There are two things that every single one of us have in common:
1. Virtually everything in our lives gets better when we get better at learning.
2. We’re really busy.
So learning usually loses. Not because we don’t want to, but because there’s no time. Here are four tools that help change that. I use them all the time. They will help you learn more and learn better—without adding too much more to your plate.
1. Rethink Skills
More things are learnable than you think. Friendliness is a skill. You can learn to be more friendly. Humor is a skill. Storytelling is a skill. Receiving feedback is a skill. Staying regulated while your toddler is having a meltdown is a skill. And so is presence. And so is finding gratitude. And so is dancing. If someone can get better at it, it’s a skill—which means you can get better at it too.
Once you see how much is learnable, you have a lot more options to choose from, and you can be more specific:
“I want to be a better communicator” feels like a whole thing. It’s daunting, time-consuming, a big quest.
“Saying what’s on my mind, even when it’s uncomfortable” is specific, manageable, doable. And it will help me become a better communicator.
Zoom out to see how much is learnable. Then zoom in on something specific.
2. Aim for Kinda Good
It takes a long time to master a skill. But you don’t have to master a skill for it to make a difference in your life. You just have to get kinda good. The distance between “I have no idea how to do this” and “I’m kinda good at this” is much shorter than you think. We’re not talking years. It can happen in a day, a weekend, or by the end of next month, depending on the skill.
A lot of us don’t even consider learning something new because we assume we don’t have the time. Maybe that’s true for mastery, but almost all of us have the time to get kinda good at stuff.
You are two attempts away from a new meal you can cook for the rest of your life. A five-minute YouTube video away from fixing that leaky faucet yourself. An hour away from finally understanding pivot tables. A few awkward conversations away from negotiating your next raise. My grandma is eleven minutes away from being able to FaceTime her grandchildren—if she’d just let me show her.
A little practice turns a skill you don’t have into one you use. And the more you use it, the better you get.
When we aim for kinda good we’re more likely to start, and it takes less time to get somewhere useful.
3. Dial in Your Focus
Our busy days are full of opportunities to learn, but sometimes we don’t notice them. Let’s go back to the skill from Tool 1: saying what’s on my mind, even when it’s uncomfortable.
If I decided to focus on improving that skill for a week and wrote it on a sticky note so I could see it every day, two things are probably going to happen:
1. I’m going to notice the moments throughout the week when I could practice it.
2. I’m going to take advantage of more of those moments, which means more practice.
This doesn’t work for every skill. For some, you have to go find the reps—you probably don’t have dancing reps baked into your day. But a lot of useful skills can be built inside the conversations, meetings, and day-to-day tasks already on your calendar.
You can use this tool in big and small ways. It could be a month-long learning goal: this month I’m going to focus on getting better at listening more intently. Or it could simply be bringing more intention into your experiences: What am I going to get out of the day? What’s something I can gain from this boring meeting?
Taking a few seconds to dial in your focus before an experience helps you get more out of it.
4. Reflect
A little work before an experience helps us get more from it. Spending a few minutes afterward might matter even more.
In one study, a group of new hires at a large company was split in two. One group completed the normal training program. The other group did the same training, but spent the last fifteen minutes of each day reflecting on what they’d learned. When the program ended, everyone took the same test. The normal training group scored an average of 54.4%. The reflection group scored 71.5%*.
Same training program. Same amount of time. But the group that spent some of that time reflecting scored 17 percentage points higher.
You don’t need to reflect after everything you do throughout the day. But if your goal is to learn from an experience, reflecting on it, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes, is a good idea.
Giada Di Stefano, the researcher who ran that study, told me that when we’re just starting out, simple questions are all we need: What’s working? What’s not? What did I learn today? As we get better, we can get more specific. She was also clear that it works regardless of the outcome. Win, loss, good day, bad day. A little reflection helps either way.
A few minutes of reflection turns an experience into a lesson you can use next time.
• • •
More is learnable than we think—the options are everywhere. We don’t need to master a skill for it to matter. Getting kinda good goes a long way. When a skill is on our mind, we’re more likely to notice and take advantage of chances to build it. A few minutes of reflection afterward helps us carry the lessons into the next attempt.
These tools are free, anyone can do them, and best of all they don’t take much time. Nice.
*Giada Di Stefano et all., “Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Can Spur Progress Along the Learning Curve,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 14-093, revised February 2023, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2414478.
