I'm older, can I still learn?

Have you ever reached middle age or found yourself several years into your career and wondered if you can still learn and master new skills? Maybe you don't doubt that you can, but you have kids or a spouse, and time is scarce with all of your responsibilities. How can you learn new skills when you have so much responsibility and little time? I've felt these exact feelings.

I've had many skills over the years I've wanted to acquire. I wanted to animate movies, compose music for movies, bowl a perfect game, learn to speak several languages, and the list goes on and on. The problem is I acquired the motivation to learn these skills later in life. I did well during high school and college but did little to push myself beyond any average effort. It wasn't until my first job after college that I realized I was interested in software. Notice I said 'software' and not 'computers.'

Enter Software Engineering

console.log('hello world!')

For me, becoming a software engineer ignited a desire to learn as much as I could about software. This desire quickly transferred to the skills I'd wanted to learn for many years. Software engineering gave me confidence that I could learn almost anything with enough focus and optimism. Sure, stereotypically, you can google most questions in software engineering and get answers. The same is probably somewhat true for other skills as well. With the plethora of information available to everyone, why spend time trying to develop skills? What will make you stand out?

Sadly, this article and my motivation behind skill acquisition have nothing to do with standing out or beating 'the competition.' After 9 years of software engineering, I've learned that there is always someone else smarter than me. At first, this was disappointing. I would grind late at night for hours, trying to get to a place where I was the smartest and most capable, hoping this would give me a promotion or an ego boost. This proved not only to be ineffective but also exhausting and soul-crushing.

I've learned that improving at my own pace, without comparing myself to others, is extremely rewarding and not soul-crushing. I look at learning and skill acquisition with new eyes. Whatever I can do of my own will to improve my skills better than they currently are is not a wasted effort, but a rewarding experience that validates my effort and myself.

The Skill Acquisition Experiment

This brings me to a little experiment I'm attempting this year (2022). I'll attempt to take each month of the year and learn one new skill I've been aspiring to learn. You'll see the monthly schedule below. I believe that I will be able to improve all 12 skills I attempt significantly. That isn't to say that I will be professional in these skills because I definitely won't be. I won't be able to earn a second income based on the skills I've learned. That would just mock years of practice of truly talented professionals.

I do expect to construct a repeatable framework for my learning that will benefit me for the rest of my life and career. I expect to meet new people in communities that I don't generally take part in. I believe these communities will be mutually beneficial as I continue to learn and grow. I hope that my learnings and journey will be helpful to one of you reading. Maybe seeing me struggle through learning will ignite a passion in you, maybe it won't. Either way, I'm excited for the journey ahead and invite you to tag along. I believe the things we learn along the way will make us better learners, engineers, and people.

You said the schedule was coming

I did say the schedule was coming. So here it is. These are the 12 skills I will be learning and writing about:

• Jan - Drawing

• Feb - Writing

• Mar - Piano

• Apr - Beatboxing

• May - Singing

• Jun - Rap

• Jul - Public Speaking

• Aug - Video Editing

• Sep - Portuguese

• Oct - Character Carving

• Nov - Penmanship

• Dec - Memorization

Final words

Each month I will post at least once on my blog and give a 'before' and 'after' of each skill. Some months this will be a 'before' and 'after' photo, some months it will be a recording. You'll want to at least watch or listen to the 'before' media as it is sure to be humurous. I am not particularly good at any of these skills.

I'll share the learning techniques I employed and how well they worked. I'll also share what didn't work. I expect these techniques will be transferrable to software engineering and make us better coders while entertaining ourselves. I'd love to hear your reactions along the way and your own learnings. Good luck and I'll see you in the next post, yt video or discord.