Sintya n
Free reading 127th

A Simple Exercise to Discover What Skills You Should Learn

 It must be a skill you enjoy learning. Do not pick a skill because you think it’s what you should learn or it seems safe. Pick one that you like working on, that you’ve liked exercising in the past, and that you could see yourself continuing to pursue.

It must be a skill you can start developing on your own. Certain skills won’t be feasible as starting points, and you’ll have to reduce them to good places to begin. Dolphin training, for example, will be hard to do without a pet dolphin. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start practicing animal training at the local dog shelter.

The last thing you should keep in mind is that you don’t need to find the perfect skill or set of skills, that you want to focus on for the rest of your life. Your interests will change over time, and you don’t want to plan the rest of your life based on a decision by an 18-year-old. Instead, think of this as a place to start. Your goal is simply to find a skill you’re interested in enough to move on to the Sandbox Method for self-education.

How to Identify Skills to Start With

To find what skill or skills, you may want to start learning, take a few minutes to go through this exercise.

First, get a piece of paper, and break it into two columns. On the left side, at the top write “Outcomes” and on the top of the right, write “Skills.”

The outcomes side is a list of every kind of creation in the world that you admire. Anything that you would have loved to be a part of, contribute to, do for yourself, or understand. This could include going to the moon, creating Facebook, writing a book, organizing a music festival, designing headphones, filling the Louvré any outcome that you’re interested in.