In order to make a living in this world, everyone need to learn a skill. In most cases, there will be pain and boredom as we experience the initial stage of learning a new skill. However, learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise.
Commercial Brain Wash
The commercial we see everywhere have brain wash many people, making them believe that everything must be pleasurable in life. Our modern fast-pace life styles had lead many people to be easily distracted and always searching for short-cuts. We tends to give up or are angered easily when our effort does not produce the desired result.
Challenge Your Mind
What we failed to recognize is that the initial learning pain is a kind of challenge to our mind. The learning process teaches us to focus and move past the boredom. It is like physical exercise, you can even get a kind of perverse pleasure out of this pain when you know the benefits it will bring you. When boredom emerge, you must meet it head-on and not try to avoid or repress it. Throughout our life, we will encounter tedious situations and we must learn to cultivate the ability to handle them with disciple.
Progressive Brain
Whenever you practice a new skill, something happens neurologically to our brain that it is good for you to know. When you learn a new skill, a large number of neurons in the frontal cortex (the higher, more conscious command area of our brain) are recruited and become active, helping us during the learning process. This happens as our brain need to deal with a large amount of new information and this would be stressful and overwhelming if only a limited part of our brain were used to handle it. The front cortex even expands in size in this initial phase as we focus hard on the new task.
However, once we master the skill and it became repetitive, it become hardwired and automatic, and the neural pathways for this skill are delegated to other parts of the brain, farther down the cortex. Those neurons in the frontal cortex, what we needed in the initial stages are now freed up to help in learning something else and the area goes back to its normal size.
Eventually, an entire network of neurons is developed to remember the new skill, which is the reason why we can still ride a bicycle years after we first learned how to do so. If we were to take a look at the frontal cortex again once you have mastered any skill through repetition, it would be remarkably still and inactive as they performed the skill. All of our brain activity is occurring in areas that are lower down and require much less conscious control.
Focus Learning
This process of hardwiring cannot developed if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to the new skill never get established because what you learn is too weak to remain rooted in the brain.
To master a skill, it is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it.
Skill Mastery
As you learn and gain skills, you can begin to vary what you do, finding meaning that you can develop in the work so that it becomes more interesting. As elements become more automatic, your mind is not exhausted by the effort and you can practice harder, which in turn brings greater skill mastery and more pleasure. You can then look for new challenges, new areas to conquer, keeping your interest at a high level.
Once the cycle accelerates, you can reach a point where your mind is totally absorbed in the practice, entering a kind of flow in which everything else is blocked out. At this stage, you become one with the thing you are studying and that is why it seems so easy when you know the task by heart.
Conclusion
Although it might seem that the time necessary to master the requisite skills and attain a level of expertise would depend on the field and your talent level, many who had researched the subject repeatedly come up with the number of 10,000 hours. When you practice and develop any new skill, you transform yourself in the process. You reveal to yourself new capabilities that were previously hidden and are exposed as you progress. The best benefits comes from overcoming challenges during the learning process, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills and experiencing the power this brings.
