Education
17 Reasons to Learn Hard New Skills
Conquering hard topics builds your confidence, adaptability and problem-solving.
Posted February 14, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
The ability to learn new skills is crucial to personal growth. Difficult learning challenges shape our self-perception and build our adaptability in ways easier quests can't.
Especially given this context, here's why I argue you should tackle a challenging goal at least once a decade.
The Self-Improvement Benefits of Taking On a Meaty Learning Challenge Each Decade
1. To maintain your confidence that you can learn hard things.
Learning hard things reinforces your confidence that you can always adapt. It's powerful to know you have that capacity.
2. You can learn a lot about yourself from how you approach learning.
Through learning, you learn about yourself. You can track your growth over the decades by how your approach to learning changes. How you approach learning as a 40-year-old will differ from how you did as a 20-year-old. Changes in your mindset and the skills you've gained from solving problems over time will shape your approach to learning a difficult topic.
3. It connects you to different communities.
Learning a hard skill connects you with a community of people teaching and learning that skill. Different fields attract different personalities and backgrounds. Each skill you choose is likely to attract a different makeup of people. This will help you create a more diverse network of weak connections, which we know helps people succeed generally.
4. It gives you new analogies to draw on.
We often solve problems through analogy. Learning something new gives you new analogies to draw on, which helps you approach any challenge from different angles.
AI has greatly lowered the bar in terms of the depth of knowledge needed to use concepts from one domain to solve problems in another. If you have even a vague sense of how a particular analogy might help you solve a problem in a distant domain, it can help you bridge that gap.
5. It reminds you what it's like to be a beginner, which enhances your empathy.
If you're expert- or mid-level in your work role, it's easy to forget what it's like to be a beginner. Re-experiencing being a beginner helps you have more empathy when you're engaging with other beginners in any domain.
6. It disrupts patterns that may have become stale.
You might need to step away from a habit you've consistently followed to make room for learning. Habits help us grow, but so does breaking them—even the good ones.
7. It expands your ability to solve problems in new ways.
Different disciplines structure problem-solving differently. Each time you learn a hard new skill, you gain fresh mental models that help you approach challenges from different angles.
8. It keeps your brain sharp.
We build ourselves through learning, just as we do through fitness, nutrition, and connection. Learning helps rewire us in a positive way.
9. It keeps you engaged with life.
Learning goals give you a clear sense of direction, providing purpose and structure to your day. They motivate you to organize your time and stay on track.
10. It’s psychologically rich.
Learning involves productive struggle. You'll experience a full range of emotions, including frustration, pride, and satisfaction. It's not just experiencing positive emotions that creates a rich and meaningful life; it's having a full experience, including positive forms of challenging emotions.
11. It creates demarcations in your life.
Without something differentiating one day, month, or year from the next, life can feel like it's passing in a blur. Doing something valuable every decade can create big signposts that help you demarcate time.
12. It’s satisfying, which is good for your mood hygiene.
Mood hygiene involves regularly engaging in activities that provide pleasure and activities that provide a sense of mastery or accomplishment. Learning a hard new skill provides fertile ground for frequent experiences of mastery.
13. It'll take you in unexpected directions.
When you learn a new skill, you don't know what new directions it will take your life in, but you're virtually guaranteed it will take your life somewhere unexpected.
Whenever we set out to accomplish something, we do it with an objective in mind. In reality, we often get another benefit that matches or outstrips our original expectations. For example, you start running for physical fitness but unexpectedly experience tremendous improvements in your mental fitness.
14. It builds a unique combination of skills that sets you apart.
There may be many experts in your core area of work. However, not as many people will combine expertise in X with expertise in Y. The more unique combinations of expertise you build—even if your knowledge in one area is only moderate—the more valuable and distinctive your skill set becomes.
15. It gives you a second chance at difficult skills you struggled with before.
If you've previously attempted to learn a very challenging topic and struggled, now might be the time to try again, utilizing the "adjacent possible": tools available now that weren't available last time. This will expand your confidence in your capacity to grow.
16. It gives you an impetus to explore cutting-edge learning tools.
Taking on a challenging skill encourages you to explore learning tools you might not have had reason to try otherwise, like AI chat, YouTube tutorials, or online communities. When you use these types of strategies for one form of learning, you'll become more likely to use them for your core work or other challenges, like parenting or general self-improvement.
17. Learning a challenging skill or topic often requires you to improve your skills at learning itself.
To succeed at particularly difficult learning challenges often requires you to up-skill at how to learn (see point #3 here for tips), enabling you to pick up knowledge and technologies faster in all areas.
The Benefits of Lifelong Learning
Learning a hard skill every decade keeps you adaptable, engaged, and ready for whatever comes next. With so many accessible resources and AI-powered tools, you can experience success, no matter how complex the skill.
