How to learn any timeless skill for life in less than 66 days

Hard skills open doors.

Timeless or permanent skills keep you in the room for as long as possible.

Some skills can do a lot for your career for a few years. And others can advance your life for good.

The hard truth is, some skills expire.

All the career skills I spent four years of my life acquiring at the university have proven to be temporary. Today, I rely on totally different sets of skills for work and life.

If I were starting over in any structured learning environment, I would invest my time in skills I will actually use.

But it’s not all bad. I built a foundation for stacking better skills. Plus, I learned a lot of life skills from remarkable people.

I’m a massive fan of learning permanent skills.

Hard skills won’t make you wealthy, but lifelong learning can help you pick the right skills for any pursuit in life.

If you can pick up skills as fast as possible, you can thrive in our ever-changing world of work. A sense of wonder and the willingness to learn is the only way to evolve into your best self every day.

Skills that expire are prone to become obsolete as technology improves and industries embrace change.

People who heavily rely on expiring skills rarely make room for permanent skills that can potentially secure their careers. They overinvest in hard skills and underinvest in timeless skills.

Your present skills may be necessary today, but they can become obsolete over time if you don’t embrace lifelong learning and upgrade your skills all the time.

Timeless skills anyone in almost every field can master include good judgement, building and improving relationships, empathy and the ability to communicate ideas. Other excellent permanent skills are the ability to persuade, make good decisions, write in public and the ability to adapt in a rapidly changing world.

That’s why it’s essential to know where you are headed in life, the skills you need to keep moving and most importantly, how to learn fast.

Scott Adams was right, “Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.”

The big question is: how do you learn relevant and permanent skills without disrupting or changing your schedule completely?

Start with a goal.

What are your current blind spots? What timeless skills can help you thrive for the rest of your life?

For instance, it could be the art of public speaking. Why is that an important skill to master? Why do you want that skill and not a different one? What will you do with it?

Find a significant reason and let that guide your learning process.

Once you know what you want, break it down into smaller chunks or deconstruct it for easier learning every day.

Identify the branches of the skill.

For example, if you are interested in learning how to persuade others, break it down into different subtopics: understanding human behaviour, persuasion techniques, social and psychological triggers of persuasion, words that improve your chances of persuasion, etc.

The aim is to identify as many components as possible. This process allows you to learn one branch at a time or, better still, one chunk of skill at a time without getting overwhelmed.

To get started, identify the first 20 percent of the sub-skills you need to build a better foundation.

Once you know that, schedule the pieces on your calendar.

For instance, if you are interested in learning how to write online, components like writing better titles, using headings, writing digestible content, writing clearly and persuasively, building a system for writing daily are essential right from the beginning.

Start small. If you can only learn something for just 30 minutes every day, stick to that. Don’t make it hard to start; otherwise, you will give up.

Biting more than you can chew will only lead to failure. So, make it insanely easy to fit into your current schedule and focus on learning something new every day.

The aim is to make learning permanent skills a habit. That’s how you can pick up skills fast without disrupting your already busy schedule.

If you can focus on learning the sub-skills for at least 66 days in a row, no matter how small, the learning process can quickly become an important habit for picking up skills every day.

“On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behaviour becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact,” says James Clear.

If you can commit to learning one component of your selected topic at a time, you will be on your way to mastering the skill.

Getting started is the most challenging part. But if you can make the first few steps very easy and don’t break the habit chain, you will surprise yourself.

And finally, make time to practice.

Teach others what you know or find opportunities to put your knowledge to work every day. Move from accumulating knowledge to practicing fast.

“If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough,” says Josh Kaufman, in his book, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything … Fast. You can live your best life by learning how to pick up skills fast. Relevant and permanent skills can prepare you for our ever-evolving world of work.

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