Age of Skills
Piano in Incheon Airport, South Korea.
The time I’ve grown up in has been aptly called the “Information Age.” However, I’m experiencing a shift to a new age I call the “Age of Skills.” I’m not assuming this is a world phenomenon. No, literally I’m talking about my own age. I am twenty-four now, and I want skills. It is time for me to do something about it.
In the past two years out of college, I have had many amazing new experiences. My view of the world has continued expanding in ways I could never have dreamed of two years ago. Right after I graduated, I discovered the “Age of Distraction.” There is so much information out there, if I have a question, I’m freed from the need to think for myself and can absorb the opinions of everyone on the internet, spending hours every week getting lost in ideas. Then I lose sight of the original question, and I forget to find an answer because I got distracted. I have come to think that do not need to learn things because I can just look them up whenever I need to. So what is the point of learning anything in this age?
In the past few months, I have transitioned to thinking instead according to the “Age of Skills.” If information is readily available, it is not necessary for me to know facts off the top of my head unless I’m teaching or using them in some other purposeful way. What becomes more valuable in my life now are skills. These are things that cannot be searched for on the internet. It’s not what I know, but what I can do. With people stuck in an “Age of Distraction” and spending countless hours watching Netflix and skimming social media, they take less time to build skills. Being skilled in something takes a lot of time and effort. And I believe it is not too late to start building a skill. There are geniuses in every field and people who started working on a skill when they were three years old. You cannot compete with them when starting at age twenty-four or seventy-four. But the value of a skill is what you put into it and what it brings to your experience. It is the knowledge that after you have spent many hours on a skill, you can do something you thought was impossible before you started. It builds confidence that can go a long way in improving different areas in your life.
When coming up with goals last New Year’s Eve, I came up with the motto “It’s called discipline.” Whenever I start wishing I could speak Japanese better or sing like the many people I follow on YouTube, I remind myself that if I want something, I can get it with time and effort. I just need to have the discipline and motivation to put in the effort. It has taken me eight months to really understand why I made this my motto, but I have four more months to put it into practice.
So we are entering the last quarter of the year. There is still time to start building a skill before the end. The hardest part is starting and making it a habit. Becoming skilled will only follow after time and effort.
What will you start devoting your life to do today? To give you some ideas for your own skill-building age, here are two areas I personally want to focus on more this fall:
Japanese Reading
The N1 level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) taught me that reading in Japanese is incredibly difficult for me still. I just don’t know enough vocabulary and other language knowledge after six years of studying. It seems like an insurmountable hurdle. But I have not even started working on it seriously. Rather than thinking of it as an intrinsic ability, if I think of it as a skill, I can improve my ability through practice. I’m now making a plan to work on reading as a skill this fall. I want to prove to myself that I can increase my skill.
Piano
This one is a skill I have not even started working on this year. I still have four months left! Since June, the feeling that I want to return to playing the piano has been growing. I just haven’t gotten around to it because of distractions and lack of a piano in my apartment. I plan to buy one soon, though, and start rebuilding my skill. Technically, I already have this skill. Or at least I used to. I already devoted over a thousand hours to it as a teenager. I just haven’t devoted much time or effort in the last six years, so my skill has gone dormant. I’m excited to see what I can bring back to life and what new areas I can improve on that I never tried before. I just need to buy a piano and start.
Need more ideas for the skill you want to start working on daily for the next four months? Don’t search for ideas on the internet. Start with yourself and get a pencil and paper. Set your favorite music to play for for ten minutes or enjoy silence and write out any ideas that come to mind, as fast as you can. After the time is up, look back and choose one idea that stands out to start working on. You don’t know if you will enjoy it until you do it, and you don’t know if you can do it well until you’ve devoted time to it every day for the next four months. It’s called discipline.