How To Learn A New Hard Skill — Personal Growth Takes Time!

From 2019 to present (2023), I’ve had a full time job in New York.

I love my job, I learned a lot working there. I’m driven by personal growth, and bettering myself. So, every year I try to learn something new outside of my full time job.

This year the new skill that I’m learning is Spanish. My goal is to be conversational in 6 months (I started 4 months ago — and I’m get better)! For context, I love to travel — and I want to travel to Latin America, so I’m studying Spanish to prepare for my travels. I love studying Spanish — it’s a beautiful language.

As a bigger point, I love learning new hard skills, it’s my favorite part of personal growth.

I’m telling you, I’ve been into bettering myself for a long, long time. Ever since I could remember — I had my head in a book, usually fiction. Then in middle school, I started working out (doing karate) where I leaned out.

After that, in high school — I found the weights and calisthenics. I gained muscles, some confidence. I love to push myself. And am inspired by action adventure anime, particularly One Piece and Naruto.

High school I attended a college preparatory school, pushing my myself to get good grades.

I got to college and studied screenwriting. In college, I was shy ( reading in the library alone too much). So, I decided to attack that problem by doing improv classes. And that’s when the whole world opened up.

I cleaned up my diet, became a better writer in college — creating 2 feature length screenplays . Which grew my writing skills.

I worked on my hard and soft skills, a lot. Especially since, I wanted a new job straight outta college.

Hard skills such as writing, learning different software, acting, content creation, etc.

My whole 20s were focusing on hard skills.

Why?

Cause it can get you a higher paying job. Or even learn how to do freelancing (which I’m learning now). Or you can learn how to run a business (my end goal).

So learning a new hard skill is important, but how do you do it?

Here’s how…

1. Practice Everyday: Writing is my second best skill. Like I said before, I graduated with a degree in screenwriting. In college, I wrote 2 feature length screenplays, and handful of shorts. I started a blog or two. And a mailing list for movie nerds. In school, I got a lot of praise for my writing (even for writing my own resume). How did I do it??? Practice everyday. When I was working my wack bar gig — I would write funny Woody Allen type jokes in my iPhone. I also would write down different ideas for books, screenplays, etc. It didn’t matter if my ideas were bad. I would write everyday. Currently, I practice on the language learning app, Duolingo, everyday. When you wanna get better at a hard skill, you have to practice everyday, then you’ll get better. Practice 365/7.
2. Obsession — The stuff that I’m into: improv, film, writing, Spanish, GPUs — all have one in common — I’m obsessed with it. When I first started improv a decade ago, I practiced, watched shows and read improv books. Same thing with movies. Same thing last year with hardware. And, now Spanish. My phone, laptop, and Apple watch are all in Spanish. Spanish ads play on my Spotify, the majority of the time I dunno what they’re saying, but I’m getting better. And that’s only cause I’m obsessed with it.
3. Invest the $$$ — This one is the hardest. Why? Cause I’m natural cheapskate, and don’t like to spend $$$. But I wanna get better at my skills, so I force myself to spend money on my skills. Last month I spent $200 on Spanish lessons. Last year, I bought $1000 + worth of tech hardware. Spent $120 on group fitness classes at Orange Theory Fitness (so worth it)! This idea is amazing cause the extra $200 dollars helped my Spanish skills this month . And I can see the improvement. Well worth it!
4. Bring it to the real world: After you practice your skill like crazy, you need to bring it into the world. I’ve done it, time and time again. I’ve done improv jams with random people in front of random people. Also, this past Tuesday, I practiced my Spanish with the Hispanic security guard close to my job. I’m using my new found skills in real time, and A/B testing the results. Feels powerful.

Practice Makes Perfect

Building your hard skills takes time, but it’s valuable. And nice to see yourself grow in new ways…

… If you wanna talk more about hard skills, or personal growth — you can tweet me at @ JAKLHC or my LinkedIn.

Adios!

— Jamual

Thanks for reading!