How to Learn Skills and Be a Competent Expert on Anything

Expertise does not require talent to pursue but support and interest. Even a perfect pitch can be practiced and it’s not given. Practice during childhood is very effective when trying to get expertise. This is because the brain is in a very important stage of development.

If you’re not training well, then beyond 2 years' experience won’t develop you. Then, just getting more experience does not make you better. So to improve, you need to train very specific things in your process. Identify what you specifically need to improve on and work on that. To ensure growth in certain things, do exercises that are tried and true. As long as there is a science that the exercise works, an exercise is good.

You know an exercise is working when it’s difficult and challenging. Training is hard because it requires you to do things you don’t do well. Make a schedule to commit a certain time to train your weaknesses. This will help you be more consistent in improving as you don’t think much. The more advance the training, the less transferrable skills tend to be. This is because you will be training for particular situations in a field.

To train without a mentor, you first need to know what you want to do. There needs to be some vision for your skills so you can design training. Learn how to evaluate your skills so that you know if you’re improving. This is helpful as you can see your evaluation improving as you train.

Anything can be trained deliberately, even if they’re regarded as soft skills. This is because you can simulate scenarios that need soft skills. After training, it would be good to look back at areas for improvement. Those notes will help you know what to focus on to grow through training.

The 10,000-hour rule is false as time doesn’t magically give you expertise. It doesn’t make sense for bodies to know the time you spent on practice. Very talented people become great because of extensive training. However, there is no magic number or secret to becoming competent experts.

Source: Anders Ericsson