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.
If you have little to no skills in this, perhaps teaming up with someone who knows what they're doing would be a good approach. He could lead the project and share the workload between you and him. Preferably, it would be someone who you either know or who was recommended by someone you know. If your country is like mine, there should be plenty of old-school older men, who are very good in this kind of work and would enjoy some extra income. Just asking around friends and family could land viable candidates.
Alternatively, you could learn it all from youtube, but e.g. doing things like putting in new doors or windows solo (without anyone there to help) seems hard enough even when you know what you're doing.
Way cool. Love the potential to collaborate here. Like the idea of using it as a way to focus too... ending the year with 12 sweet skills on the list is a big win. And one a month seems manageable.
- sausage making (jalapeno cheddar is the inspiration)
- vegetable gardening
- wok cooking
- tiny home building (does that work? Gonna take more than a month)
- welding
- leveling up the extremely basic food preservation skills - proper canning & dehydrating
- vegetarian cooking
- cheese making
- raising chickens
- hot sauce making
- play guitar
- how do I say... establish meditation habit
- yoga habit
- making ginger beer
- increase Permaculture knowledge and apply into my place
@sodatrain
Like you, my list skews heavily towards food-related skills.
Mooching a bunch of ideas off of previous posters, I would have something like:
Fermenting
Pickling
Canning
Cooking different cuisines, but especially Indian food (Indian food is my white whale... I've spent so much time trying to make authentic Indian food it and it's never as good as the real stuff)
Dumpster diving (J+G???)
Exploring different meditation modalities
Music (I could spend a whole year (whole life?) just on all the different sub-skills here, e.g. guitar / piano / drums / singing / ear training / theory / arranging / recording / mixing / live performance / etc.)
Dance
Every variation of interpersonal skills (conflict resolution / speaking extemporaneously / there's about a million more)
+1 on the different meditation modalities. A goenka retreat would be nice. The thought's been at the back of my mind ever since RoamingFrancis mentioned it way back when. Update: have researched. Turns out it would definitely not be "nice"
If you have little to no skills in this, perhaps teaming up with someone who knows what they're doing would be a good approach. He could lead the project and share the workload between you and him. Preferably, it would be someone who you either know or who was recommended by someone you know. If your country is like mine, there should be plenty of old-school older men, who are very good in this kind of work and would enjoy some extra income. Just asking around friends and family could land viable candidates.
Alternatively, you could learn it all from youtube, but e.g. doing things like putting in new doors or windows solo (without anyone there to help) seems hard enough even when you know what you're doing.
This is a great suggestion, zbigi. I might pursue this.
I like this! I have a long list, but I likely won't have my own land or even backyard for at least another 6 months.
Full list:
Permaculture/gardening
Plant ID, Tree ID
Botany
Mushroom hunting/ID
Foraging
Build a good solar oven
Cook with a solar oven
Build a solar food dehydrator
Drying food
River fishing/fish cleaning
Smoking fish (build a smoker)
Build a rocket stove/cook on a rocket stove
Singing
Guitar?
Water color
Cooking entirely from scratch for at least a month
Swimming free style
Wood splitting
Bikepacking
Beer making (for gifts)
Bird ID
Geology
Canning
Bee keeping
Live without electricity for at least a month
So for 2024, this might be somewhat realistic although that's still too much at one focus per month. I'll need to prioritize.
Plant ID, Tree ID: spring
Botany
Mushroom hunting/ID : mid oct – mid nov
Foraging : year-round?
River fishing/fish cleaning: summer
Singing?
Guitar?
Water color
Cooking 100% from scratch for at least a month
Swimming free style
Bikepacking : September 2024?
Bird ID
Geology
knitting (201) : winter
Last edited by NewBlood on Tue Oct 10, 2023 4:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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.
Skillathon Draft v1.0
Might as well start next month part-time until contract is up next June. I plan on publishing a quarterly zine to wrap up illustration, data, and adventure projects into single issues. All the new skills build on my art foundations and are then applied each quarter to a zine. Print and move on!
November
- Cartooning Philosophy and Practice Book
- Binge watch (no exercises) ArtCamp 1 and 2 videos (bought 3 years ago and still have not watched all of them)
- Begin DIY Design Sketching Curriculum
December
- DIY Design Sketching I
- Advanced Bike Repair Class
- Design Drawing of all major class concepts
- Print and ship two 24 page zines with a spine (content already complete, just need to assemble for printer)
January
- DIY Comics 1
- DIY Comics 2
February
- Faces - 1 week 4 characters
- Clothing - 1 week, 4 characters
- Intro to Blender class (binge)
- 4 page comic with new skills
March
- 32 page zine - Trail Running!
- 6000 word feature article in zine
- Publish comic from February in zine
- 4 data visualizations
- Zine to printer
April
- DIY Design Sketching II
- Specialty bike repair seminars
- Draw all processes
May
- DIY Design Sketching III
- Bike trip with DW?
June
- 32 page zine - BIKES!
- 6000 word feature article in zine
- Publish design drawings
- 4 data visualizations
- Zine to printer
July
- DIY Natural History Illustration I
- Plein air Gouache I
August
- DIY Natural History Illustration II
- Plein air Gouache II
- Hand Drawn Maps
September
- 32 page zine - NATURE!
- 6000 word feature article in zine
- Publish illustrations and maps
- 4 data visualizations
- Zine to printer
October
- 4 comics master studies
- sketch, layouts, frame by frame, color, dissect
- Inktober - new inking techniques every few days
November
- Character designs for comic
- design sketching of character's tools and skills
- 8 page comic
December
- 32 page zine - Primitive Tech!
- 6000 word feature article in zine
- Publish illustrations, design sketches, maps, 8 page comic
- 4 data visualizations
- Zine to printer
1. Learn to milk, feed, bathe a cow and general cow maintenance
2. Learn accounting the language of business
3. Learn the legal paperwork required to register a HUF, LLP, OPC, AIF and a Private Limited company on my own and getting a DIN registration with the Registrar of Companies at the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
HUF: Hindu Undivided Family
LLP: Limited liability partnership
OPC: One person company (no shareholders, different from a sole proprietership)
AIF: Alternate investment fund
These are all separate legal entities where as DIN: Director informantion number required to become a board member.
4. Create a complete ecommerce/membership website from scratch and have it go live
5. Obtain enough domain knowledge to be able to read the Charak, Suśhrut and Agniveśh Saṁhitā Ayurvedik texts and understand them
6. Start a pharmacy based on 5
A while ago I built a template for Ultralearning project design. I'm going to use it to design each skill chunk.
## Project Name
### What are you trying to learn?
### What is the desired outcome?
### Why do you want to know the thing? How will it improve your life?
### How will you know when you are done?
### What Materials are you going to use to learn? (books, yt channels, udemy, people, ...)
### How are you going to practice?
1. The Best practice activity:
2. Second best practice activity (don't use more than two to start with):
Some notes on practice:
>Increase intensity, not volume.
>Distribute practice (1hr/day for 5 days is better than 5hrs in one day per week)
>Active recall should be >75% after initial information intake.
>Prioritize the hard/important stuff. Struggling? Hone in on that material.
>Fix weak spots first, instead of repeatedly doing stuff you're okay at.
>Aim for level-of-use, as close to the actual activity as possible. When that's not possible, use drills to get specific skills and then go up a level.
### Deadlines and milestones, including end date
#### Week-by-week Plan
#### At the halfway point, do a broad-insight Feynman Technique. ID weaknesses.
The previous post was about designing each chunk in isolation. These are some thoughts on how to design the overall composition/relationship between skill chunks:
.Seasonality. I might enjoy bookbinding and sewing during winter months rather than spring/summer/early fall when I'll want to be outside more; Jan, Feb, July, and August are wretched months to bikepack around here.
.Any skills that I want to frontload/will support later skillchunks? e.g. I want to make videos about the Skillathon, so I'm going to do a 'Shooting Video' chunk early and then practice it through the whole year.
.Schedule chunks with other people first, fit other chunks around them. e.g. let's pencil in a date for the Bushcraft chunk now, and I'll fit around it.
.Tempo/variance. It'll probably be easier to sustain if the kinds of focus required changed between each chunk: some skills are more cognitively demanding, others more manual dexterity, others more social. Keep the tempo dynamic to maintain stoke.
.Skills that will suit scheduled travel? I can practice handwriting or fiction writing anywhere.
Do you have a plan to make / keep the skills durable? I see @mF has focused on art and bikes. He's both stacking and integrating the lessons over time.
When I look at the breadth some have posted, this is probably my biggest question. One thing that dampens my enthusiasm for a renaissance strategy, is by the time I need the skill again, it has totally eroded. I replaced my kitchen faucet 12 years ago. All faucets have worked since then. I don't remember how.
My work around has been to meticulously document in my digital planner. IE - time to replace the furnace humidifier pad, here's the steps to blindly follow, here's the part number and vendor to order more. But I wouldn't say I've learned the skill. I knew it only momentarily.
For myself, I've identified two categories of skills:
1) skills I have high confidence that I want to learn or develop further and integrate into my wog in a deeper and durable way (video, writing, sewing, cooking, fashion/style, interior design). e.g. I'll do a chunk on video, but then I'll be shooting video the whole rest of the skillathon. I'll do a chunk on cooking, but then I'll be cooking for the rest of my life, practicing the skills.
2) Skills that I'm curious about but have never gotten over the 'activation energy' to do. The purpose of including them in my skillathon plan is discovery. For me this includes bookbinding, drawing, and small engine repair. I might do these for my skill chunk and then go 'neat, I'll do this again someday, and now that I know how to do it (and have documented it) I'll be able to get back into it quicker than if I never had' or 'cool, wow, I hate bookbinding, I'll just buy journals and not worry about it'.
One of my Desired Outcomes for the skillathon is to have a clearer idea of what skills I actually want to pursue further/devote serious time to. It's a bit of a rapid survey of many skills. The experience will guide my decisions in the future.
Another desired outcome is meta-skill of rapidly spinning up skill acquisition projects.
..
I'd say replacing a furnace humidifier pad isn't a skill, it's a specific task. Tasks are easy to forget (all the steps). DIY HVAC maintenance might be a skill, which involves things like building intuition around how air flows through a house, how to think about gas safety, what kinds of tapes and seals are appropriate for what kinds of equipment, etc. Replacing a faucet is a task. Knowing basically how plumbing works, how pipe wrenches work, how pipe dope/thread tape works, are parts of the skill of plumbing. etc.
An example of task vs. skill in my life: I've forgotten the steps of how to paint a UV map texture on an object in Blender, but I'm a more skilled 3d generalist than someone who just watched a youtube tutorial on UV map painting and can currently copy the task.
ETA: I sewed a bivvy bag and an ultralight tarp in May. If it were a skill chunk it was about a week's worth of time. Six months later, I feel confident enough that with some brushing up on it I could tackle other sewing projects. Before I made those projects, I didn't have that confidence because 'how to sew using a machine' was a total mystery to me. That knowledge that I could, if I wanted, pick some skill up and do something useful with it, for a broader array of skills, is part of what I'm after.
I'm interested in participating but I don't think the structured of 1 skill per month will work for me. I've been on a skill improvement quest for several years. I'm interested in collaborating with people, sharing the experience and getting motivation from the group. Here are the skills I'm currently interested in:
Botany (Plant identification)
Improving my record label
Utilizing my studio to build a MoTown like song writing team
Increasing my skill as a consumer (recognizing and appreciating quality craftmanship)
Crafting/ Costuming (design + build)
Improving cooking skills*
Learning more about waste streams and recycling
Dumpster dive more than just food
Learning more about economics and economic systems
Embroidery
Gardening
Grooming
Investing
Learning more about Tax Law
Learning to repair things
Learning more about rope bondage/ suspension and other bondage techniques.
Learning non-bondage rope uses and knots
Becoming more persuasive
Sewing
Becoming a better lover
Storytelling (oral)
Becoming better at flirting and seducing people
Becoming better at making "professional" connections and selling my skill set
Becoming a better songwriting (working on a live EDM project currently)
Become better at transcribing music on guitar and drums
Be able to play in a band as a drummer
Learn Spanish
Learn French
Improve stenciling skills
Sewing
Learning more about systems theory
Time management/ Project management
Writing
Photography
Lighting
Improving as a sound engineer
Improving as a guitarist**
*I'm already a decent cook and prepare 95% of my meals, but I've been stuck and haven't felt I've improved for awhile. I feel like I'm stuck at decent and having trouble getting to excellent.
**I don't actively work at this anymore, except for transcription/ active listening.
LMK if anyone wants to collaborate in any of those areas.
Also, the potential for latticework meta-lessons such as learning a new way to think/approach the world. For example, learning the syntax of do-loop would be a task, learning C++ would be a skill, but learning object-oriented design vis-a-vis function-oriented design would be a meta-lesson.
In my experience, these meta-lessons---insofar they're there---can not be learned by a quick dive. The brain will resist the reframing and the more you already know, the harder it will be to assume a beginner's mind. For example, I was in my humble opinion very good at function-oriented programming and it took me a year before I could appreciate OO. OTOH, insofar one has a well-developed latticework, it will be relatively easy to pick up new skills that are meta-similar. Indeed, all it requires is just knowing that it's possible from seeing it demonstrated once.
