Skills for Learning Everything
Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate in physics, was known for his curiosity, but also his persistence when solving problems. In addition to being a prominent physicist, he was also a talented artist and drum player.
The most important skills you need (which aren’t really skills, but rather mindsets) are curiosity and grit.
I think both skills are crucial. You can not have one without the other if you would like to learn many things. This is especially true if you want to become multi-talented.
When you are truly curious about something, you will naturally want to learn more about it. If you are curious about everything, then you will naturally want to learn about everything. This is the kind of mindset that you need in order to learn many things and become multi-talented. Without curiosity, you would not be motivated to learn, and would quickly give up when trying to learn (look at the countless students who despise school because they were not able to cultivate curiosity in their subjects).
When going through the learning process, you will inevitably come across many roadblocks and challenges. This will always happen, no matter what you are learning or trying to do. It is during these times that learning truly happens. If you are able to overcome this hurdle, then you will be on your way to mastering whatever it is that you are learning.
Many people give up before they reach mastery, claiming that they just don’t have the natural talent. Although natural talent may have an influence on a person’s aptitude, this really only has a significant role in the beginning and at the end of a person’s road to mastery. Natural talent may make someone better or worse than another in the beginning, and at the very highest levels of achievement, natural talent may be what distinguishes the best, but inbetween everything is fair game. For the most part, the amount of work you put in has a positive relationship with the amount of reward you get out of it, and that is why grit is an important skill to have.
I would also like to throw in a final skill that you might need, which is humility. The reason I say this is because your motivation for wanting to become multi-talented should come from a desire to satiate your curiosity. I find that for many people, when their motivation comes from wanting to impress or show off (such as working out at the gym to have a good physique), they tend to eventually give up, compared to if their motivation came from wanting to push personal boundaries and achieve goals.
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Written on June 21st , 2016 by Paul Le