ERE Skillathon 2024

[theanimal]

The idea (h/t @mountainfrugal) is to dedicate a year of working full time to develop an array of skills. You dedicate 2-4 week sprints to learning each skill and during that period you are only focusing on that skill full time during the main part of your day. The end goal is to finish the year with an array of skills that you otherwise wouldn't have focused on or developed as fully. So for example, I'd like to learn whittling. I could spend January just whittling every day. Come February i move on to bike repair, fixing bikes and then In March, I exclusively cook Mexican food and so on for the rest of the year.

If people share their list of desired skills here and there are overlapping interests, @AxelHeyst had the idea that those people could try and coordinate a time and place to working out those skills together in person. For example, @mF and I are both interested in learning bushcraft and primitive skills and have talked about spending a few weeks in the desert pursuing that.

This challenge obviously lends itself better to those who aren't working full time, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be scaled down as needed.

To maximize learning time, there are some logistics, prep work and planning that should be done for each person prior to starting the year. It would hinder progress and limit the success of the project if you got to May and were like "Ok, the next 3 weeks are fixing small electronics. Where do I go to find small electronics, what are good resources for troubleshooting and what kind of tools do I need?"

For those interested in participating, a good starting point might be coming up with a list of skills you'd like to pursue in the next year and how long you'd like to spend on each one. Then following that, we can see if there are similarities and ways we can join forces. Otherwise focusing on preparing materials and resources to ensure smooth flow.

[7Wannabe5]

This concept is like crack for an eNTP. Are all of the skills supposed to be brand-new-to-you or would re-boot at Level 201 or 501 rather than 101 be kosher for this challenge?

[mountainFrugal]

@7wb5 Choose your own adventure!

I originally thought about this in the context of different drawing techniques/skills, but after talking with @theanimal, realized it would be a fun challenge for other things. You could design projects that are a mix of 101-501. It would likely be best for mostly 101 projects so that you are making really good progress on each one to keep the momentum going.

I was also thinking that the sequencing of the skills should be considered. As an example, learning to cook using a pressure cooker or slow cooker... then learning multi-week meal pre-prep/freeze for the pressure/slow cooker. This would free up more time to then focus on other projects.

Whenever I have done learning intensives before, 2 weeks is a good period with a small project/outcome at the end to "show" for your work. Whittling - could be chess pieces - just as an example.

Brushing up on my bushcraft skills over a few weeks while learning some new skills with @theanimal in the desert sounds incredibly fun.

[AxelHeyst]

A braindump of skills I'm interested in:

Drawing landscapes, portraits, and figures
Watercolor
Handwriting with a dip pen
Cooking mexican/indian/italian (pizzas!)/bread
Whittling (esp spoons and bowls)
Waking furniture out of salvaged 2x4's
Making cob structures, including ovens, RMHs, benches/hardscape, etc
Bookbinding (making journals)
Sewing (modern ultralight gear; canvas bags; sun tunics; harem pants; mocs/mukluks; both machine and hand)
Bushcraft
Gardening (not sure how to do this 'full time' for a month: maybe do a week for startup and then cruise throughout the year?)
Winemaking/beermaking (same concern)
Cooking on fire: grill, dutch oven, sandpit
Cooking with solar oven
Joinery (make dovetails all month)
Small engine repair (plenty of broke small engines round here to work on)
Social media
Writing fiction
Toasting/public speaking, particularly extemporaneously. Improv?
Dance
Sex
Photography
Videography (first month or week's skill, to build skills to document the rest of the year's skill development)
Video editing (last month's proj, use the full year's raw footage as grist. Or maybe this is the secret 13th month's skill after everything else is done... and this would focus more on color and sound editing, pulling in stock footage, text/transitions, etc - taking a decent cut and making it seem professional quality.)
Meditation/zen


re: sequencing, I'd want to produce some sort of documentary or series of videos I could post to yt about this year. So an early skill could be 'how to shoot video that doesn't suck', and I would then use that skill to document the rest of the year. The last month would be 'video editing', and I use all the footage I shot through the year as content.

Meditation/focus practices might also be a good early skill to, uh, focus on, as it'd pay dividends for the rest of the skills.

[Crusader]

Oh I like this! Here are my list of skills that I would like to learn, in no particular order, with a rough estimate of how long I would want to spend on it with dedicated study and given how little free time I already have.

-> become a latin dance DJ - 1 month (I can easily DJ at dance socials at our dance school and/or socials)
-> anything related to music - singing, playing guitar, ear training - 6 months initially (sing a song at EREFest 2024?)
-> storytelling - 1 month (I have a storytelling meetup that I go to... I would love to be able to tell my story one day there)
-> sowing - 2 weeks (so that I can fix my old clothes)
-> getting laid/sex education - 2 months (I need all the help I can get)
-> leadership - 1 month (so that I can be a better manager at work and leader in the dance community)
-> computer science - years (I want to slowly work my way across the following curriculum: https://teachyourselfcs.com)
-> learn Hungarian - years (my only path to EU citizenship)
-> acting - 2 months (always wanted to try)
-> improve my English vocabulary - 2 months
-> vegan cooking... the cheaper the better - 2 months

[7Wannabe5]

@7wb5 Choose your own adventure!

Since 2024 will be the year before I turn 60, it might be fun to do a sort of skill/project retrospective. Unfortunately, I will still have 2 or 3 10 week long grad school courses to complete, and I still need to work approximately 16 hours/week to support myself, and I am not yet thoroughly recovered from my severe bout with Crohn's disease, so my time/vigor will be somewhat limited.

Gardening (not sure how to do this 'full time' for a month: maybe do a week for startup and then cruise throughout the year?)

If you reframe as Permaculture, you could easily do full time for a year! Observe and Interact: Principle 1, alone could occupy a month.

@AH@Crusader:

I am assuming that you did not imagine "sex" as a joint ERE2 skill endeavor , but since Become a Licensed Sex Therapist was one of my abandoned projects circa 10 years ago, I would be happy to contribute Dr. Ruth style input and/or syllabus. I could maybe even round up some guest speakers! Probably the worst outcome of following my advice in this realm would just be some experiences that will seem humorous in retrospect.

[mountainFrugal]

I was thinking on my walk this morning that something like this could be a way for folks to take a freedom-to sabbatical of 3-6 months towards the end of accumulation, but before burning out. Finding out what you want to do with your time after you retire is just as important as the accumulation phase IMO. Spending a few intensive weeks on a number of micro-projects that feed into your skills base prior to fully pulling the plug would be a great investment. Having a dream to retire into something and not having actually spent any time doing that thing is actually a huge gamble. Prototyping it (even for a long weekend) would at least give people some personal data to work off of.

[mountainFrugal]

Drawing landscapes, portraits, and figures
Watercolor
Handwriting with a dip pen

Want to swap skills next year? I can teach you the basics and you can teach me the basics of blender? Also, desert bushcraft intensive at Ft. Dirtbag?

[Slevin]

Making furniture out of salvaged 2x4's

I've been breaking this one into 2 skills:

1) Make furniture out of framing lumber
2) Process salvaged lumber into something useable

Getting the salvaged lumber and processing it is just an add-on to the other bit, and framing lumber + OSB is still pretty cheap. So if you want to learn as fast as possible, you will either need a huge huge collection of salvaged lumber already, or just to buy it during the learning process. Most of the things I have been building while learning have cost $10-$30 depending on size (36 inch high garage table with storage was around 30 with purchased materials).

[Crusader]

I am assuming that you did not imagine "sex" as a joint ERE2 skill endeavor , but since Become a Licensed Sex Therapist was one of my abandoned projects circa 10 years ago, I would be happy to contribute Dr. Ruth style input and/or syllabus. I could maybe even round up some guest speakers! Probably the worst outcome of following my advice in this realm would just be some experiences that will seem humorous in retrospect.

Since I like Albert Ellis, I've had his book "Sex and the Liberated Man" on my bookshelf and I've been meaning to read it forever, so that's where I'll likely start, but beyond that, I have no clue, so yes, some kind of a syllabus would be helpful.

[sky]

I would like to learn how to cook vegetarian with beans. I can do some recipes but need more.
Bikepacking.
Long distance backpacking
Build a velomobile.
Make a food garden that doesn't suck.
Forage and preserve significant amounts of food.
Improve small talk skills to meet people.
Build a low cost shelter and live in it.
Be more car-free.
Have intimate relationships.
Lose weight.
Sculpture.
Build or buy a Linux tablet.

[theanimal]

Here's some of the things that are top of mind that I'm considering for 2024:

Whittling (utensils)
Sewing (working with natural fibers making mukluks, pants, anorak, ruffs
Bike repair (brakes, derailleurs)
Bushcraft
Spanish(C1 level) +Mexican cooking
Cooking without gas or electricity
Preserving meat and fish without electricity
Fermenting
Milling lumber
Felling trees by axe and crosscut
Small engine repair (generators, chainsaws, snow machines)
Knife making (ulus and more)
Ukulele (play "Can't Keep" and "Rise" by Eddie Vedder )
Timber framing (build outdoor kitchen and woodshed)
Bow hunting/archery
Shooting hand guns
Drawing?
Birch syrup/tree tapping
Video editing
Handwriting (penmanship)
Soldering/small electronic repair
Masonry (Russian masonry stove and outdoor rocket stove)
Metal working ( with salvaged tin a la Dick Proenneke)
Building with logs (fully scribed)
Dovetails/mortise and tenon (I'd eventually like to make a dovetailed log cabin)
Making farmhouse tables
Making log furniture (benches, chairs)
Furniture out of scavenged materials
Skate skiing
Flying tail draggers and landing remote/unimproved landing areas
Fly fishing

[dustBowl]

This is an excellent idea. Two of the most common struggles we see people report post-early-retirement are 1) lack of clarity on their freedom-to and 2) lack of a peer group to do interesting stuff with. An ERE skillathon potentially targets both of those issues.

[AxelHeyst]

Want to swap skills next year? I can teach you the basics and you can teach me the basics of blender?

Yes.

Also, desert bushcraft intensive at Ft. Dirtbag?

YES

[berrytwo]

Excited about all of this!!! I was thinking about how timing the weeks in a particular way could be interesting too (gardening in the spring or winemaking when your grapes are ripe.) Also, spontaneity would also be great (when you happen upon a 2x4 for example.) Fun to imagine how different people could run with this idea.

Skills I am interested in:

Mastering sewing machine
Food preservation
Organizing life/ events
How to build a website
Uke
How to be a master facilitator
Self-defence
Fix shoes (not sure if this is possible)
Permaculture
Spanish and/ or French
Basic wood building
Navigation
Tech skills (obsidion, excell)
Writing poetry
Photoshop?
Ask better questions
How to tell/ write a good story
Change my car oil/ oil filter
Nothing to something skills
Make a 10/10 ratatouille
Perfect 3 sauces for cooking

and more...

[Jin+Guice]

This concept is like crack for an eNTP.

Someone pass me the mini blow torch!!!!

[OutOfTheBlue]

My skill will be to not overcommit and spread myself too thin or fear of missing out. Inner work is enough right now. Enjoy the challenge, folks!

[ertyu]

-> vegan cooking... the cheaper the better - 2 months

You have an advantage over all the other people who want to learn vegan cooking because of knowing serbian. Greek orthodox chsristians have a vegan lent and thus many vegan recipes which are cheap and non-nonsense (no bullshit substitutions, no weird vegan specialty products, etc). Your mother will be an excellent resource on this one. I'm interested as well, might work best as a thread/MMG where we post recipes and results.

@sky, join us on this one, the balkans are big on "vegetarian with beans"

As for improving my English vocab, I literally crammed the GRE wordlist. Bought blank cards in bulk from a place that prints business cards, flipped through. SAT/TOEFL/GRE wordlists are widely available and are already preselected to include academic/"fancy" rare vocab that you might not encounter in everyday life. 97th percentile on the English section of my GRE exam that year

[ertyu]

While I'm geographically weirdly located and would not be able to do these in person, the idea is inspiring. Here are mine (I'll try to make them 12):

- join in with others on the vegetarian/vegan cooking: maybe a MMG that requires intense posting, e.g. anyone is free to contribute but challenge participants commit to making one post every X days with a recipe + pictures or some such.

- learn to play the handpan. Have beginners' video exercises, will require a handpan. Want to buy Y/N?? Also will leaning music theory be required/helpful here. Further, handpans come in different scales, so recs on what scale to choose are welcome from anyone knowledgeable.

- +1 on "fixing my old clothes" and "resizing the bedsheets I got for free to fit the duvet i got for free." I also have a bunch of old clothes that i've been meaning to turn into various pouches for various things but never did. So, general utilitarian sewing.

- Doodle cats following the instructions from this one beginner's "if you're an idiot at art, do this" book I got and never used

- learn the hatha yoga primary series. I will not be able to do everything and at the start it will surely take me more than an hour, but learning the postures and their sequence will be good. Open to recs for youtube instructional material. Prefer instructors focusing on correct execution of classical poses without modifications.

- UK Chartered Editors and Proofreader's courses + their fiction editing course. When it comes to writing, I can generate a first draft full of garbage, I can't edit it into something coherent and readable. Plus, taking an actual editor course would soothe my ocd

- GTD implementation. Im a disaster and I've tried (unsuccessfully) too many times to count.

- Really stoked for an online certificate in brief solution focused therapy that the university of toronto is running starting september '24. I hope I get in. In general, I'd love to pursue formal education in counseling/therapy, but not many programs offer this online due to practicum requirements (which, reasonable). If I someone lets me on an EMDR course I'll probably cream my pants.

- I haven't been to Trash Place, my fixer-upper apartment, since 2021. I should probably go make sure that the kitchen hasn't turned into a pigeon roost and do some actual fixer-uppering. Summer '24. This is a big one for me, I do want to fix it up myself but my skills are quite pathetic and I never start because without actual skills, it's hard to parse what's actually involved with starting. This is probably a multi-month project.

Edited to add another skill I thought of: study the writings/past letters of investment research pundits i like in order to learn

[7Wannabe5]

This concept is like crack for an eNTP.

Someone pass me the mini blow torch!!!!]

Many life-style/organizational/time-management books written with eNTP and similar types in mind, such as "The Renaissance Soul" by Lobenstein (which Jacob included in his loose "ERE" bibliography) are core concerned with helping folk with a bajillion projects they would like to work on gain focus and a sense of completion. So, lack of intrinsic "freedom to.." motivation is hard for us to grok. Lack of willpower/focus to slog through the boring/painful parts of any given project towards completion and ignore more pleasant distractions does. Some of the helpful suggestions offered in books such as these might be relevant to this Skillathon. For instance, identifying/ending each time period devoted to particular skill with a specific product , event, or award/badge/certficate. For instance, a number of years ago when I was organizing my self-employed-slacker lifestyle in a similar manner, one of my projects ended with entering a baking contest (I lost) and another ended with placing a complicated bet on a major horse race(I won!)

"You Can Do It! The Merit Badge Handbook for Grownup Girls" is a great book that includes a template for designing mini-skill challenges. This book was aligned with a mini-movement a number of years ago (not entirely unlike "Stitch and Bitch") in which adult females met and kind of re-lived their Girl Scout days. The difference being that beyond the requirements for the badges already provided in the book, any member of a group who had already achieved some level of mastery of a topic/skill could use the template to create a new challenge/badge. Obviously, this organizational concept could also be rendered gender neutral. Paul Wheaton's permie site/groups also use a badge system.

Anyways, since I have already committed myself to a grad program in IT/Data which is sucking up too WAAAAAY too much of my time/post-coffee-alertness, I am thinking my first mini-project for the Skillathon could be the meta-task of designing a simple database for the Skillathon. It's pretty obvious how this might be helpful, because scrolling up and down this thread to, for instance, figure out who/when/where/how is similarly interesting in Vegan cooking as mini-challenge is uber-inefficient. This would serve a dual purpose for me, because it is possible that I could submit a more generalized (made anonymous) with bells and whistles version as my final project towards degree.