What It Takes To Get Really, Really Good at Any Skill

Summary: One of the most satisfying things in the world is mastering a skill to a level where you quickly get into a state of ease: a state where engaging with that skill feels like floating, where you forget everything around you. To reach that stage, it’s not enough to hone a skill at a deep level: You also have to cross fields and widen your expertise. Here’s what you can do to reach that stage in language learning.

The Magic of Being at Ease

Have you heard of the Kiffness, a guy on the internet who’s making music out of memes? Check this out:

He’s hilarious, but there’s something else that mesmerized me:

This guy epitomizes how it must feel to be at ease with music. He sees a meme and can instantly connect it with some melodies, rhythms and snippets lingering around in his head.

He must be a natural talent, right?

Well, I don’t think so. Maybe to some extent, but if we look at all his skills, we see it has probably taken him years to:

  • learn different instruments and techniques
  • build an enormous repertoire of different melodies, beats, rhythms, moods and styles. 

It seems that he’s put together a whole library of material in his mind that’s ready to be mixed and matched into a piece of music. And building such a library probably takes years.

But do you see how worth it is to reach that stage? 

For The Kiffness, making music is not just an activity that takes place in a certain room at a scheduled time, it’s not over when he leaves a place or finishes a session – it has trickled into other parts of his life, where something as tiny and insignificant as a meme turns into a catalyst for a piece of music.

See, when we’re really good at something, the inhibition to engage with that thing is low, and that’s where creativity sets in. How amazing is it to draw inspiration from your surroundings and transmute some vague ideas, feelings or fragments into something clear and specific?

For example:

  • Experienced writers, musicians or other artists are often more receptive to the little things in their daily life: A snippet of a conversation turns into a story, a beam of light into a painting, a rhythm into a song – whatever it is, they’re constantly attentive to pieces of inspiration for something bigger.
  • The same goes for language learning: For me, language learning has become so pleasurable that an upcoming trip to Turkey inspired me to learn some Turkish. For others, watching Narcos is an inspiration to learn some Colombian Spanish. And if you’re like me, something as small as hearing people chattering on the street in a foreign language can spark your interest in at least dabbling a little in that language.

But you might wonder: Doesn’t it take years to become proficient at something and will I ever be able to reach this?

You’re right, it takes a while, but hear me out – it’s not just about becoming proficient at something. It’s also about engaging with different skills at different stages and in different fields, because as you do that, you accumulate what I call: micro and macro skills. And these skills will eventually lead you into a state of ease.

Building Micro and Macro Skills

So, what do I mean by micro and macro skills?

Micro Skills

See, every skill – be it an instrument, a language, or something like web design – can be broken down into sub-skills.

For instance:

  • If you’re a guitarist, you’ll have to learn different chords
  • If you’re a novelist, you need to learn about how to develop a great character
  • If you’re a web designer, you’ll have to learn how to design website headers

These skills are very specific to the very skill you’re learning, and they’re very tangible.

Macro Skills

Macro skills, on the other way, are a bit more vague. 

For instance:

  • If you’re a guitarist, you also get a good feeling of rhythm. This will later serve you in other aspects of music, for example if you’re learning to play the piano.
  • If you’re a novelist, you have to develop a feel for capturing your readers’ attention, which will be useful you if you’re writing, for example, for Social Media.
  • If you’re a web designer, you have an eye for visuals: You know what makes a great composition, how to create harmony and contrast. You can use these skills for other visual areas as well.

Macro skills are very intangible. You can’t quantify a feeling of rhythm, an eye for visuals or a feel for the language. But you’re building them as you engage with your skill, not matter at which stage you are.

Micro and Macro Skills in Language Learning

So, let’s take a look at how building micro and macro skills looked like in my language learning journey.

Language learning comes easy to me now – but it hasn’t always been that way.

When I started learning French at the age of 13, I was struggling.
Then I took some Italian classes for like 2,5 years, but I still can’t speak a sentence.
Once, I started learning Russian and quit after some weeks.
For a while, I took some Farsi classes, but I literally don’t remember a single word.

Oh yes, and I even learned Chinese for a year. But let’s not even talk about this.

But you know what? Dabbling in different languages didn’t mean I was failing. In retrospective, I realized that I was actually building micro and macro skills that later helped me become really good at other languages:

  • French and Italian gave me some valuable micro skills for Spanish because the grammar and the vocabulary are very similar
  • Dabbling in Farsi and Russia gave me a glimpse into learning new scripts, which later was a great macro skill to learn Cyrillic for Serbian.
  • By self-studying Serbian, I learned how to organize myself and stay on track, which later served me for Turkish. A very useful macro skill for every future language!
  • Getting a feel for verb tenses in Romance languages made it easy for me to hack the Serbian aspect system, because some parts of it resemble certain tenses.

What I’m saying is: It’s not only about the depth in which you hone a skill, but also about the width. You get better as you cross fields and explore their intersection.

But of course, depth also plays a big role if you want to get really, really good at something. And to reach depth, I identified 4 stages you will go through in language learning – each of which has different requirements.

The 4 Stages of Reaching Proficiency

Stage 1: If You're a Complete Newbie, Just Get Into The Habit

See, if you’re a beginner to something, things are hard. Things are not creative yet. Learning guitar chords is hard if you can’t play a song yet. Learning new words without having a conversation is tedious.

In this stage, your job is not to be good yet. Your only job is to get into the habit of engaging with that skill for some time and build a very basic framework.

Make the inhibition as low as possible. It can be very helpful to download a course that guides you through that stage, that gives you some input on a daily basis. Set aside 30 minutes a day for 30 days and see what it does to you.

Stage 2: Get Personalized And Work Your Way From The Inside Out

The intermediate stage can be overwhelming. Once beginner courses get too easy, it’s tricky to find material that fits your needs.

My recommendation here is to work from the inside out: Focus on the topics, the grammar, the skills that matter most to you and then work your way outwards.

I wrote a whole article about learning at an intermediate stage, which you can find here.

Stage 3: Hack the Bigger Picture and Deep-Dive Into Specialized Areas

While the intermediate stage is like setting free trails in a jungle, the advanced stage is more like sitting in your garden, looking at the flowers you’ve grown and watering them one by one.

You now have a lovely overview about your skills and your few deficiencies. And this stage is about targeting these deficiencies.

A fantastic method of doing this is by creating inventories:

Create a to-do-list, a Notion template, or whatever you feel comfortable with, and note down each aspect of the language you still need to work on. For Serbian, for example, my list looks roughly as follows:

General

  •  Pronunciation  –> Shadowing exercises
  • …

Cases

  • Verbs used with dative case
  • Verbs used with instrumental case
  • irregular female nouns
  • …

Vocabulary

  • Economy
  • …

Now you have a clear list of all the things to work through to reach proficiency.

Stage 4: Get Inspired and Create

If you’ve reached stage 4: Congrats! You now feel so at ease with a skill that engaging with it comes easy.

In that stage in language learning, sitting down to study doesn’t feel like a burden – for me, it’s something that I can concentrate on so easily that it even calms my mind. Opening a notebook, writing down stuff in another language, learning how to put something in words in another way has something therapeutic to me.
And isn’t it beautiful to have a hobby that can spark your curiosity over and over again and put you in an inspired, calm, focused state of mind when you need to distract yourself from the rest of the world?

So, my takeaway is this:

1) Skill building takes time, but it’s worth it.

2) Be aware of the stage you’re in and work in line with your level. If you’re a beginner, just get into the habit. If you’re an intermediate, work from the inside out. If you’re an advanced learner, deep-dive in different fields.

3) Don’t get frustrated if you can’t put things together yet. If you feel like failing, have in mind that you are still building intangible macro skills and tangible micro skills that will later serve you. Things will fall into place eventually. 

4) Don’t just focus on one field. Dabble in other languages, instruments, fields of art, cross fields and explore their intersection.

5) Enjoy the process and make your sessions as pleasurable as possible.

BY THE WAY!

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