaining it as simply and clearly as you can. You’ll find along the way that this is much harder than you expected it to be, and you’ll start to recognize parts of your understanding that are lacking the depth required for a full explanation. This allows you to actively notice and fix problems in your understanding, which leads you to increase your abilities with your new skill.

It may seem strange to “teach” yourself something that you don’t understand. But finding the places where your understanding is flawed is the point of the Feynman Technique. By sitting down and seeing what you know, you’ll be probing your understanding for the places that you need some work. This is incredibly helpful because when we aren’t understanding something, it can be hard to know what we don’t know. When you hit a rough patch in your learning journey you may not know exactly where you lost your understanding. But if you use the Feynman Technique you can write everything out and find the exact places where you need to go back and take another look. 

Thanks for reading!