3 Lessons I Wish I Knew...Before Trying To Learn A New High Leverage Skill

Are you starting to learn a new skill in hopes that you can turn it into a lucrative side hustle, or maybe even a full time career?

Back in 2020, while working full time as a Real Estate agent. I had been doing it for 3 years, following what the "experts" told me to do (with varying degrees of success but still not financially free where I wanted to be). Covid hit in March, and snap, just like that was locked inside the house with no way to go out and generate income.

I needed to find another way to make $$$-and fast.

I decided to google high money skills and came across a few that sounded interesting and tried to start learning. No matter how many "great" ideas I came across, I continued to fail in actually learning and implementing anything until I realized a few things:

• I didn't need to read 15 books on every skill/topic

• You always will pay one way or another, with time or with money.

• Taking action will teach you more than any book or training will.

If this sounds like you, or if you have ever tried to learn a new skill and not been able to implement it, let me save you some a ton of time and give you the 3 things that once I stopped doing, was immediately able to implement and benefit from my newly learned skills.

Lesson #1: Less information is more.

If 5 books are good...then 25 must be great right?

Don't take this the wrong way...when learning anything new you should always start with reading and learning from the experts who are currently doing what you want. This starts to become a problem when you only consume information without implementing or creating what you are trying to learn. The act of gathering information becomes the priority, and you wind up never feeling like you have enough information to actually start.

This downfall can be avoided by reading a few books, then rereading those same books to really understand them, then taking immediate action based on your new knowledge.

Lesson #2: You always pay... with time or with money

I like to think that I am fairly intelligent, and with not having a ton of disposable income to learn a new skill (and the free resource of YouTube sitting there) I decided to try to learn on my own.

Learning this way left me feeling frustrated and like I was on a road-trip with no GPS. While true I could find all the information for "free" that I was looking for, I wound up paying with time (the one thing you can't get more of). I've wasted years online searching for the perfect training or free courses instead of learning from the experts and immediately implementing.

Taking the knowledge from somebody who has already gone through the trouble of learning it and paying to be able to immediately implement those ideas has paid for my trainings 10x over in the time it would have taken me to learn on my own.

Lesson #3: The cost of inaction

Finally, the best thing you can do is to take the leap and actually try to do the thing you are learning.

If you wait until you feel ready, you never will. There will always be more you could be learning and more content you can consume. The truth is doing and implementing will teach you way more than consuming and never feeling ready.

Imperfect action will always trump perfect inaction.

Once I started to abide by these 3 lessons my ability to learn new skills started to become skyrocket!

What I learned was that sometimes when learning something new, I was my own worst enemy.

Simply taking the small pieces you learn and immediately implementing them will save you years of wasted time.

This lesson may have taken me years to learn...but my hope is that my mistakes can be your gain and this will help save you time along the way!