How to develop competence quickly in any skill
Pressure over lots of time makes a diamond. What about pressure over a short period of time? (Image by Dimitris Christou from Pixabay)
When I was in tenth grade, I suddenly developed a passion for the guitar.
My dad played, so he lent me a guitar and showed me my first chords. Late at night, I would sit on the edge of my bed and work out songs.
One afternoon, I spent about three hours going through a book of Beatles songs, painstakingly reading the tiny chord grids above the piano part.
The intense effort paid off. I started in March, and by May of that year I was jamming regularly with other musicians, performing onstage, and writing my own songs.
I have since learned that my progress was unusual, but I didn’t know that as a teenager. I just really wanted to play the guitar all the time.
I promise you, I was not a musical genius. My early efforts sounded just as bad as anyone else’s, and my fingers hurt just as much. But something drove me to push through that. I got ten times the results because I put in ten times the effort.
Think about it: If the average music student practices about two hours a week (twenty minutes, six days a week), they’ve played 20 hours after ten weeks. Not too shabby, actually! After a year, they’ve played about 100 hours.
On the other hand, I was playing at least two hours a day. After 10 weeks, I had already played 140 hours (in reality, it was more like 200 hours). So of course I made the progress in a couple of months that most of my students make in a couple of years. It wasn’t talent, it was time.
The compressed time frame yielded additional benefits:
My body adjusted physically to the demands of playing the guitar by quickly forming calluses. That meant that, after just a few weeks, it was no longer painful to play, which eliminated a major obstacle that beginning players face. For many students, the process of forming calluses takes place over a period of months — and if they don’t play enough, they may delay it indefinitely.
As a beginner, I wasn’t embarrassed about my ability. After all, I had only been playing for a week or a month or whatever. Of course I wasn’t any good. Therefore, I had no qualms about trying to follow along with my friends who were much better musicians. And time spent playing with others is a multiplier — in other words, an hour spent trying to keep up with other musicians is worth double or triple the time spent playing alone. Not only do you pick up helpful advice directly, you absorb new ideas from watching and listening. Plus, it’s incredibly fun, which motivates you to keep going.
Your brain, especially when you are young, optimizes itself for your new activity. As you sleep, biochemical processes organize and store the knowledge and skill that will be necessary for you to succeed the next day. The more effort you put in, the faster this process happens for you. You notice “freebies” as a result of daily practice: In other words, your practice on Day 4 isn’t just incrementally better than Day 3: It’s as though you practiced an extra five days in between. It’s positively magical.
I gained a fundamental shift in identity, which led me to discover opportunities and boldly make the most of them. I thought of myself as a guitarist. I made sure everyone knew I was learning guitar. I carried my instrument with me everywhere. When I made a new friend in art class, we quickly discovered that we both were guitar players and ended up starting a band together within weeks.
I would estimate that 80% of my current skill level as a guitarist was forged in the crucible of those early weeks of playing many years ago.
If you want to gain competence in a new skill, see what happens when you put in an absurd amount of time over a short period. You may have to sacrifice other things (in my case, it was my grades and sleep) in order to make it happen, but only temporarily; once you establish a baseline of competence, it is often self-sustaining at lower levels of investment. In other words, you won’t have to work that hard to maintain your skill level.
If you’re not sure what you would work on if you were to, for instance, practice French for three hours a day, I strongly recommend working with an experienced teacher or coach to help you develop a plan. But the bigger obstacle is in your mind: It can be challenging to shift your expectations and your belief in yourself in order to accomplish something that seems impossible. But once you open yourself up to the possibility, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish in just a few days or weeks.
Where do you want to be next week at this time? Go!
