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the other day i received this message which basically says jeremy could you share with us how you learn new complex topics and i remember thinking wow what a fantastic question it's something i do all the time i definitely have a process
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but i never thought about writing it down or sharing it with you guys the same is true with learning new skills i have acquired a lot of new skills in the last three years and you've seen those displayed in many of my youtube videos
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now just to be clear i don't consider myself to be an expert at any of these things but i have developed enough proficiency that i can accomplish my project and feel good about using that skill on another project mastery of any
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skill is going to take time but my goal today is to show you how i get into the driver's seat as quickly as possible i'm going to focus mostly on the skill acquisition part first but later on in the video we are going to revisit learning new topics so let me share with
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you how i do it and then you can take the parts that work for you and apply it to learning new skills and knowledge [Music]
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even in physics we have this thing we have these laws of motion right an object that rests wants to stay at rest until acted upon you are an object at rest you have your routine you get up you go to work at a certain time you
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come home breaking that is hard you are trying to wedge in a new thing and if you're not motivated to keep that thing in your schedule you'll just forget about it you'll default to your normal thing when you're sitting on the couch you're comfortable you're surfing the
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internet and then you remember oh yeah i should be working on my skill everything in you wants to stay on that couch and keep doing what you're doing because that's the that's the state of being at rest if you're going to break out of
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that rest you need motivation to do that next we need to define what we mean by learning a new skill because there's a big difference between knowledge and skill for the purposes of this video we're going to define knowledge as just information in your
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head and even understanding but a skill will be producing something in real life even if it's just sounds for example learning to sing i think we'd all agree would be a skill and learning a new
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language is both knowledge and skill because there's information there's you need to know the vocabulary and you need to understand the grammar that's stuff in your head but you also need to be able to construct sentences in your head
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form the sounds and speak them in real time responding to people so there's a skill element as well in high school i took two years of french i got straight a's in french i don't speak a word of
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french why because almost all of the hours i spent in class was focused on grammar and vocabulary and i didn't spend hardly any time at all actually trying to form the words
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hear something in french process it and then respond to it that just didn't happen in class that's why you can take someone like me who's had two years of structured grammar and vocabulary training and put me up against a
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five-year-old kid in france who hasn't had any grammar training at all nothing structured at least and his grammar is going to be better than mine why because he has thousands of hours of actually practicing the language and i just have
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a whole bunch of information in my head i haven't actually developed the skill i want to bring this up because people think you need a whole lot of knowledge before you start practicing the skill and thus you never actually learn the skill it's always amusing to me that
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people say they're interested in woodworking and they even go as far as buying the tools and then they just watch woodworking videos and they never actually cut anything so let's apply this same logic to trying to draw something or trying to build something
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you can spend a lot of time watching tutorials you can drown in an ocean of information and never get to all of it pick any micro topic within the major topic and there's going to be somebody with a phd who spent all their life
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studying that one little thing so if your goal is to develop the skill and not be an expert then your strategy needs to be very different right and i'm going to talk about this more later in the video but my goal is to show you how to find the
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information that you need just enough to accomplish the task as opposed to trying to learn everything there is to learn about that topic the next thing we need to do is remove barriers number one is probably going to be cost for a lot of
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people all of us have a budget right it doesn't matter how big or small it is you have some kind of budget and you need to decide whether you can realistically adjust and give up some things or move some things around to
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make your hobby or your new skill affordable for you when i decided i wanted to start making metal parts on my youtube channel i needed to learn how to mill which means i needed a milling machine so when looking for a milling machine i would love to have bought like
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a brand new big old haas machine fully enclosed that would have been amazing but i ended up buying a 40 year old broken mill and i had to repair it myself which means i had to invest both some time and some cost but it made it
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affordable for me maybe you're just gonna break down some pallets if you want to learn woodworking and get some cheap or free wood you practice on that because by the way you're going to screw up and that's also part of your budget you
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can't be afraid to break a tool i broke many tools when i started learning how to mill [Applause] wow and i had to buy new material i had
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to buy new tools it is going to happen as part of the cost of learning so mentally you need to be prepared for how do i alleviate some of that cost and make it affordable for myself one of the easiest ways to get your budget down is
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to remember that almost any resource can be had used you can get tools used you can get books if you need raw material instruction sites often buy more material than they need and then they put the rest of the wood up for sale
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online even if you're learning a foreign language there's used audio cds where someone's gone through the course and they don't need it anymore and they put it on something like ebay and you can buy it used of course if you're watching this video you've already got access to
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a huge resource and that's the internet for me when i was learning how to write python and c plus i learned almost all of that on the internet the programs that i used to actually write the language were also free programs that i just downloaded to my computer so in
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that sense some skills require very little cost at all next i'm going to suggest that you only buy tools as you need them rather than buying a bunch of tools at once this is especially important if you're working on a limited budget the next thing we need to address
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is fear so we're talking about fear of failure fear of being electrocuted those are all legitimate concerns nobody wants to be electrocuted one of the things that i usually respond to that with is you just have to learn how to be safe 90
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of your risk of being electrocuted is simply unplugging the thing you're working on before you start working on it if you unplug it and perhaps discharge a capacitor if there's a capacitor in there now we're up to 98
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risk removed of being electrocuted if batteries are supplying power you need to disconnect the battery the key message here is you can learn to do this safely it's why i have so many videos on my channel about how to wire various
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types of motors because i'm trying to remove the intimidation and just show you how to do it now that we've addressed the fear of being injured how about this fear of failure the way i deal with fear of failure is i simply
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say i am going to suck at this for a while and i'm okay with that if you can just look at the thing and say jeremy or insert your name here i am going to suck
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at this for a while and that's okay you're gonna be like a baby who's learning to walk and their legs are shaking and they fall down and that's perfectly normal we don't laugh at babies when they fall since you are the one who decide whether you are
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embarrassed about what just happened you can just choose to not be embarrassed and just try it anyway if you've watched two or more of my videos you have definitely heard me say stuff like i don't know what i'm doing i'm not sure
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if this is going to work or not just consider for a moment that i can edit my videos in such a way that you don't see any mistakes but i'll leave that stuff in there because it's important to me that you know that there's going to be uncertainty and that there's going to be
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failure it is part of the process to me the failures are the most interesting part of any project because that's when you learn the most it's the thing that gets burned in your mind seeing something burn up in front of you
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or break in front of you and you go wow i didn't expect it to break there why did it break there and now you know okay i need to redesign my structure it should be stronger here these are things that you learn from seeing your failures
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if you're afraid of failure and then you avoid it at all costs you won't learn very much time is the next barrier you're going to have to overcome there is a direct relationship between the number of hours you spend practicing and your actual proficiency your ability to
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do that skill so if you don't invest the time you're never going to get the skill or it's going to take way longer than is reasonable now for me and i assume many of you time is really precious it's the only commodity that once you spend it
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you can never get it back that hour is just gone forever things like family time for me are off limits though that barrier won't be crossed i don't give up those hours to practice or work on anything else which means i've got to
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sacrifice something else maybe i need to work a little bit less maybe i need to sleep a little bit less reality though it probably means i need to spend a little less time on internet on social media and doing things that don't matter
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quite as much we all love to develop new skills with as little effort and time as possible because so many people want that there's always somebody trying to sell you that even if it doesn't exist this is why you have to resist these get
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rich quick type schemes that exist for nearly everything even now i'm trying to learn mandarin chinese i've been studying it for about two months now and when i would look for youtube videos about mandarin i keep coming across
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these click bait videos with titles like listen to this seven hour audio while you sleep and wake up speaking mandarin chinese which is ridiculous right you have to be able to associate a real war object with these foreign sounds that
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you don't even know yet and even worse when it comes to abstract thoughts that don't have a corresponding thing in real life you also need to be able to make those connections that's hard enough while you awake so you're going to dream in a foreign language that you don't
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even speak yet like this to me is it's insane but it exists because of hope we all have that hope but i'm gonna beg you to not waste time with anything that promises you results in five minutes a
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day or while you sleep the reality is if you could have that skill in five minutes a day you probably wouldn't even be watching this video and that's why for the rest of this video nearly everything else i want to share with you is about how to effectively practice the
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skill because that's going to be the thing that matters the most you might say up until this point we've been talking about the prerequisites but now class is about to start your first and most important mission is to get to hands-on as quickly as possible if your
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goal is to learn a foreign language like the one i'm working on now your goal is to get into a conversation with the native speaker as quickly as possible remember you will suck at this so those first couple of conversations are not going to go very
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well when i decided i was going to learn python i chose to automate my cnc table saw when i decided i was going to learn how to cnc i decided i would build a full-scale industrial robot there's a
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little bit of a theme here that's kind of outrageous and that is i tend to choose very very difficult projects my personal preference is to weigh it out as close to the deep end as possible and
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when i feel my feet starting to come off of the bottom of the pool that's where i stop that's my comfort zone that's where i want to be because mentally that's where my motivation is the highest i'm the most driven i'm still just barely
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capable and that's what keeps me engaged you decide how difficult this is if your goal is to improve your baking skills or start working on baking skills maybe your project is to make a cake for your
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friend's birthday you could make it entirely from scratch or you could also just start by buying the pre-mix and adding the eggs and water watching it you know decorating the cake these are all things that still need to
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be done it's part of the process and you can get that small victory before you dive into the bigger victory the same is true for every skill you might want to develop you can choose the entry level of difficulty and progress it up as
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steeply or as flat as you want when you select your project make sure you pick something that's centered around the skills you actually want to acquire let's take my coding experience for example my primary goal in learning how
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to code was i wanted to be able to control my projects in real life so when it came to python i specifically wanted to be able to write code that i could put on a raspberry pi that would allow me to get inputs from the device sensors
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or whatever and also send out commands you can easily spend a lot of time watching tutorials about things like how to design other things that are digital that also require coding my goal is i want to be able to send digital inputs
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and outputs how do i get to that point but of course you can't just jump to that right there's some foundational stuff in between you can't just walk up to a stranger and start trying to practice a foreign language when you have zero vocabulary in the case of
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coding there's some basic things about code syntax and how to structure your code that i needed to learn so our goal is to find some tutorials that give us the essentials from then on i took a blank page and i said okay i'm going to
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start writing my code and then of course i quickly ran into a problem because i didn't watch a tutorial about how to automate your table saw what i watched was a tutorial on the basics of python coding so there were a lot of things
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that i wanted to be able to do and i didn't know how to do i wanted to do this i don't even really know what it's called i don't have all the vocabulary yet so you just start searching for projects that do similar functions and
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this will get you on the trail you learn new vocabulary you bring it into your mind i did the same thing with learning cnc as i did with learning how to code i watched a few tutorials on basic things like how to use the software that i'm
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using to control my machine how to set up a work offset how to clamp your pieces down properly but my goal in watching those tutorials were very specific to getting me in front of the machine as quickly as possible now
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that we've got our project and we've decided to go hands-on you want to look to maximize the sensory input that you can get for me coding was one of the hardest ones to do this with because
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there just isn't a lot of sensory input you are typing things on the computer and there are words on the screen and that's it when you do something wrong in coding you just get a red bar at the bottom with an error message it was the equivalent of just being slapped in the
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face until you did it wrong try again i mean that's how it felt to learn how to code the computer has no mercy on you contrast that with the cnc machine where you get lots of input you can feel the vibration of the machine when
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something's going weird with the cut you can see the chips coming off if they're turning a weird color and it's starting to you know squeal and make this weird noise like all of this input sensory input is coming in and teaching you
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every way that you can find to maximize your input it's going to also maximize your ability to acquire the skill when it comes to speaking a foreign language for me i try to emphasize
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seeing the person who's talking whenever possible instead of just listening the easiest way for me to get into a conversation like this with a native speaker is to do a language exchange or meet up with a language tutor when i do one of these meetings my rules are
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really simple i want to use english as little as possible you can use hand signers you can use gestures we can play charades but don't use english unless you absolutely have to now this bushwhacking sort of blazer on trail
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method is not for everyone i'm sure that some of you might prefer a little bit more structure even if you still want to do this on your own and that's entirely possible in fact that's how i taught myself solidworks so let's go to the computer and i'll show you how i did it
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way back in 2015-ish i started an internship at an engineering firm where they were using solidworks they told me about this course that you could sign up for and they also handed me a book and said by the way this is the book you get when
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you take that course i flipped through it and said well i can do this and i put myself through the course i just checked on ebay and sure enough there are copies of that book available where people took the class and now they no longer need to book similarly some colleges will let
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you audit a class for free even auditing a class online for free now not all colleges do this but some of them do mit offers a huge library of completely free college-level courses where you can see everything that went on in the lecture
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hall you can see the homework material like you have options for getting college-level material for free if you want it the trade-off for the audit is you don't get college credit they're not going to give you a grade but that's not why you're there to begin with the moral
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of this story is there are many options available to you i want to tell you about today's sponsor zometry zometry is basically manufacturing on demand it doesn't matter if it's 3d printing laser cuts water jet these guys do bench sheet
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and the ordering process is really easy to give you an example of how it works i uploaded two different parts from my robot just so that you can see the difference as you can see on this first part i pretty much got an instant quote and if i want to have it made overseas
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and i'm willing to wait a little bit longer i can get a better price this other part from the wrist however is really complicated it has internal geometry it's got threaded holes on all different sides it even has some pockets on the inside this part's definitely
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project and you're ready to move up to something more challenging or you're completely stuck you have stalled out you don't know what to do next it's perfectly fine happens to me all the time you are a noob right you don't know what you're doing you're expected to
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fail sometimes what that tells you is you need more knowledge you need more time to learn so we're going to start looking for more variation in our resources i usually look for books on the topic i'm looking for
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different creators i'm looking for college textbooks not so that i can read the textbook from cover to cover i'm looking for those books so that i can skim through them and see if there are key areas that i might find helpful
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remember your goal at this point is not to have mastery over this you just want to shine enough light on the path in front of you so that you can keep walking forward you will come across terminology that you don't know but this
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is good right because the light bulb will go on you look that word up and you go ah that's actually this other thing i've been looking for all this time i just didn't know what it was called and this is how the discovery process moves you forward even though we're trying to
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find the shortest path you're going to occasionally do something the hard way or go the long way because you just don't know and two or three projects later you might figure out that there was actually a shortcut there this is the beauty of having people around you
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who have more experience or having a professor or a teacher who can show you where all the shortcuts are but that's not always a luxury we have and i run into this problem quite frequently with my projects because they almost always cover
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multiple disciplines now and everywhere where two disciplines interact there's gaps in information so for example i have electric motors that i need to control with the computer in between there's usually at least two components
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a motor controller and then some sort of electrical interface between the computer and the controller and then there's communication pro protocols and all of these things need to be able to interact and i don't know very much
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about any of them or i didn't initially when i come across these gaps i generally have to forge my own path i'm pulling bits and pieces from many different sources and putting the puzzle together now earlier i told you that skill and knowledge are not the same
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thing but they are definitely highly dependent upon each other so when i want to increase my knowledge on a particular topic especially when i'm trying to get a high level of knowledge and skill on a particular topic then i do a lot of the
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same things for my knowledge acquisition that i do for skill acquisition whenever i come across something i don't understand i don't just take notes i try to increase my sensory input and one of the ways i do that is by creating
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experiments if there's a concept i'm not fully grasping but there's a way to replicate it in real life or create an experiment that demonstrates it then this is one of the best ways for me to internalize it and fully understand how
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it works one of the best examples of this is my how motors work series on my youtube channel i really wanted to have a deep understanding of how electric motors work and so i built all kinds of experiments when i felt confident enough
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to explain those concepts to others in youtube videos i brought back many of those exact same examples and you guys gave me great feedback about that you found it helpful in learning a new topic the same way that i did building those experiments immediately makes the
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concept hands-on and thus your understanding of it will be much deeper you're also going to need good teachers not a teacher but multiple teachers one of the key reasons you want to have a lot of different teachers that you're
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learning from is because every person has a different blind spot some of them have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner some of them are just making assumptions without realizing that they think you know something you don't know but when you're getting different pieces
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from different people it's easier to pull the whole puzzle together this is especially true that further along you get in your skill because there's always beginner guides and lots of information for the person just starting out but as
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you get further and further out into the woods there's going to be less and less resources so you're going to need multiple teachers in order to find all the little pieces to your puzzle the main thing i want you to take away from this segment is you want a wide variety
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of teachers and professors giving you help whether that teacher is teaching you through a podcast or a textbook or youtube video or whatever resource you're using speaking of resources you should let your friends and family know
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that you're interested in learning a new skill because they can often expose you to resources you didn't even know were around you your friends can have friends who have work woodworking shops and people will invite you in my favorite
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experience related to this i was at work looking inside of an electrical cabinet for the first time and i saw the unbelievable order and structure inside of it i remember looking at that cabinet and thinking i want to be able to do
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that because at the same time i could picture the rat's nest of electrical wires i had just done on a project at home i went right up to the electrician who was working on it and i said could you teach me about this could you just
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tell me a little bit about what's going on here you know we spent like an hour and a half looking at that cabinet this is when i learned about what terminal blocks are i learned so much he took his time and he was happy to teach me and
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i'm just telling you you can have a similar experience sometimes you just have to ask i've got one more strategy to share and this one is in my opinion the most effective strategy i have for deepening my understanding of a new
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skill and that is trying to teach someone else that new skill my kids are my primary target once i can explain it to my kids and i can see in their eyes that they understand what i'm talking about they get it then i know i'm
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starting to get it the best part about trying to explain this to a kid as opposed to an adult is because adults can pretend to understand when they really don't and they may even ask you some very hard questions that you might not be prepared to answer now you know
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what you need to know to understand this thing a little bit deeper i have a request have you been working on a new skill and if so scroll down to the comment section and leave me some tips i would love to know what kind of things you have been doing
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to learn and master your skill i will pick my favorites add them to the video description so that we can all learn from them thank you so much to my patrons these fine folks that you see scrolling here you guys make this kind
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of content possible and i'll see you in the next video thanks for watching
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