We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle

Bah. I suck. I’ve been hesitant to write lately and seem to have a mental block. Trying to come up with content to write about for Rentything has been a challenge. There’s a reason for this. I haven’t practiced, and I haven’t been consistent.

If you want to get good at something, you must must must practice consistently and deliberately. There are no shortcuts. It is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for success. Anything less simply doesn’t cut it. The path to mastery is littered with failure and setbacks, but this shouldn’t stop you from trying. There are skills that I believe have a huge return on investment and are definitely worth learning. Some of these include:

 

1. General strength training

Not being generally strong is a terrible thing. There are so many reasons to be strong that the list is exhausting. Some of the reasons include being functionally useful in a variety of activites, such as helping friends move, gardening, playing with your kids, and so on. Strength makes almost all activites better and very few worse. And the best part is strength is something that can be earned, significantly, if you are willing to put in your time, probably more so than most other types of physical activites.

 

2. Social skills

This is the one that most people believe is either you have or do not have, which is simply a FALSE belief. Social skills are a game of practice and encompass a huge variety of skills including the ability to listen, to empathise, to connect, to understand, to adapt, and so on. And believe it or not, going out and meeting people and trying different things will improve your skills. On the flipside, not going out consistently and generally hiding from people will make you more socially inept. This is my current situation and is something I am fully aware of. Social skills take consistent practice, just like anything else. And the skills will get rusty.

 

3. Writing

Writing a lot will get you better. I’ve never heard of any writer any time in the history of writing who wrote masterpieces on their first try, it simply doesn’t happen. And when you don’t write frequently, it is a struggle, kind of like what is happening to me write now. Typing these words on this keyboard is very unnatural and coming up with the right words is difficult, and yet I have nobody else to blame except myself.

 

4. Programming

This is something very important to me at the moment, and so is something I spend the majority of my days/time on. I notice if I take days off, it takes a while to get back into the groove of things. Just like many skills, the more consistent the practice the better you get.

There are an infinite number of skills you could spend the rest of your life trying to learn, but you won’t be able to learn them all. I would say getting relatively good at a skill isn’t too difficult if you are willing to put in your time, but obtaining mastery requires extreme dedication and time. Two ways of getting good at a skill are to go full immersion or to spend a little bit of time each day practicing. If we take the full immersion route, there is not much room to learn other skills for the time being. Spending a little bit of time each day allows you to develop other skills without getting overwhelmed on one specific skill.

There are skills you’ll get good at throughout your life. Some, such as driving, will become second nature to you. Others you’ll naturally let die due to lack of interest (like that one time you tried pottery). Others you’ll get rusty on due to lack of practice. This is my current situation with skills such as rock climbing, writing, and jiu jitsu. If you don’t want those ones to go away, start practicing them again. Generally they come back pretty quickly. Having a variety of skills in your repertoire is important, and having a few with full mastery is even better. I think they call it becoming a T shaped person (generalist in many areas, expertise in a few). In my opinion this is a good strategy and one I strive for myself. The skills you get better/worse at will likely be constantly in flux, but don’t worry about it. That’s part of the ebb and flow of life. Just remember to practice consistently.