How do I learn a new skill as an adult?

Adults often plateau not from lack of talent but from practising comfortably. Improvement comes from working just beyond current ability with some source of correction — which is uncomfortable, which is why it gets avoided.

What you'll need

• A specific goal (optional)
• A source of feedback (optional)

Step by step

1. Define what 'good enough' looks like.'Play guitar' is unmeasurable. 'Play three songs through without stopping' tells you what to practise and when you have arrived.
2. Break it into specific sub-skills.Most skills are several separate abilities. Isolating and practising the weakest one is far faster than practising the whole thing.
3. Practise at the edge of your ability, not within it.Slightly too hard, with mistakes happening. If you are getting everything right, you are rehearsing rather than learning.
4. Get feedback from somewhere.A teacher, a recording of yourself, a knowledgeable friend. Practising a mistake repeatedly makes it permanent, and you often cannot see your own errors.
5. Keep sessions short and frequent.Twenty minutes daily beats three hours weekly. Distributed practice is consistently better than massed practice for retention.
6. Slow down to fix errors, then speed up.Practising fast and badly builds speed at the wrong movement. Slow correct repetition is what transfers.
7. Expect and plan for a plateau.Progress is stepped, not linear. Plateaus are normal and usually break when you change what you practise rather than how much.
8. Track progress in a way you can see.A recording from a month ago, a log, a photo. Improvement is invisible day to day and obvious across weeks.

Tips

• Recording yourself is uncomfortable and unusually effective. You hear and see things you cannot notice while performing.
• Learning with someone else adds accountability and a source of feedback, and it makes the plateau phases more tolerable.
• The first few sessions of anything are disproportionately awkward. Judging your aptitude at that stage is unfair to yourself.

Common mistakes

• Practising what you can already do — It feels good and produces almost no improvement. Improvement happens at the edge of ability, where mistakes are happening.
• Practising fast before practising correctly — Speed built on a flawed movement embeds the flaw. Slow it down until it is right, then rebuild the speed.
• Long infrequent sessions — Retention is much better with short frequent practice. Three hours once a week is a poor substitute for twenty minutes daily.

Questions people ask