How To Be Good At Lots Of Stuff

1. Luck – Start Young
Ideally, your parents would have started interacting with you constructively before you had any idea that you were alive: Mozart on the swollen baby-mama belly, face-in-face moving talking and playing like an obsessive parent, encouraging curiosity and exploring, treating child with respect, multiple environments and quiet time to digest the day.

If you’ve already been born and mama didn’t play mozart while you were chillin in the amniotic jacuzzi, no worries, just start now.

2. Efficiency – Train Smart
If you want to be good at something, learn about it, break it down, understand the pieces, and learn appropriately for your goal. If you want to know how to play piano, don’t learn a song, if you want to know one song on piano, don’t music theory.

3. Discipline – Be Consistent
In almost all cases, it is far more beneficial to train regularly than in binges. I’d suggest that practicing piano for 5 minutes in the morning and night has been far more beneficial than for 2 hours twice a week. Do the math; it also saves time for lots of other stuff.

Training regularly trains your body, your muscles, your synapsis, your mood to grow for a certain purpose. Once you feel yourself growing appropriately, learn to add variety to your training to strengthen and accelerate through the learning curve while not leaving yourself in the dust.

4. Perception – Internalize Abstract Lessons
You will never be good at lots of stuff by memorizing. You might be great at something, but that’s another post for another day. To be good at lots of stuff, it’s important to be able to apply lessons learned today to new situations tomorrow.

5. Conclusion – Bringing It All Together
Now that we’ve reduced practice time by Training Smart, we can further exploit Abstraction by incorporating it into our training. By training generally to run and jump and throw in a variety of ways, instead of how to throw a frisbee, run downhill, and jump out of planes, we prepare by arming ourselves with the potential to be good at many things, instead of just pulling disc, out-running an avalanche, or tempting the parachute gods.