Every skill is learnable

This post now includes material from "Getting better every day" (January 2024).

I've been a student all my life, and I still am as I write this. One thing has become clear to me: almost everything in life is a skill we can learn. We often forget how to learn, or we overthink it. It applies to everything, from learning a new language to giving a sales pitch in that language, from professional skills to an entrepreneurial mindset, from teamwork to leadership. Some skills may be innate, but most take dedication and hard work.

That work builds up in small steps. Think of how babies learn to walk and talk: small efforts, every day. (Most babies also spend more time asleep than awake. My daughter is the exception.) We keep learning this way through school and university. Somewhere along the way, though, we lose sight of the simple truth that small steps and daily progress are what count.

It's funny when you think about it. Countless books have been written, and whole philosophies developed, from Stoicism to Japanese kaizen, to remind us of this basic idea. They're all tools for remembering that we already know how to learn.

There are no shortcuts, and accepting that matters. Learning something new takes time, effort and resources. It takes repetition, day in, day out, until you've mastered it. The trick is to aim to be a little better each day, to stay open to new experiences, and to accept that not knowing is part of learning. With that mindset, we can learn almost anything we need for a better life.

Getting better every day

We can't master everything at once. Real growth, in self-improvement and in building products, comes in small increments, not leaps.

What makes this work is clarity and a way to measure progress. I need a clear picture of my goals and my limits, and a simple way to track how I'm doing over time. That means paying attention to the details, my behaviour and the things that trigger it, because each of them matters.

This is the thinking behind my journaling. I use it to map the path from who I am now to the person I want to become. That change is made of many small adjustments and improvements, and writing every day lets me track them and see myself change.

Why does this matter to me? Because I think happiness is a long-term pursuit; it's one of the reasons I love being a parent. Happiness isn't something you stumble on; you grow it. I find joy in making progress, in being capable and useful, and in sharing that usefulness with others. Turning what I learn into real expertise is what makes me happy, and it comes from getting the details right, every day.

The chance to learn a new skill is always there. Learning is a commitment to small daily progress, kept up over a long time.