Start Easy

When you look back on your life, you'll see that for every skill you have acquired you have been through basically the same process.

In learning to walk, you started off rolling around on the floor pushing with your legs, learned to push yourself up on your arms, then to crawl, then walk and then eventually to skip, dance, run, jump…In other words you mastered a particular stage and then pushed into what you were now just capable of attempting and tried to master that and so on, each stage setting the stage for further progress.

And similarly with talking, reading, doing arithmetic,…in a series of small steps , building mastery in stages until you gained easy fluency.

This is a life lesson that not everyone learns. Some people will try a new activity and then give up because it doesn't come easy immediately. It is as if they were trying to jump a chasm rather than taking the time to build a bridge. But the reality is that almost nothing worth doing comes that easily and it is only by being patient and serving the required apprenticeship that you can get to mastery.

So how does that apply to your learning now?

Well, suppose you want to learn how to use a computer. Your best bet is to find the easiest book you can and work through it first. This way you will become familiar with all of the basic aspects of computing, the words used and basic functions. This would give you the confidence to try something a bit more challenging, master it…and so on.

The lesson here is to build new competence on existing mastery and in time it will become second nature.