How I master any skill in 35 days | The Skill sprint

“Work like a lion, rest like a lion”

A lion uses the maximum energy while hunting to find and hunt the biggest prey in the jungle so the entire family can eat and sleep with their belly full.

Once the job is done, the lion sleeps like there is nothing else to do - Days might pass by without doing anything.

Having conquered the jungle, the lion can decide to stay at rest until one of the baby cubs gets hungry and starts acting restless.

That’s how I like to learn and work - In sprints!

People sit at their work desks with no intention, no drive, with no focus, and wonder why they are not learning skills, not making enough money, or not getting ahead in life.

You don’t win if you act like a shrimp!

Approaching anything in life with intensity, positive energy, and focus is the only way to get ahead.

It is the way to learn skills faster and get better than 90% of people who claim to be experts.

“Right intention X Focus X obsession X Time = Compounding”

Learning skills come naturally to us - that’s how we evolved.

• We learned to fight to survive

• We learned to light the fire to keep ourselves warm and cook food

There was urgency and need so we focused and made it through!

Now everything is comfortable and so we need to create urgency in the mind with our thoughts, ambitions, and goals to be able to learn fast.

For a person who doesn’t have goals and ambitions - learning skills is a side hobby.

For you and me, self-education and learning skills are mandatory!

It doesn’t matter what we know we need to learn more and accumulate more skills in our arsenal to become invincible.

You can pick a skill say copywriting and you can spend the entire year learning it

OR

You can do a 30-day skill sprint!

I will be doing atleast 3 sprints this year and this is exactly how I perform a skill sprint and gather more knowledge and insights than the so-called experts around me:

FUNDAMENTALS

The idea of a skill sprint is to spark one neuron of curiosity after another and start a curiosity chain reaction.

This chain reaction of curiosity will make learning the skill effortless and you will learn more in a month than others will learn in a year.

Fundamentally the idea is to overload the brain with the information around that one skill and then disconnect.

A skill sprint is a minimum 30 days period dedicated to one skill.

You can even do 60-90 day sprints depending upon how deep you want to be soaked in that skill for your use case.

I like to do 35 days for 1 skill

I divide these 35 days into 5 phases and here is what it looks like:

PHASE 1 (DAY 1-10)

This is the information overload phase. For the first 10 days into the sprint, you want to pick the top 3 books around the skill.

Do your research and find 3 best books on the topic that are available on the internet.

Order the top 3 books and start reading all these books together randomly from wherever you feel like.

The idea is to not read every book word by word!

Skim the books and pay close attention to new ideas and mental models.

As you read 3 books simultaneously you will find connections between different ideas of different books and that’s exactly what we are looking for.

We want our brain to form those connections between the ideas to be able to think in the language of that skill.

Soon you will start making connections and some ideas will stick with you

Now you create a Google doc and write down all ideas that struck a string in your brain for better recall of the best ideas.

PHASE 2 (DAY 10-20)

In this phase, we go a level deep!

Textbooks will give you clarity of fundamentals but now we change the format and see the theory in execution with video content on the Internet.

If you are learning copywriting - Find the best ads ever created in history and watch those ads again and again to find insights.

If you are learning video editing - Watch and analyze the videos of some of your favorite creators and movies.

In this phase, we visually consume the execution.

Again, create a new Google doc and write down your best insights from the videos.

PHASE 3 (DAY 20-25)

By now you have an overloaded brain with information!

Now is the time to disconnect.

For the next 1 week - forget about that skill!

• Don’t read anything

• Don’t watch anything

• Focus on normal daily things.

When you disconnect from the skill even if you are consciously not thinking about it - your brain will be processing all the information unconsciously and this is when you are learning the skill.

This is when the insights, the patterns, the mental models get engraved in your unconscious and you will be ready to execute the skill yourself.

PHASE 4 (DAY 25-30)

Come back to it and create a master Doc!

This master Doc is going to be your Bible for the skill you are learning.

Write down your best insights/takeaways and learnings in this doc and keep adding to this doc as you you learn more about the skill.

PHASE 5 (DAY 30-35)

Pick a personal project to apply the skill you learned!

For any skill you learn - you can apply it to a personal project, you don’t need permission.

Almost every skill that you are probably thinking to learn can be applied on social media - You don’t need internships and you don’t have to work for free.

If you apply your skills well, your projects will be your proof of work.

When you apply the skills - the output will be better than 90% of people who call themselves experts in that skill.

This is when you can call yourself an expert but we won’t because being the student of the skill we know how much there is to learn.

Better to always be the student than call yourself an expert and feel like an imposter.

Once the sprint is complete you can now rest or you can go for another sprint or maybe you can extend the same sprint to 60 days - Look inwards and you will have the answer!

• Go for any skill to master it

• Go with energy

• Go with obsession

Once you do this, you will feel invincible!

Right now you are underconfident because you don't have any skills!

Once you realize you can learn anything you want with a sprint and can get better than 90% of the people you will never feel underconfident about yourself - atleast intellectually!

You are ready to face any skill, so go now!

Build your skill arsenal

Talk soon,

-Akshat Tongia