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There are no shortcuts — everything is reps, reps, reps — Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The problem is you think you aren’t ready.

It doesn’t matter how good your strategy is, if you’re not skilled at what you do, that strategy won’t take you very far.

Skills are needed more than ever in this modern world of ours. Because as time goes on, it won’t be about what you learn in school anymore, but what skills you can offer.

There are lots of skills out there to learn from. It’s up to you to choose one or two you can learn from but remember, getting good at anything requires a lot of work.

Rather than learn a skill for money, learn it for mastery and the wealth and fame that last will follow suit.

For those who can’t still figure what they want or their passion, start by taking action and you find out what you are passionate about.

Action creates engagement. Engagement creates passion and passion creates meaning for your life.

Once you get your hands on different skills and engage with it, you can finally settle for the one you love the most.

And once you do that, here’s what you need to do to get good at it.

Practice it daily

You eat, brush, bath and sleep every day without stress. That’s the goal you want to make with whatever skill you want to get good at.

Showing up to work on your skill every day is how you overcome what Steven Pressfield calls resistance.

Resistance is fear, doubt, procrastination and all sort pulling you away from doing your work. But once you can make the effort of showing up daily, you will overcome that resistance.

Showing up to work on your skill daily is what differentiate the professionals from the amateurs, the great from the average.

We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day. Richard G. Scott.

The good thing is when you show up to your work daily, you begin to see mental shortcut about your work. Back in 2018, I find it difficult to hit 500-word count but practising my craft daily changes everything for me.

Once you have a mental shortcut of how you can do more of your work, not only does your work become more interesting for you but you begin to get good at it.

To get good at any skill, practice it daily simple as that.

Read books on it

Reading is important because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything. — Tomie dePaola

The power of reading books can’t be overemphasized.

Bill gates is a billionaire, he still read books. Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg are all billionaires yet, they don’t do without reading books.

What skill are you learning? reading books on that particular skill will help you see things on a wider frame and different perspective on how you can go about it.

Books like the element of style, still writing, Big magic and on writing has helped me with my writing skills.

The philosopher Socrates knows the importance of reading when he said:

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for.”

Reading helps you digest people’s life years of experience in hours only if you carve out time to read them.

Reading is a conversation. It is not a passive activity but an active one and your relative gain from a book depend on how interactive that process is for you.

Reading is a process of becoming, meditated by a form of conversation, that helps us better bring out what it is that is most honest and most pertinent to who we are, who we were and most importantly who we could be write Zat Rana.

Practising your skill daily will not only help you but also reading books in the area of your skill will speed up the learning process for you to get good at it.

Do it for mastery

This is the utmost way you can become good at anything.

Do your work for mastery.

Remember the goal is not to learn a skill that can make you money for short time. The goal is to find a skill you are willing to work on for the rest of your life.

You can’t get to mastery level if your work brings you no joy and you’re constantly struggling to overcome your own weakness.

For me, it’s writing. I don’t know what it is for you. But once you know what you want, be willing to do it for life because that’s the only way you can ever achieve mastery.

In the end, there’s no end. It’s for life.

Mastery doesn’t mean you know it all. When we say someone has mastered their craft, art, or work.

What we are alluding to is their ability to grasp, and then fine-tune the finer details that encompass the palette of their vocation to produce remarkable results writes
Eze Onukwube.

The ability to fine-tune small details of your skill and make it big is what makes you a master. After all, mastery boils down to simplicity. And to rise to the level of mastery requires many hours of dedicated focus and practice.

There are many paths to mastery, and if you are persistent, you will certainly find one that suits you.

Because getting to the mastery stage of any skill won’t be easy as you would need to persevere, determined and be patient with yourself writes Robert Greene.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said:

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek from material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius but none is a miracle.

When you learn to do these three things, you will get good at any skill you set out to do as long as you are willing to do it for life.

Do it not for now but for the future where you can be a master.