Everything is a Skill
If I had to teach only one thing to every student, athlete, artist or aspiring top performer in the world this would be it.
The most important thing I’ve ever learned is that there are 2 groups of people in the world:
Group 1: Those who believe that their level of skill in a subject is fixed
Group 2: Those who believe that their level of skill in a subject can change (go up with practice and use or go down with neglect).
You want to be part of the second group.
Growth vs Fixed Mindsets
The people in Group 1 have a fixed mindset, you’ll often hear these people saying “ I am not a Math person” or “I am bad at sports” or “I suck at writing”. By using words like “I am XYZ”, they’re walking self-fulfilling prophecies, implicitly limiting themselves from growing and getting better at a certain skill. They’ve somehow built their identity on being a certain way, most often from past trauma or bad experiences.
For example, many children who had bad math teachers grow to hate math or children who were never praised for their dance or arts develop a negative association with such creative pursuits later in life. A fixed mindset can also manifest itself in seemingly positive beliefs. You get people who say “I’m great at Math” or “I’m good at sports” and then face existential crises after getting a bad grade on their first college maths exam or getting injured and never getting back to their best. Such a mindset results in being very brittle and breaking at the first challenge.
If you want to succeed at school and in life, you need to have a growth mindset -- the belief that your potential is not fixed and that with hard work, smart training and perseverance, you can get better at everything.
For those who have a growth mindset, when they win, their internal dialogue praises their effort, learning and iteration and never because they are “so good” or “the best” at their domain.
Everything is a skill
Another way of framing a growth mindset is that everything is a skill. Solving maths problems, writing good stories and essays, public speaking, getting fit and healthy, having great relationships and friendships -- everything is a skill. Almost every single thing that you want to be good at is a skill at which you can increase your competency. The way you increase your competency is by first, believing that you can get better if you work on something and conversely, knowing that if you don’t work on something, your competency will remain static or get worse.
The second way to improve your competency is to actively try to view things as skills, even things that don’t look like skills in the traditional sense. The world changes when you look at it through this lens. Here’s Naval Ravikant explaining how two things that don’t look like skills, being happy and breaking habits, are actually skills:
On how being happy is actually a skill:
“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a skill that you develop and a choice that you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. It’s just like losing weight. It’s just like succeeding at your job. It’s just like learning calculus. You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic...You can slowly but steadily over the course of the years make yourself happier.” - Naval Ravikant on The Tim Ferriss Show
On how breaking habits is actually a skill:
Similarly, I would say that breaking habits is a skill, and it is something you can learn. Start with a small habit and try different techniques to break it. Try substituting. Try going cold turkey. Try weaning yourself off. Try social proof, by telling other people that you’re going to break the habit. Try putting other habits around it that leave no time for that habit. Try removing the triggers. Try toning down the rewards. Do whatever it takes but break one bad habit this year. Once you pick up that skill, it’s a beautiful thing, because slowly you can shed all your bad habits and make room for good habits in your life. - Naval Ravikant on The Tim Ferriss Show
But how can we look at everything as a skill? There are four steps to follow.
How to Make Anything a Skill
Here’s how to make anything a skill in 4 steps:
Clearly define success and failure
Make it practice-able
Create feedback loops
Track your progress over time
Step 1: Clearly define success and failure
Having a clear definition of success and failure will set an ideal for you to strive toward. After you’ve constructed this target to hit, you’ll be able to answer “Yes” or “No” to questions like “Did you hit the target today?” and “Did you get closer to hitting the target today”, because you’ll know exactly what success looks like for you.
This is similar to goal setting but is different in one key aspect. Definition of success and failure should include both quantitative and emotional components and should also be specific to your personality and circumstances. For example, if someone is trying to build the skill of good health, they might have a weight number they’re trying to reach but might also want to consistently answer the questions “Yes” to questions like “Do I feel good about my body?”.
One note of caution about defining success, you want to set goals that are internal to you-- you want to set goals where you’re not being judged too much by how others perceive you or by some external metric. Rather use an internal scorecard, where you use things like effort, progress and energy or enthusiasm as markers and focus on the process and less on the being totally outcome focused, as you’re more likely to resort to hacks which are unsustainable in the long term.
Step 2: Make it practice-able
Break something down so that you can practice and “do the reps” of it, similar to how a bodybuilder will do reps of exercises. In the beginning, it’s often good to get reps in, but as you progress further, you want to be practicing deliberately:
“While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.” - James Clear, Author of Atomic Habits.
This is why Step 1 is critical, because it gives you a goal to strive toward in your practice systems.
For complex topics, like “having good relationships” or “being a good writer”, the key way to make something practice-able is to deconstruct it into a series of sub-skills which you can practice independently and then bring them all together. This process of deconstruction forces us to build more intricate mental models about our chosen skill and update along the way.
For example, as someone wants to build mastery in the skill of writing, I found that there’s many different sub-skills that compose the major skill of writing well, such as idea generation, structure, transitions between paragraphs, hooking my reader’s attention, actionable takeaways, following a writing process etc. This helped me stay away from a fixed mindset that says “I’m bad at writing” and kept me keenly aware that I had different levels of strength in each sub-skill. I noticed that while many of my pieces had good structure, I was weaker at idea generation, and so I worked more on that.
This same principle of deconstruction can be applied to things like having good romantic relationships. Some examples of sub-skills to work on might be: partner selection, communication, quality time spent, activities that spark connection, understanding each other’s love languages, mutual respect, professional and personal goal alignment.
Step 3: Create feedback loops
“What gets measured gets managed” - Peter Drucker
Create feedback loops that tell you if you are hitting your target of success and if your current methods of practice are getting you closer or further away from your definition of success. This feedback loop will help you understand what’s working and where aspects of your practice can be improved, so that you can make adjustments accordingly. This is why a clear definition of success is important, as it helps you clearly see whether you’re getting closer to success or not.
For example, if you’re trying to build the skill of differentiation in calculus your feedback loop might be whether you are getting the correct answers to practice problems for your homework and how well you can explain concepts to your fellow classmates. From there, you can further investigate the reason for why you might be getting answers wrong and focus on improving sub-skills related to those sorts of problems.
For skills with no ‘correct answers’, like the skill of health, your feedback loop might be quantitative things like the amount of weight you can lift, how reps you can do, your weekly weight, body fat percentage, waist circumference or scores for qualitative things like your self-reported energy levels and feelings during the day, on a scale of 1-10, with details. The feedback loop might also be how often you stuck to a diet plan and your mental state or justification when you broke your diet, so that you can work on those root causes that cause you to relapse.
Step 4: Track your progress over time
The final step to make something a habit is to track your progress in gaining mastery in that skill over time. This process of reviewing your progress and planning for the next phase of your growth is extremely gratifying, as you can see how far you progressed, but also can be scary, because we can clearly see how we’re falling short of our definition of success. Whether you feel excited or scared about tracking your progress, it is a vital step in making something a skill, as it will help you overcome the cycle of spurts of progress and regression, and prevent you from falling back into the same unconscious bad habits over and over again (I fight this battle all the time when building my skill of health!).
When you track your progress, you want to review the feedback from your feedback loops and notice how and why you’re staying on the path or falling off the path of success. This step also includes celebrating wins, no matter how small they may be, as tiny gains are powerful and you can always learn from failed attempts or methods.
One method to track your progress is to conduct a daily or weekly review of how you practiced your skill and the progress you’ve made. You can then reflect on what’s working that you want to keep, what’s not working that you want to discard, and new ideas that you want to start implementing. As you hit different parts of the learning curve on different skills, you’ll find that you may need to change the methods you use to reach the next level, as you continue to refine your skill.
Another method is to keep a ‘mastery journal’ or a ‘skill journal’, where you jot down notes about your practice sessions, like your goals, the results you saw, errors you made, technical and emotional mistakes, as well as and your feelings and mental states when practicing your skill. This will help you deconstruct positive and negative outcomes later so that you can improve on your areas of weakness and double down on your areas of strength. I learned this idea from chess players, who keep notes about the moves they play and why they play them as they play chess matches. By revisiting those notes after the game, they can see if their predictions were actually true and notice the biases they had that led them to make incorrect predictions.
Learn More
To learn more about the Growth Mindset and skills, I’d recommend these source materials:
Mindset by Carol Dweck [Book Summary] [Amazon Link]
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin [My Takeaways] [Resources] [Interview with Author] [Amazon Book Link]
The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge (Great intro to the concept of neuroplasticity, which underpinned how you can change proficiency in skills) [Author Interview] [Book]
Atomic Habits by James Clear [Author Interview] [Summary] [Amazon]
Which part of the article did you find most interesting? Let me know on Twitter (@avthars) or email me (avthar at avthar dot com) if you’d like to discuss it!
