ERE Skillathon 2024

[Slevin]

Can you help me understand what outcomes you are looking for when studying each of these skills under extremely compressed timelines? Is the point to just to have moved yourself from "clueless" category in a field more into the "beginner" realm? Or just to focus on learning how to do a specific task or project in one field? And are you worried about skill retention when you cycle through the skills in a linear order but only give them one time block instead of repeated repetition over time to hammer it into your brain? I would think you would get more positive results running multiple skills asynchronously over a longer period of time to allow the spacing / repetition / sleep cycles that really help cement in a subject.

Many of the skills I really value getting in life took me years of training multiple hours per day, and taught me to love and stick to the incredible process of doing a thing under good direction... Just for a dumb simple example I think it took me something like 150-200 hours of active training (which maxes out in value around 3 hours a day) to get > 100 juggles using alternating feet only with a soccer ball. I think it took me about 6 months of active training 5ish days per week (wasn't the only thing I was training).

[AxelHeyst]

Yeah, for me it’s mostly about lifting already current practices into higher levels. It’s stuff I already do regularly but am not getting any better at because I’m just repeating what I already know how to do.

Eg I’d like to learn really nice handwriting, but I haven’t taken the time to read the one book I have on it and do the basic exercises to be able to start ‘doing it’ in my normal journaling.

I’d like to learn drawing, I just haven’t learned it to the level of being able to design in it. So I’ll spend a month or whatever learning drawing and then instead of reaching for blender to design my builds I’ll start with a pencil.

I’d like to learn trad joinery. I don’t because I always just want the thing right meow so I just grab the Kreg jig or a bracket or whatever and bang it out. Once I spend a couple weeks learning I’ll have that as an option for future builds. Etc.

(And for totally new skills - the intention is to loft the practice into routine/regular practice to start getting in those consistent reps.)

[Jin+Guice]

These two posts represent the central conflict in my life. How deep to go on a subject to get good, when enough is enough and trying enough new stuff not to get bored but keeping motivation to make it through the boring parts of learning.

[Gadget]

I would like to follow along with this. My projects will fall within the following categories:

1.) Drawing and painting
2.) Portrait storefront improvement (marketing, photography, video editing)
3.) Bike maintenance/repair/upgrades
4.) Plant ID, geology and water science

I need a sequence of projects that build on each other over time to retain the skill. I will develop a plan and post progress in my journal.

[Crusader]

I've narrowed down the skills I want to work on to these 12 topics:
- cooking
- sewing and decluttering/organizing my wardrobe
- painting my house
- guitar
- singing
- learning Hungarian
- becoming a DJ at dance socials
- dating
- brewing alcohol and bread
- learning about fashion (and possibly buying some clothes)
- storytelling
- computer science projects (e.g. private VPN and media server, and/or a website/blog)

I don't know what order I'll do this in, but I feel compelled to start with becoming a DJ, so that's what I'll do in January.

[ertyu]

People who have storytelling as one of your skills, what is your motivation for pursuing this? What does that involve and how do you plan to approach it?

[mountainFrugal]

Some of our fellow ERE'rs are already in 2024! How does it look out there with respect to the Skillathon?

This is going to be such an exciting year. I am pumped to see all these cool skills/projects. I noticed a recurring goal of watercolor. I would be happy to teach an intro seminar on the topic for those that are interested, although there are a lot of good resources on youtube as well.

There are some ambitious plans in this thread. I love it! One thing I have been thinking about is keeping the stoke high throughout the year. You will likely have good and bad days/weeks/months. No worries. Think about the minimum goals and that this should be challenging, but still fun. Doing 20% is better than 0! Do you have a plan for when you inevitably fall off the schedule? If by mid-Feb you are off track, just reassess and continue on. This is not an all or nothing challenge! Getting bored with something after only a few hours? Try pushing through. Staying bored after a few days, go back to an earlier skill and brush-up.

I just printed my yearly plan and it is now hanging on the wall directly in front of my drawing desk. viewtopic.php?p=283215#p283215

Let's get it!

[Crusader]

People who have storytelling as one of your skills, what is your motivation for pursuing this? What does that involve and how do you plan to approach it?

I frequent an amateur storytelling meetup, and it has been on my list for a long time to write a short story about a particular topic that I think it would be interesting. I went to a few workshops, but I got discouraged by the quality of other people's stories (very high), and I just put this off as something that I will revisit in the future. So, my goal is to finish and present my story. I think it would be a good experience to have, and I am really scared of doing it, so it will be a great opportunity to get out of my comfort zone.

Some of our fellow ERE'rs are already in 2024! How does it look out there with respect to the Skillathon?

My general idea is to commit to spending at least 5 hours per week on the skills (I feel anxious about comitting to more), and I will spend one month per skill. I don't have the full order figured out, but my first skill will be "become a DJ at the dance school".

[AxelHeyst]

Can you help me understand what outcomes you are looking for when studying each of these skills under extremely compressed timelines?

I had another thought on this good question. Very roughly speaking, we can imagine skills at three scales: tens of hours invested in learning, hundreds of hours invested, and thousands of hours invested. While the skills in the thousands of hours invested are going to provide the richest experiences as you said, there are plenty of skills at the tens of hours and low hundreds of hours invested that I want to have, but am not interested in bumping up to the next scale of mastery.

If all I focused on was the thousands of hours competencies, my skill spectrum would look like swiss cheeese. Or sourdough crumb. I'd be oddly incompetent at some basic stuff. But if my criteria for investing *any* time in a new skill is "I am going to dump no fewer than 500 hours into this" then I'm not going to get off the ground with a lot of stuff.

Relatedly, this morning I made the tastiest meal I've ever made myself and I'm only on day 3 of cooking month. I'm twelve hours in and my life is durably better, and I'm making a bunch of connections between food, skill, flavor, local food and gardening (the pico de gallo I made was tasty but the weak link is the subpar tomatoes and so now my motivation to grow my own just leveled up), nutrition, social gatherings, etc.

So I guess I'd push back a bit on the idea that these are extremely compressed timelines. They're intense chunks of skill acquisition, but the aim isn't to learn everything there is to learn about cooking in a month. The aim is to learn whatever I can learn given I'm going to spend one intense month learning about cooking, and I can take what I learn in that month to decide how and whether to pursue that skill in a less intense, more day to day fashion in the future.

[jacob]

If all I focused on was the thousands of hours competencies, my skill spectrum would look like swiss cheeese. Or sourdough crumb. I'd be oddly incompetent at some basic stuff. But if my criteria for investing *any* time in a new skill is "I am going to dump no fewer than 500 hours into this" then I'm not going to get off the ground with a lot of stuff.

It's a width and depth question. Width plus depth translates into area or volume. This takes time and effort, so it's a hard problem. The [rhetorical?] question, then, is what areas of the noosphere to cover most efficiently and effectively. Go deep in more than one field and shallow on many fields. Humanity has only so many ways of viewing the world but definitely more than one! Latticework. Figure out which structures are common to all.

[Slevin]

Pretty much agree with both of you here.

I had another thought on this good question. Very roughly speaking, we can imagine skills at three scales: tens of hours invested in learning, hundreds of hours invested, and thousands of hours invested. While the skills in the thousands of hours invested are going to provide the richest experiences as you said, there are plenty of skills at the tens of hours and low hundreds of hours invested that I want to have, but am not interested in bumping up to the next scale of mastery.

If all I focused on was the thousands of hours competencies, my skill spectrum would look like swiss cheeese. Or sourdough crumb. I'd be oddly incompetent at some basic stuff. But if my criteria for investing *any* time in a new skill is "I am going to dump no fewer than 500 hours into this" then I'm not going to get off the ground with a lot of stuff.

Agreed with this completely. Finding the "low hanging fruit" (skill gained vs. time invested) especially for your circumstances and training them is always fantastic ROI. I was mostly musing about "deep pools" like "cooking", etc. A few weeks is less than many chefs use on perfecting one dish. From a low skill level, two weeks can be a lot of competency gain. Just wanted to know what the ending expectations were, given the time constraints. “I’m gonna learn cooking in two weeks” sounds like low value click bait. “I’m gonna learn how to make 14 lentil dishes / I’m gonna learn how to use different spicing profiles / I’m gonna learn how to sear a steak perfectly / I’m gonna learn how to cook things in a wok using a wok burner” sounds much more reasonable (p.s. they better be lentil dishes). Cooking is one of those >> 500 hour skills. Smaller segments of cooking are not.

Relatedly, this morning I made the tastiest meal I've ever made myself and I'm only on day 3 of cooking month. I'm twelve hours in and my life is durably better, and I'm making a bunch of connections between food, skill, flavor, local food and gardening (the pico de gallo I made was tasty but the weak link is the subpar tomatoes and so now my motivation to grow my own just leveled up), nutrition, social gatherings, etc.

Yeah, one of the better / interesting problems of cooking. It's incredibly deep, as in, "oh if I grow this better / source this better" the food could improve. And you do, and you have this one time where you got the perfect ingredient because of some random variable, and you cooked it just right, and its amazing. But then its harder to replicate in the future . Its relatively easy to make the best meal you've ever made on day 3 of cooking, but on day 3500 you will very rarely be making "the tastiest meal you've ever made" because of the increased standards issue and long history issue. Kinda like how everything is amazing for a child and one day is so long (relatively compared to all of their remembered history), but as timelines grow longer you become more immune to it and days feel short in comparison (now 1 day is 1 / 10000th or less of your remembered history). However, on day 3500 you will still make a lot more "exceptionally delicious meals" than day 3 you ever dreamed it could make.

So I guess I'd push back a bit on the idea that these are extremely compressed timelines. They're intense chunks of skill acquisition, but the aim isn't to learn everything there is to learn about cooking in a month. The aim is to learn whatever I can learn given I'm going to spend one intense month learning about cooking, and I can take what I learn in that month to decide how and whether to pursue that skill in a less intense, more day to day fashion in the future.

Yeah, this is a good expectation (which is what I thought, just didn’t understand your “goals” for each project so asked about the clarification).

[AxelHeyst]

Your questions/this dialogue helped me flesh out/get more usefully specific for my approach to cooking for this month (and it'll help me think through my future months as well).

WHAT DO I WANT TO LEARN?

• I want to learn the principles and techniques of good cooking
• So that I can make tasty, nutritious food for other people
• Without worrying that what I’m making will be weird or gross.

I’ll know I succeeded if I can cook at least few different dinners and/or breakfasts for other people and
a) not be stressed about it and
b) be pretty sure they enjoyed the food.

Also if I feel like I know enough about cooking to steadily improve in the future as I learn and practice even more types of dishes, techniques, and concepts.

WHY

• I want to be able to express my gratitude towards other people by cooking food they’re delighted to eat.
• I want to enjoy the process of cooking for others - right now it’s stressful because I’m not confident in my skill to make food that tastes good.
• Cooking - even for just myself - is an opportunity to practice devotion to a craft and engage in lifelong improvement of a skill.
• I’m going to cook 99% of the meals I eat whether I know how to cook well or not, so I might as well take advantage of the ‘mandatory’ craft time.
• I’m interested in bringing people together, and I see how central a role food plays in that.

HOW
How does one learn to cook? What materials will I use to learn? How exactly am I going to practice? What are the concepts, facts, and procedures?

HOW DOES ONE LEARN TO COOK?

• Culinary school. I’m not going to do that.
• Working your way up in a professional kitchen. I’m not going to do that either.
• Cooking classes. If I lived in a city I’d consider this, but I’m out in the boonies. Not a reasonable option.
• From family. I certainly learned some growing up, but being a rambunctious boy I never stood still long enough to absorb much from Mom’s good cooking.
• From books + the internet + lots and lots of cooking. Bingo.

WHAT MATERIALS WILL I USE TO LEARN COOKING?

• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samrin Nosrat.
• The Science of Good Cooking.
• Various other cookbooks.
• Recipes from online.
• Cooking youtube channels.
• Asking friends.

HOW WILL I PRACTICE?

• I’ll cook two meals a day (I rarely eat three meals a day).
• Every meal will have specific learning/practice objectives (make tortillas that don’t suck; make pico de gallo: make Mexican Rice: etc).
• I’ll record everything in my cooking journal.
• Each week at minimum will have a theme so that I’m not just making random dishes. Week 1 is burritos, for example, with specific subgoals of making flour tortillas, mexican beans and rice, and learning to make basic pico de gallo, salsa roja, and salsa verde.
• At the end of each week I’ll try to line up cooking for friends and/family to assemble everything I learned that week, and to get used to the stress of cooking for others.
• I’ll repeat every subskill until I feel like I have a good handle on it.
• Every weekday I’ll aim for 3-4 hours of cooking and 1-2 hours of study.
• Study looks like processing books like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, or taking notes from youtube channels, researching why my tortillas are so horrible, looking up techniques on deseeding tomatoes, etc.

CONCEPTS

• The relationship between gluten, protein, water, temperature, salt, and fats in different kinds of wheat and how these variables affect rise, chewiness, tenderness, crumb, flake, etc.
• What salt does to protein strands (e.g. why is salting and resting beaten eggs for scrambling so magical?)
• Salt diffusion and osmosis.
• How the Maillard Reaction works.
• The effect of heat on flavor lock-in.
• Autolyse
  etc.

FACTS

• 16 tablespoons = 1 cup
• 3 tsp = 1 tblspn
• etc

PROCEDURES / TECHNIQUES

• How to hold a knife
• How to chop food and not my finger
• How to knead, stretch-n-fold, and roll out dough
• How to mix pancake batter properly, and how to flip pancakes
• The sauté movement

AFTER THIS MONTH, HOW WILL I RETAIN AND/OR CONTINUE SKILL DEVELOPMENT?
I cook almost every meal I eat, so I have literally two reps of this skill a day baked in to my life, if you’ll forgive the pun. I also can tolerate repetition.

So my continuation plan is to pick one new dish, technique, or concept to work on at a time and then repeat it until I feel like I’ve got it locked in.

For example I might decide to make myself an omelet every morning for a month, looking up a few different recipes and watching a few different videos. At the end of the month I should be pretty good at making ometeles. The next month I might decide to make sourdough bread until I don’t need to look at the instructions.

I also intend to begin a practice of hosting a hedonic dinner night once a month for friends, which will be a regular test of my ability to cook for others as well as an event to motivate learning new dishes. Plus a source of feedback.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Cooking is, honestly, a very open-ended skill. I’m not so much creating a map with an X marks the spot, I’m filling out a map and establishing an initial direction to walk in, but for this particular skill the real point is to explore the territory for the rest of my life.

Contrast this with my skill for March, in which my goal is to fix my motorcycle. That’s a much clearer project - I’ll know I’m done when all the bits are back together and the thing starts up and rips.

[Scott 2]

With cooking being so physical, in person mentoring could 10x your rate of skill development. An expert may have strategic shifts you'll never grasp from self-directed learning. Any way trade a large minority of the self-directed effort, to establish a mentoring relationship? Is that worth consideration?

From what I recall of the ultra-learning / peak expertise materials, mentoring is a critical component. This feedback is not specific to your one skill.

[AxelHeyst]

Certainly worth considering! Generally, I think at least considering mentoring / outside instruction is important especially for ERE folk. Insourcing to a fault was mentioned in the Bad ERE Habits thread iirc. We can see examples of the power of outside instruction in theAnimals woodshop course and mF's mtb suspension course.

Ultralearning specifcally is defined as *self-directed* and intense skill/concept acquisition. A big part of the research phase has to do with how to get high quality advice, feedback, and/or information from experts to inform the design and feedback phases of your own project, but you mostly design and execute the project yourself. Insofar as learning how to 'ultralearn' is one of my aims with my whole Skillathon project, aka increasing my skill at teaching myself new skills, finding a mentor goes counter to that goal. (Which is not to say that Skillathon = Ultralearning. It's just main approach I've decided to use.)

Also I have very limited access to mentors based on where I live (and I care more about living where I live than in having access to mentors). That said, if I find access to mentorship for at least some of my skills, and assuming I feel like my goal of learning Ultralearning is going well, I'd likely jump at the chance. I actually have a vague idea of focusing on cultivating mentorships in 2025 because I've never really had any and it sounds magical.

[Scott 2]

That makes sense. Anders Erickson's book Peak is what resonated most with me. I am likely confusing it with the ultra learning approach.

We need @Seppia to fly out and level you up. Quail Haven ERE mentor of the month, lol.

[7Wannabe5]

I am going to be slow rolling into the Skillathon. My birthday is a few weeks into January, so I often do a Take 1 and Take 2 on plans for the year forward. Since, I'm looking at my last year before turning 60(!!!), I am dedicating all of January to mostly Meta/Planning/Overview itself as my skill. I am re-reading, re-booting a variety of my all time favorite lifestyle planning guides and a few new ones. Nearing 60 finds me looking back at least as much as looking forward, so I am trying to remember every self-help type book/program I ever read/attempted and at least give each one a skim. For instance, I believe the below was the first self-improvement program I attempted way back when I was 13. I know I won't once again be attempting to define my cheekbones with dark tone of blush, but it will be amusing to leaf through when my copy arrives.



Losing 30-plus lbs, again (for the 4th time in my adult life (heavy sigh)) would be a top priority if I was in energized, vigorous, ambitious,Modern mode. I'm not, so I'm going to attempt a Gentle Nutrition/Intuitive Eating plan instead and integrate it with rebooting my cooking skills within the context that I am mostly only cooking for myself after a lifetime of mostly cooking for others. I started teaching myself to cook from books when I was 8 or 9, but I've never sought mastery. I rate my current cooking skills as being analogous to a half-rate lounge pianist who has memorized all the popular favorites and can riff on a variety of themes. I generally only consult cookbooks to double-check proportions on baked goods or similar specifics, or when I want to learn to cook something I find myself frequently ordering when I go out.

Intuitive Eating is based on trusting your body/senses to guide your food selections if/when you are being mindful. Therefore, I am going to focus on cooking a variety of foods that I know I will enjoy once a week, so that I will always have a selection on hand. I also enjoy novelty, so I will also try out some new cookbooks and recipes. This week I made:

1) Scalloped potatoes with mustard greens, swiss cheese, and mushrooms.
2) Cabbage tomato soup with beef shank bone.
3) Tuna salad with pickles ( I purchased loaf of rye with caraway this week, but might start baking again soon.)
4) Apple/walnut/blue cheese salad (to eat with omelette made on the spot.)
5) Homemade peach ice cream (an evil person I love gave me a mini ice cream maker for Christmas.)

Definitely more than a tad heavy on the dairy/animal products, but I am chronically low on Vitamin D, B12, and Iron, and I'm losing density in my hip bones, whereas my cholesterol, glucose, blood pressure, resting pulse, and all the other heart disease/metabolic disorder numbers are very good for my age/weight and my grocery expense was less than $35 including giant bag of oranges for snacking. I also liked how cooking in bulk this way takes advantage of the efficiency I achieved when usually cooking for a household. Although I won't be tracking my weight or kcals, etc, on an Intuitive Eating program, I will keep a journal reflecting on how I feel about what I am eating and its effect on my physical well-being in the moment. This is roughly analogous to just answering the question about whether spending was in alignment with core values in "YMOYL."

[sodatrain]

@AH - saw your blog post about cooking. I love the enthusiasm and diving into the cooking. I've been working my cooking skills for a while. Old me was always cooking with recipes and quite often a new recipe every time! Geez that was a lot of work! I'm working on simplifying, and being more unstructured / creative with my cooking (cooking without recipes). I feel like there was some frustration or struggle in your post and wanting to be achieving more than you were perhaps. Remember that cooking is part art! I felt your engineer brain wanting to be able to read/learn and then apply structure and rules and have results. My brain wants the same thing. I feel the struggle. It made me think about my evolution which has taken time, coaching, willingness to fail/experimentation and patience/opportunity. Maybe I'm wrong - but I think you can't necessarily brute force some of this stuff. Learn the basics and over time it will come naturally.

Check out Ethan Chlebowsky on youtube and sign up for his excellent newsletter called The Mouthful. He's very structured in his content. Shares frameworks which are awesome. Example - a framework for stir fries. Learn the framework and make endless number of stir fry dishes.

The netflix series Salt Fat Acid Heat is also awesome - I think you mentioned that previously.

Last thought... one of my favorite new recipes is for a pretty delicious 3 ingredient man and cheese. It's from Serious Eats if my brain is remembering correctly. Equal amounts by weight of noodles, evaporated milk, and a good melting cheese. Cook noodles, add milk, add cheese. a little salt and a dash of hotsauce to cut the richness (not enough to make it spicy per se) are great too.

[AxelHeyst]

Thanks for the resources! Those look great.

I actually feel great about how cooking went/is going. I always expect things to turn out different than I expect... that's sort of the whole point of learning stuff you don't already know! (But taking the time to build expectations that you know are going to be wrong is an important part of the process, I think.)

And I feel like my engineer brain is serving me well here haha. I am applying structure and rules and I am having results.

Part of this might have to do with the fact that my engineering experience was with HVAC, where inputs are things like 'the weather over the next 20-50 years' and one of the main objectives is 'thermal comfort, which is a psychological state of being defined by five major variables which overlap in myriad nondeterministic ways, and where a building with 80% occupant thermal satisfaction is literally as good as it gets.' You engineer stuff like that and you get comfortable with slack, buffers, unforeseeable unfolding environmental conditions, complex interactions of elements... Engineering is part art, too, yall. At its best, anyway, it is.

You may have been picking up on my struggle with the videos, which, yes, I'm having a hard time with. Ironically, that is going according to plan as well. I knew ahead of time that I don't like my skill level with making videos, but I planned to go some number of months just consistently making them anyways, and then doing a skill chunk on making better videos, so I could see a 'before' and 'after' progression. Damn, though, the emotional overhead of publicly releasing content you're not happy with is high. I have some ideas to begin ameliorating this and start having fun with it, however.

..

An update on the cooking thing, though, since we're talking about it, is that I'm going to call it at the 2 week point and move on to permaculture early. The major epiphany driving this is that I hit a study efficacy ceiling faster than I assumed.

There's a relationship between study and practice, and my practice volume is capped at 2 meals a day. (I could do things to increase that volume, but it'd be a big pain in the ass so 2mpd is my chosen cap.)

I actually began studying (SFAH) in early December, and I began informal practice in mid December, so I've had 1.5 months of study and 1 mo of practice already. I got a good introduction to the major concepts of cooking, enough that I at least know where to go find them when I'm learning a new dish or technique.

I find myself settling into a rhythm of practicing a new technique, dish, or framework until I feel I've got it to the level of competence I'm happy with, and then I move on to a new one. I now only need to study an hour or two per new thing when I'm getting it off the ground, and then rep it out.

So at this point I've built a habit/process that doesn't require much extra effort, and over time as long as I keep it up I will accrue more and more cooking skill, breadth, competence, etc. So, cool. No need to force it for another couple weeks, I achieved my goal earlier than I thought. Moving on.

Anyone else having realizations/epiphanies with their skillathon projects?

[7Wannabe5]

Anyone else having realizations/epiphanies with their skillathon projects?

Yes. My epiphany is that rules and metrics suck. My happiness meter has gone up so much since I started my Gentle Nutrition/Intuitive Eating practice that I am rethinking my entire notion of goals within my meta-planning. IOW, I am asking myself how I can approach more matters from a gentle intuitive perspective rather than a strict measured perspective.

[Jupiter]

Yes. My epiphany is that rules and metrics suck. My happiness meter has gone up so much since I started my Gentle Nutrition/Intuitive Eating practice that I am rethinking my entire notion of goals within my meta-planning. IOW, I am asking myself how I can approach more matters from a gentle intuitive perspective rather than a strict measured perspective.

Please let us know if you find anything on that subject of gentle goal setting. I am curious!

I had the same train of thoughts in the past years. In the past, I have done months on a strict schedule, doing activities mechanically, even thought they were creative endeavours that need breathing time & a more intuitive-led pacing (at least for me, if I don't want to face the direction of most resistance constantly). I've also put myself through things that I had 0 excitement abusively, for until it started to fragilize my happiness.

When setting ourselves goals because we want to do more, we have to keep in mind that we are not machines. We can pretend to be, turn on the auto pilot mode and reach our targets by regular increment and maniac discipline. It will produce results, at a cost that will manifest differently for everyone.

Or, we can follow the vibes, the curiosity, the weather and the sparkles
(It also has a cost, of course, and some might say it is less productive but so far it has been the opposite for me; I feel happier than ever before after a year of letting go of my robot parts and embracing the sparkles!!).

Optimal point will thus be somewhere in between, to be found by each individual. Loose framework for the win ^^