Mastering Skills: The Importance of Focus and Enjoyment

Mastering one skill at a time leads to greater focus and success in learning.

### The Journey of Skill Acquisition: Quitting, Focus, and Momentum
* 🧠 Reflecting on your reasons for learning a skill is essential; if it's solely for **monetary gain**, consider if there are other skills that align better with your **interests and enjoyment**.
* 💻 After dedicating four months to learning Python, I realized my motivation stemmed from its **financial prospects** rather than a passion for coding, which led me to **reassess my learning priorities**.
* 📉 Focusing on one skill at a time is crucial, as multitasking can hinder progress; a **laser-like focus** allows for a **more accelerated learning curve**.
* 🎮 I liken skill mastery to a video game, where your **focus is a limited resource** that decreases throughout the day, emphasizing the need to **concentrate on one skill** to maximize learning.
* 💪 My experience with calisthenics demonstrated the **importance of persistence**; after overcoming initial difficulties, I eventually achieved my **first muscle-up**, leading to a **domino effect of skill acquisition**.
* 🚫 Quitting isn't inherently negative; recognizing when a skill **isn't worth pursuing** can save time and energy, and understanding the "**shiny object syndrome**" helps prevent distractions from your main goals.
* 🌟 Momentum builds as you master skills, allowing you to **tackle more complex challenges**; achieving milestones provides **confidence to move on to new skills**.
* 🎹 Once a skill becomes a **non-negotiable part of your daily routine**, it indicates readiness to progress; my journey from feeling shy at the gym to **embracing fitness** exemplifies this transformation.

you probably heard of the saying that if you try out too many things at the same time, you won't master any of them. But I don't think that's true. I'm going to show you my method, what worked for me to achieve astonishing results in various areas. Hopefully, this video saves you a bunch of time because I made a lot of mistakes when I started off. At the beginning of my journey, I was so pumped to try out all these different skill sets: kinetics, teaching myself Korean, the piano, the guitar, video editing, and investing money. It wasn't until I learned the concept of the shiny object syndrome that I realized that my old approach was not the most efficient way. The shiny object syndrome basically says that as soon as we start with a new skill and we face some challenges, we tend to look for another shiny object, another skill that seems to be easier to achieve than the one we're trying to work on right now. As we continuously do this, we become a jack of all trades, but

the master of none. Our brains are not designed to multitask. I don't care what any guru out there is saying. At least for myself, I found that focusing on one skill at a time, really digging deep, mastering it, and then moving on to the next skill, is way faster in the long run than splitting your attention into several different skills at the same time. So, how do we decide which skills we should pick first? Everyone has a different approach for that, but for myself, I just asked myself one simple question: if I could get one skill in an instant without having to work for it, which one would I choose? Which skill am I thinking about most of the time? These questions really help me, at least, to see which skill I should focus on first because subconsciously, if I'm thinking about one skill all the time, that shows me that I'm really interested in that skill, and that's a skill you most likely should start off with. Remember what we said in the beginning, that you should only focus on one skill at a time, and

the reason for that is because if you focus on one skill at a time, your focus is not shattered into many different places. Your focus is like a laser, be centered on one specific thing that you want to master. I think of this in terms of a video game, you know, where you have this bar of energy or life above your head. The same thing goes for focus. We all have a limited amount of focus every single day. When you wake up, your tank of focus is basically full, but over the course of the day, the more activities you do, this tank will lower, will decrease. So, if you use your focus bar basically and focus 100% of your focused energy on one skill, your learning curve for that skill will skyrocket. So, for example, when I started with calisthenics, in case you don't know what calisthenics is, it's basically bodyweight exercises, all the cool things you see people online doing, like the muscle-ups, the planche, whatever. At the beginning of my journey, I focused solely on the muscle

up because for me, doing the muscle-up was like the coolest skill you could have to impress girls and to be above your friends. Yes, I wanted to be superior to my friends. I know it's kind of toxic, but that was just my mindset back then. And it took me 4 months of consistent training to unlock my first kind of chicken wing muscle-up. If you try to learn a muscle-up yourself, you know what I'm talking about. But here's the interesting part: once you unlock a new skill, you will build insane momentum. I call this the domino effect. In my mind, I have this image of dominoes stacked up in a line. I'm not talking about Domino's Pizza, by the way, guys. I mean the domino kind of stones that you flip. These dominoes are stacked in a line. Imagine that every domino represents a skill that you're trying to learn. You can flip all the dominoes at once. If you played dominoes as kids, you know how it works. You have to flip the first domino.

and that Domino flips the second Domino. The second Domino flips the third Domino and so forth, so that the first Domino activates a chain reaction that flips all of the other dominoes. That's the same with learning your skills. Once you've mastered one skill, that gives you the confidence to attack the next skill that you're trying to learn. So, when I first unlocked my muscle-up, I was like, Oh, I thought the muscle-up was the hardest exercise I could ever do. Then I found out about the handstand, the back lever, front lever, the planche. So, there was such a wide spectrum of things that I could learn. And soon after I unlocked my first muscle-up, it took me another four months to learn the handstand, the next skill that I attacked. I used this momentum of energy that I got from learning the muscle-up and dove right into learning the handstand. After unlocking your first skill, you will feel a lot of momentum and motivation to tackle the next skill because you have just proven to yourself that you are

capable of learning hard skills. Your mind is taking mental screenshots of your success, so whenever you're tackling the next challenge, your mind reminds you, Oh, in the past, you've tackled this challenge, so this should be a piece of cake. It wasn't long after I unlocked my first muscle-up that I mastered the handstand, then the back lever, and now I'm currently working on my front lever. That brings us to the next logical question: How do I know if I should move on to the next skill? Ultimately, I'm going to give you the answer every lawyer is going to give you: It depends. But here's how I approach this. Before I even start learning a skill, I have certain milestones planned before that I want to achieve. And if you have specific milestones up front and you achieve them, then you know, Okay, it's time to move on to the next skill. So, for example, when I started practicing the piano by myself, I told myself in the beginning, Once I can read the music sheets comfortably, very

fast. Once I can play 20 piano songs, that's enough for me to move on to learn the guitar because in my mind back then I was like, Okay, if I can play 20 songs and can read music sheets, that's enough to look like a great pianist out of the perspective of an average person. Another good indicator for you to know when you should move on is once the skill you're currently learning is becoming a non-negotiable part of your daily routine. So for me, for example, going to the gym in the beginning consistently was really, really hard. I was a really skinny, nerdy Asian dude, and I really felt embarrassed and shy to lift my tiny little weights next to these huge, jacked dudes in the gym. Over time, as I got more jacked myself, the gym actually became a funny place to be at. I really enjoyed going to the gym. I really enjoyed seeing the progress of my muscles growing, the fitness I felt, the energy I felt throughout the day, and now it's just a non-negotiable part of my

daily Journey. If I don't go to the gym for one day, it feels weird, unless obviously it's my rest day. But during vacation, for example, if I have no access to a gym, my body feels like it needs to move, so I just do push-ups at home on the floor, for example. So, if you feel weird about not doing a specific skill on a daily basis, that's a good indicator for you that it became part of your identity, and maybe it's a good sign for you to move on to the next skill. Now, I want to talk about the pain that every beginner has to face when learning a new skill. This is the reason why most people quit in the first place, this beginning stage of learning a new skill, because they can't overcome the initial phase. Whenever you start learning a new hard skill, there will be this stagnant phase in the beginning where you feel like you make no progress. I certainly know how this feels. You're putting in so many hours and a lot of effort, but you see

little to really no progress at all, and these questions of excuses pop up in your head. You're like, Oh, maybe I'm not born to do this. Maybe I don't have the genetics to do this. When I first started to learn a guitar, my fingers couldn't like form the shapes to grip the Accord, and I thought, Maybe my fingers are too short. Maybe I can't even physically like form my hands to do the Accords. So, actually, I started learning the guitar in 2012 already during Co, but after the first 6 weeks, I quit because I thought, Oh, okay, I think my hands can like physically not grip the chords. I think I can just physically not play the guitar. But this year, with this new mindset, I started to tackle learning the guitar again, and this time I really stuck to it. It took me 6 months to play my first like easy song on the guitar. Until then, on a daily basis, my Accord suck. I couldn't really grip it, but step by step, day by day, weeks over weeks, I could see

very minimum slight progress, one%, maybe just 0.5%. Improvement, one Accord got easier to grip, and the next one got easier to grip once. Once I've mastered one Accord, I had this momentum of, Okay, I can rip this Accord, so maybe I can learn the next Accord, and the next one, and the next one. And now I can play really simple Accords like 10 songs where I can sing along, and that for me is a huge achievement. So, if I would have quit after 6 weeks like I did in 2022, I would have never gotten to this point where I can now play up to 10 songs. And that brings us to the last question: is quitting always bad? And the answer to that is, with all the s up content out there, we got sold this idea that quitting is always bad. I think I partially agree. If you really want to learn something, and deep down you know, Okay, I really want this, but because it's hard, I'm going to quit, I think that is

bad because you know deep down that you just betrayed yourself. But if on the other hand you show up and try a different skill you want to learn and you realize oh I actually don't really enjoy this I actually don't like how it affects other parts of my life I don't think it's worth investing more of it then I think quitting actually makes sense. I had this experience with coding for example last year. I signed up for a course to Learn Python which is like a coding language and I really showed up every single day for 4 months and I could see slide progress and so forth. I kind of understood the basic concepts and all of those things but I realized for myself that I really didn't enjoy coding. I realized that the reason why I started coding was because I know it's a highly paid skill. I enrolled in this course main of the purpose of making more money. I didn't do it because I intrinsically really like coding. Numbers I hate math I hate numbers I hate everything that has to do with numbers.

besides investing money. So, after I hit the monster that I set up before for the coding, I decided, Okay, it's time to quit this. I don't think I want to really do this anymore. I really don't enjoy it, and if it's only for the money, there are the skills that I can learn to make the same amount of money and at the same time enjoy the process. So, really reflect for yourself what are your reasons to learn this skill during the process. Do you really enjoy it? Do you think it's worth pursuing this? So, I hope this video gave you a little insight and saved you a lot of time on how you should approach learning new skills.

Too Many Interests? How to get REAL results in them!

David Pham

Focusing on one skill at a time leads to greater mastery and a faster learning curve.

The limited daily focus is like a tank that depletes with each activity, making it crucial to concentrate energy on one skill.

The shiny object syndrome can disrupt progress, causing individuals to switch between multiple skills instead of mastering one.

Mastering one skill creates a momentum that boosts confidence to tackle the next skill.

Unlocking the muscle-up led to a series of challenging skills, like the handstand and back lever.

A skill becomes a non-negotiable part of daily routine when it is consistently practiced and integrated into life.

Daily practice of a skill can become part of your identity, making you feel weird when you skip it.

Beginners often face a stagnant phase with no progress, which is a common reason for quitting.

Setting specific milestones before starting a skill can help determine when to move on to the next challenge.

The speaker struggled with learning the guitar due to self-doubt and physical limitations, leading to a six-week quit.

With a new mindset, they persevered and took six months to play their first song.

The speaker also experienced a similar journey with learning a muscle-up, taking four months of consistent training to unlock the skill, and believes in the "domino effect" of building momentum through skill mastery.

The Importance of Enjoying Skill Development

Learning new skills should be driven by enjoyment and intrinsic motivation, not just for financial gain.

Quitting a skill that doesn't resonate with you can be a valid decision.

Focusing on one skill at a time and identifying your true interests can lead to more effective and fulfilling skill development.