Today's topic is making progress learning technical skills. By "technical" here I am talking about skills where there is a clear, measurable way to tell how some result is better or worse.

For instance, drawing realistically—or emulating the style of a particular artist—may be viewed as a technical skill. On the other hand, evaluate "are these blog posts getting better?" is not so easy ¹. Technical skills are vital for creative expression because they are the vehicle by which you can form and express ideas. Weak technical skills means weak expressive capacity!

Here, I will introduce some ideas I have useful and give examples of how I have applied these ideas. In this way, I will give a kind of journal of some of successes and failures and remind myself of what has(n't) worked for me; maybe it will be useful to you too or at least fun to read ¯_(ツ)_/¯

First, have projects

"Projects" are some concrete goal you can work toward ². Some projects are very-well defined. For example, you may have goals to:

• Pay off student debt
• Produce a painting a week for a year
• Learn German to a conversational level before visiting Germany
• Build a website for a friend
• Re-establish contact with at least four friends over the next month

Other things may be more abstract. Though, I think that if you can visualize it, it can be a project. Can you imagine the "conditions of success" for your project?

• Feel comfortable talking about XYZ—you probably have at least something you feel comfortable talking about, e.g. your pet cat. You can therefore conceptualize what it might look like to be able to talk about some topic comfortably. You can see examples of people doing such-and-such on YouTube and visualize yourself doing the same
• Improve your relationship with some family member/mutual acquaintance/etc.—you may not know exactly how this will look with such-and-such particular person you are going to have to spend some time with, but you may have positive examples of working relationships to turn to as inspiration for how stuff might work out
• Learn to Code—what does this even mean? You can measure your success on this based on your ability to make a project of XYZ scale or go through ABC cirriculum.

Having projects is important because they give you something to align your efforts with. Broad projects, get broken up into small sub-tasks—such as doing math problems everyday towards a broader project goal of "achieving basic mathematic proficiency". Looking at your own activities in relation to projects means you can evaluate if what you're currently doing is moving you towards or away from your goals. You may find that getting shwasted on Friday night is not conducive to "finding peace and happiness with a stable family"—your time may be better spent doing activities that will earn you money, improve your health, etc.

Note that many people naturally excel at creating projects for themselves on-the-fly. For example, a person naturally interested in anime may set themselves over completing many "goals" of studying Japanese by compulsively watching through lots of anime series, investing effort to take notes of new vocabulary and such as they go. This hataraki-mono ("hardworking") weeb may succeed gloriously at learning Japanese quickly and efficiently because little planning is needed—interest drives serial "project creation".

I write about explicitly selecting and choosing projects because one of my problems is that I start way too many different projects and "spread my efforts too thin". By explicitly figuring out what my projects are and keeping inventory, I can better select which projects don't need my attention and turn my efforts towards the goals most important to me.

Coming up with projects

Getting started with a new project can be daunting, but also lots of fun. It may mean you get to take a shopping trip, set up a new calendar where you plot and scheme your road to glory...

It may also be useful to re-think activities that you are already doing in the context of "projects" if you have hit a plateau in progress and are not satisfied with how things are currently (not) improving.

Here are some ways you can establish new projects or "cast" things you are already doing into projects.

Work through a comprehensive resource

Textbooks can be very helpful. Undergraduate classes I've taken have rarely gotten through an entire textbook. So if there was some subject that you would like to learn about (e.g. biology) picking up a book on such-and-such subject and working through all the chapters can be a fine way to get a comprehensive, "canonical" understanding of any given subject.

You may want to re-work through the fundamentals of something you already know how to do. For instance, I already know some basic of reading music, but I kind of suck at playing piano. To get better, I acquired some easy-ish classical music. By working seriously (as an adult learner) through training materials I can improve. Playing through every piece in such-and-such book may help me improve on areas I am weak in (e.g. playing complex rhythms) even if these pieces aren't as "fun" at first because I suck at playing them.

Working through a comprehensive resource will help you find what you are good at and what you are not so good at and give you obvious areas to "flag for improvement".

Build something

When you try to build something rather than just solve some pre-prepared problem you will soon discover what you have to study and what skills you lack.

For example, it is easy to passively "study" a foreign every language by playing some songs in that language. Sooner or later, you may just listen to that music passively, zoning out and doing other stuff while learning zero Spanish (or whatever language you happen to be studying).

What you may want to do is build a repertoire of songs/lyrics you actually have memorized. This will involve picking and choosing songs that are meaningful enough to you that they are worth studying. In doing this, you will likely come across idioms that surprise you, words you find you didn't know, and so on and so forth.

Other examples of building stuff include,

• Creating a finished work of art—not just quick, fast sketches, but a painting that will take you many days (or even weeks, months)
• Establish a nexus of communication for you and friends/family—e.g. create a Discord server and input your own content there everyday for a month to get activity buzzing; personally invite/promote your project
• Configuring Linux to your liking from a relatively basic setup—may be a pain in the butt, but you will learn a lot about how stuff is clobbled together to produce a decent "user experience"

Sometimes building is just putting in the blood/sweat/tears needed to get something done. This can be more refreshing than wallowing around in indirection sometimes even if it is difficult in another way.

However, other times you may be pleasantly surprised at how little work you have to do to build something nice—this may be because you find ways in which you can bring other people into your project(s). Projects involving others may gain a life of their own and continue organically grow.

Having a knack for getting projects started, putting in concentrated effort, and then seeing stuff just kinda... work out is called being enterprising. Fantastic! You can then choose to stay involved with your own project or hand off (or sell) your "startup" to some other party.

Optimize some metric

Another class of projects is making some number go up/down. For instance, you may have a goal of running three miles in under 30 minutes. Metrics are good because you can measure your progress.

However, metrics can be bad because they can be misleading on measuring what you're really interested in. For instance, you might be measuring your body weight but be more interested in feeling healthy overall.

Let somebody else give you a project

Not everybody has to be a "leader"; choosing to follow people whose goals align with your own can be a shortcut to a life well-lived.

Having a good teacher/coach/manager can be very helpful because it means someone who has seen more of some domain than you can guide you to make faster progress than you could on your own.

Letting somebody else assign you projects, and following their directives is also a fine way to occupy one's time productively towards ends that at least someone else cares about.

Work on your projects frequently

For some people, the easiest way to ensure frequent work on projects is a schedule. Others hate schedules and still get a lot done. Typically, the more projects you will have the more sort of structure you'll need to continue making progress at all of them. If you only care about doing one or two things well, your whole life can take shape around doing these things without much planning.

Personally, having too many projects is often an issue for me. For example, I'm interested in studying many different languages. But every minute I put towards studying Korean is a minute that is not spent studying Chinese. Here, I just have to make a choice about what I am prioritizing.

Attention is the secret sauce

Once you have some projects to work on, you need to put attention into them. Note that attention is different from time; you can put lots of time into watching tutorial videos and learn nothing. However, if you bring your attention to actively work on problems, you will learn.

Oftentimes focusing attention means turning off distractions. You may be surprised how much progress you can make focusing on some one thing for not so much time, e.g. 15 minutes a day. If you had spent 15 minutes per day studying XYZ foreign language for the past 5 years, do you reckon you'd know a lot by now?

It is when we get overwhelmed (often by our attention getting split) that we fail to allocate attention, though we may spend a lot of time suffering. It is easy to spend a miserable Saturday "kinda studying" from 10 AM till 10 PM; perhaps 2 hours of concentrated studying, interrupted by 6 hours of video games, followed by 2 more hours of concentrated studying would be better. That is being honest with oneself about the need to rest, recover, and "do nothing".

If it helps, embrace tracking

For some stuff, we value the "muh freedoms". For other work, being tracked means documenting that you are working hard and trying to make good use of your time.

Know when to quit

Completing projects through milestones you set can also be a good way to decide when to stop some effort and spend your energies elsewhere. For example, I spent some time studying Golang, Google's C++ alternative programing language with a nice syntax. I worked through the exercises in the official "A Tour of Go" documentation over a long while. Eventually, I realized that I didn't really need Golang to solve the sorts of problems I was currently facing; spending time on this language was also keeping me from making progress learning other technologies like UNIX utils (bash, find, sed, etc.) and improving my JavaScript. So I stopped studying Go ³.

Organizing your projects—which involves "pruning" ones that are no longer relevant to you— encourages pro-active decision making in life. You can determine what is worth your attention and what is not.

Summary and Conclusions

You can improve on technical skills by having clearly defined projects (which may in turn lead to many sub-projects). Keeping inventory of which projects you have and making sure you always have concrete goals to work towards ensures you are always improving your skills or building some thing (material, social, etc.).

By selecting which projects you continue, marking off projects as "complete", and sometimes pruning projects that aren't going anywhere, you exercise agency over your life and will feel good. Likewise, choosing not to begin projects is an exercise in confidently saying "no" because you know your own stuff well.

Once you establish a good record for successfully completing projects, your "YES" and your "NO" will both be well-respected by those who know you because you will have established that you have a pattern of planning, executing, and when necessary making clear decisions to abandon ship.