Make learning fun

I always promoted learning new things mainly because knowing one skill can be the difference between living a decent or an amazing life. But what do we need to learn and how can we motivate ourselves to spend time practicing and becoming good at something?

Well, take a look at this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/microboyd

His name is Mike Boyd (at least that's what I think) and his channel is focused on him learning all kind of new things. I know I found his channel one day after searching "How to throw cards" on YouTube and I saw one of his videos. It took him one hour and 52 minutes to learn that skill.

You see, he makes learning fun. He makes videos and tries to do all kind of "crazy" little things to learn new skills. One day he locked himself in his garage without any way of getting out in order to force himself to learn how to pick a lock. After practicing for a while, he did it.

Now, you may think "Well, those skills are fairly easy to learn and i don't see how they could help me change my life", and you may be more or less right. The thing is that it doesn't matter what you learn as long as you always know something more than before. Even if it's learning how to pick a lock or how to throw cards, it may be useful in the future.

Plus, as I mentioned in older articles, one of the main obstacles we encounter when learning new things is the delay in feeling any type of gratification. If we start to learn how to code right now, it may take several days or even weeks before we can actually code something small. If we're too ambitious and we try to go for something big really fast, we may be really disappointed and give up.

On the opposite side, things like video games offer us instant gratification. If we're playing a racing game we'll feel good every time we win a race and that's gonna happen a lot since it's a racing game. If we play an RPG we only need a few hours to get all the loot we need and defeat certain big monsters which means we'll get something for our effort really fast.

That's one of the main reasons we love playing games (or do anything similar) rather than learn new skills that can change our lives. But if we learn how to have fun while learning, if we learn how to set small objectives and accomplish them often, we'll receive instant gratification (more or less) while learning new skills, which could motivate us to learn something new every day or every week.

For example, look at another video made by the same guy who learned in a short amount of time how to use Arduino and "hack" his coffee machine to make it controllable using his phone:

Take a look at his channel and see how Mike does it. It may motivate you to learn all kind of new stuff just like it motivated me, and that can only benefit you. Remember, any skill can be useful in specific situations, so don't deny knowledge just because you think it's useless right now. You never know when you get trapped in your bathroom and knowing how to pick a lock may be the only way to get out.