Unlocking Hidden Talents: Easy Skills to Learn and Impress
Becoming a grandmaster-level specialist at something is going to take years and decades of disciplined practice. And it’s well worth the effort. We all have some things we’re naturally good at, and it makes sense to develop our skills throughout our lives. However, learning new skills isn’t quite as difficult as you keep telling yourself, even if different skills require different amounts of effort. Sure, it gets harder as you grow older, but if you stay curious about the world and keep mentally fit, you’re perfectly capable of learning new things at a quick pace. Luckily, it takes very little time to get pretty good at something.
Josh Kaufman, the author of ‘The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast!’, states that the 10,000 rule, which is a ballpark for how long you need to get really good at something, is misinterpreted by most people. The 10,000 hours is the average that it takes to become an expert in an ultra-competitive field. On the other hand, if you want to simply get from knowing nothing to being pretty good, it takes just 20 hours. That comes out to roughly 45 minutes of focused practice every single day for a mere month. This is perfectly doable for the vast majority of you, even if you have a super busy schedule.
It’s not enough to work hard. You also need to work smart. Targeted practice is going to yield better results than doing things randomly. Having a mentor, doing research, and getting feedback about your learning process are all huge boosts. That being said, you shouldn’t sacrifice getting ‘stuck in’ for the sake of ‘perfect’ preparation. Learning about a skill theoretically and actually learning a skill are two entirely different things. You will never feel fully ‘ready’ to start learning something new. Failure is a core part of the learning process, so you need to reframe your mistakes as opportunities for growth instead of personal disappointments. The best course of action for analysis paralysis is, well, taking action. Start learning whatever skill you’ve been meaning to. You’ll be pretty terrible at first. You’ll fail over and over again. But you’ll quickly get better and better as things start to click.
The Power of "Pretty Good"
Kaufman points out that you don’t have to master every skill that you learn. “I believe that developing new skills in a way that allows you to perform well enough for your own purposes is-by far-the most common and valuable purpose of skill acquisition.”
He stressed that it’s vital to focus on what you’re personally interested in learning right now, not what you think you should do instead. “When you’re naturally interested in a particular skill, you’ll learn extremely quickly, so follow your interests where they lead, and avoid forcing yourself to grind through topics you’re not really interested in exploring,” he told Forbes. Even if you’re not interested in a particular skill, it may be useful for you in life, work, etc. So, what motivates you can be the result that the skill will bring about rather than the skill itself.
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Skills to Impress and Improve Your Life
Here's a curated list of skills that are surprisingly easy to learn and can significantly impact your life, impress others, or simply provide a fun and engaging pastime.
Communication and Social Skills
- Listening in Conversation: Show basic respect and patience, and you might surprise your friends with how much they appreciate being truly heard.
- Telling Great Stories: Learn how to hook an audience, speak with enthusiasm, and tell stories in a linear way so listeners never feel lost or bored.
- Saying "Hello" in Multiple Languages: Impress at a party or prepare for a trip by learning to say hello in nearly 50 languages.
Practical Life Skills
- Basic Clothes Mending and Altering: You don't even need a sewing machine for a lot of it.
- Basic Electronics Repair: Very often it's just a wobbly solder joint.
- Unclogging a Kitchen Sink: For everyday clogs, you can often avoid the plumber by putting chemistry to good use.
- Changing a Tire: Learn how to mount a spare and do it safely.
- Reading a Map and Basic Cardinal Directions: Surprisingly useful, especially when navigating without technology.
- Basic First Aid: ABCs and stop the bleeding can literally save people's lives very easily.
- Hand Sharpening Knives: The Trick is buying Diamond sharpening blocks instead of the whetstones and just trying your best to keep the same angle.
- Chopping Food Quickly: Follow an essential knife skills guide and you’ll be slicing and dicing like a five-star chef in no time.
- Fixing a Candle With a Buried Wick: All you have to do is heat up the candle with a torch or other heat source (a hair dryer will work, as long as you watch out for splash) so that the top layer of wax melts.
- Getting Wax Out Of A Tablecloth: First, freeze the waxed fabric, then scrape the wax off with a knife and throw the item in the laundry.
- Making Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs: Follow timing instructions for soft, medium-hard, and hard boiled eggs.
- Making a Simple Bouquet: Arrange flowers and filler greens in three equal bunches and then bind the three bunches together with string.
- Cleaning A Cast Iron Pan: Rub it down with a mild oil, like flaxseed or vegetable oil-not olive oil!.
- Making A Bed Properly: Creating a Four Seasons-ready bedding ensemble, including how do a proper “hospital corner” tuck at the foot of the bed.
- Saving A Burnt Cake: Using a basic cheese grater to smooth off any blackened sections.
- Repairing Drywall: Use this video from Lowe’s, which runs you through fixes for everything from tiny holes (which require some spackle and a drywall knife) to dents from door knobs (you’ll need a patch kit) to bigger holes (get yourself some drywall, furring strips, and joint tape!).
- Packing A Suitcase: Use flight attendant tips to help travelers maximize space in their suitcase.
Mental and Creative Skills
- Touch Typing: Not the easiest of them all but very well pervieved by others. Being able to look at someone whilst typing is a good way to impress them. Also it makes your life much more efficient and writing something becomes a breeze.
- Speed Reading: Everyone thinks you're some kind of superhuman when you can flip through pages quickly, but it's mostly just training your eyes to stop saying every word in your head.
- Learning to Read Other Scripts: Like Greek or Cyrillic.
- Mental Math: Learn simple tricks to quickly calculate numbers in your head.
- Drawing: It seriously only takes a couple of study days to be able to draw well enough to impress those who don't draw.
- Hand lettering: Fake it pretty well by writing the word out in cursive and then going back and thickening all your downstrokes.
- Origami: Casually turning a piece of scrap paper into a flower.
- Learning the Sky: Knowing cardinal directions, constellations, and basic weather forecasting by looking at cloud types.
- Playing the Piano: A few minutes on YouTube will certainly get you past the “Chopsticks” playing level.
- Improving Your Handwriting: This tutorial will walk you through some tips that you might have forgotten over the years, like how you shouldn’t over-embellish any cursive loops and that proper spacing is key.
- Doing Calligraphy: Start by practicing all of letters individually to get used to making a thin upstroke and thick downstroke-and while you’re at it, you’ll be able to hone in on your favorite lettering style.
- Whistling With Your Fingers: Get someone's attention or quiet a room with an impressively ear-piercing whistle.
- Twirling A Pen: Pen twirling is a fun way to pass the time, while also impressing everyone with your casually cool skills.
- Saying The Alphabet Backwards: It's easier than you think to say the alphabet backwards, especially since it fits into the same sing-songy ABC tune you already know.
Fun and Unique Skills
- Almost anyone can rip a phonebook in half: The key is to bend it in a U so that you can separate the pages in the middle ever so slightly. This lets you essentially rip 5,000 individual pages instead of 1 solid brick.
- Cooking fancy-looking meals: A decent knife, some garlic, and knowing when to add salt makes you look like a total chef.
- Moonwalking: Its all just a rhythm of the feet, you can get it down in an hour or so.
- Dancing: Easy, fun, and you get to meet people while you're learning.
- Spinning yarn and crochet: The basics are pretty easy and you get better fast with practice; plus, stuff that looks really complex is usually just the basics in various fancy configurations.
- Circular breathing: You train yourself to use your cheeks as a bellow to continue pushing air into your instrument while inhaling through the nose.
- Riding a Bike: This video by Cycling UK helps makes learning to ride as an adult easy, breaking down each step to properly guide you.
- Making Balloon Animals: This video by Balloon Animals on how to make a balloon dog is the place to start.
- Making A Paper Airplane: This video shows you how to not just make an airplane that will fly, but one that will fly fast.
- Performing A Magic Trick: This video by Troom Troom SELECT shows you how to prepare and perform not just one, but 20 wildly different magic tricks.
- Teaching Your Cat To High-Five: To teach your cat how to high-five, stock up on a treat she.
- Whistling With Your Fingers: As with most skills, it’ll take some practice. But once you get it down, you’ll never forget.
- Lighting A Match With One Hand: All you have to do is bend a match down over the end of a matchbook, flick it with your finger across the striking pad, and voilà.
- Juggling: This video covers all the basics in just 10 minutes.
- Doing A Split: It’ll take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months to become flexible enough to do a split, so know that going in.
- Solve A Rubik's Cube: After some practice, you should be able to solve them in a few seconds, much to the astonishment of everyone nearby.
- Break An Apple In Half With Your Bare Hands: Because it looks cool. Simple as that.
- Take Amazing Selfies: Get ready to stunt on everyone with your new and improved, perfectly-angled pics.
- Take Better Pictures: Think about things like framing and lighting, and even your most casual photos will be worthy of a postcard.
- Flip Food In A Pan: In the video above you’ll learn the secret to flipping food in a pan, just like a professional chef.
Career-Boosting Skills
- Microsoft Excel: In a few hours you should be able to learn the basics of Pivot tables and XLOOKUP(), which normally lands you the title of "Office Excel Guru".
- Simple budgeting:
- Investing your savings:
- Basic car maintenance: Oil changes, wipers, fluids, putting on a spare tire, etc.
- Working on your car: At this point any fix is on YouTube.
Overcoming Challenges and Achieving Success
“Most of us are deeply disturbed at the prospect of being horrible at something, even temporarily. When you try something new, you’re usually very bad, and you know it. The easiest way to eliminate that feeling of angst is to quit practicing and go do something else, so that’s what most of us do,” Kaufman told Forbes in an interview.
“The early hours of trying something new are always challenging, but a little persistence can result in huge increases in skill. The human brain is optimized to pick up new skills extremely quickly. If you persist and practice in an intelligent way, you’ll always experience dramatic improvements in a very short period of time.”
As per Kaufman, the top three pieces of advice for mastering a new skill are:
- Deciding what you want to be able to do, understanding what skilled performance looks like, and having a clear idea of how good you want to become
- Deconstructing the skill into small, manageable parts so you don’t get overwhelmed and find it easier to start
- Prioritizing the practice of the most important, critical subskills first to increase your performance the most in the fastest way possible
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