How to Learn New Skills Fast Through Action

Learning is important for professionals. Gone are the days where you would complete school, graduate from college, and then forget about learning. The world is moving too fast.

If you do not learn for life, then you will constantly be at the threat of becoming outdated professionally.

As we have grown up, we ended up having a distaste for the concept of learning. There is no debate on how schooling messes up our brains.

Instead of doing and learning skills, we end up cramming up facts in our brain, and then we are asked to reproduce it.

Memorization is not required in the digital age anymore. Every human being has the whole world’s information in their pockets.

The purpose of education should be to learn new skills, not gain new information.

Instead of learning something by reading a book, watching a video, or doing a course, you can learn something by doing.

The best way to learn swimming is to jump into the pool.

The best way to learn to ride a bike is to ride a bike.

The best way to learn Facebook Ads is to run Facebook Ads.

The best way to learn SEO is to have a blog and do SEO.

The best way to learn how to write well is to start writing.

When we get started, we have a huge bias against taking action. It feels like we should first learn about something and do something. But it is a catch-22 situation.

Without doing something you will not learn in the first place. The theory of something is not going to help much in practice. But the practice of something is going to help a lot in understanding the theory.

There is always friction to do something new and it is anxiety-inducing. So instead of taking action and going through the pain, we keep learning, we keep preparing. And we become slow.

To understand this we can think about a simple analogy.

Think about how stressful it is when you are trying to find the new home of a friend who has recently relocated.  Even if you use maps, you still have some anxiety until you identify his house. But if you have done it once, then the next time becomes 100x easy. You just know it in a deep hard-wired way. You can be talking to someone on the phone and drive to the exact location without much thought.

If you want to go from point A to point B, you have to move. You cannot keep looking at the map.

All the theories and concepts about getting to a new place will give a sense of satisfaction but you will not have achieved anything. The only real progress is how much you have moved in that direction. Once you have moved, the path becomes clear in your mind.

You will know the path only when you have walked the path, not when you have learned about the path.

If you take action, if you move, you will make progress. The progress will motivate you to move further. The path unfolds itself as you move. That’s how you understand the path.

If you keep looking at the map without moving for a long enough time, you will lose the motivation to get to your destination in the first place. It will look complex.

That’s precisely what happens when people learn for years in college without actually doing something. The process of learning becomes hard and demotivating because the learning is not accompanied by doing and without doing there are no results.

Without results, the motivation to learn is lost. That’s why learning feels hard.

Sometimes, there is a false sense of motivation when people get ranked against each other. But the ranks do not mean anything in the real world.

When people get good marks at school, they get motivated to learn more for a short period of time but the motivation doesn’t last long. It also misdirects them into thinking that they have what it takes to succeed in life. But in the real world, what it takes to succeed is not being better than others but the capability to be persistent in the face of failure.

That’s why time and time again we see many people who did very well in college actually do not do well in real life. And many people who did not do well in school and college shine in real life. Because they are getting motivated by the results of their work and it pushes them to work more. And they learn as they work.

We understand, know, and remember the path as we move in the path.

Action and results are the only motivation to learn.

There is no other way to learn new skills fast.

That’s why my Digital Marketing Internship Program is focused on action and results, not just learning.