Summary

The website article provides four methods to effectively use time at home to develop valuable skills.

Abstract

The article titled "4 Ways to Develop Life-Changing Skills at Home" emphasizes the importance of utilizing time productively rather than wasting it. It suggests four key methods to enhance personal skills: practicing deep work to improve cognitive abilities, learning speed reading to increase knowledge acquisition, engaging in dynamic language learning without traditional grammar lessons, and taking advantage of online courses from platforms like Coursera. The author, Levi Borba, shares personal experiences and recommends resources to support these methods, advocating for the transformative power of these skills in personal and professional growth.

Opinions

The author believes that time spent at home should be used for personal development rather than succumbing to distractions like news and social media.
Deep work is highly regarded as a method to enhance brainpower, with successful individuals like Bill Gates practicing isolation for focused reading and thinking.
Speed reading is considered a meta-skill that can exponentially increase one's value by allowing for more efficient learning and information processing.
Traditional language learning through grammar classes is deemed less effective than dynamic language learning, which emphasizes practical usage and immersion.
The author is an enthusiastic proponent of dynamic language learning, citing personal success with this method, particularly with phonemic languages like Polish and Russian.
Online educational platforms such as Coursera are seen as invaluable resources, offering free access to high-quality courses from top universities, which would have been unimaginable in historical periods like the Middle Ages.
The author encourages readers to share their own methods of skill development during times when others might be merely passing time.

4 Ways to Develop Life-Changing Skills at Home.

It is never a good idea to “kill time”. Instead, some abilities in the next paragraphs allow you even to “create” time.

Have you wondered why so many people turn anxious or nervous when staying at home during longer periods?

In some cases, it can be a lack of vitamin D or noisy family members. But in others, is just our very sense of wasted time.

You don’t need to feel that. Here I will tell you 4 incredible ways to skyrocket your skills and become a better person. Maybe better by orders of magnitude.

Since this article is about not wasting time, let’s go directly to the point:

1 — Practice Deep Work

As Much as we are tempted to compulsively watch the news and scroll our news feed, this is a trap. Avoid living in the shallows of the Internet (grabbing the term coined by the author Nicholas Carr in his book with the same name).

The time we spend at home is a great opportunity to train the capacity of reaching the maximum cognitive ability of our brains.

Great creators and entrepreneurs voluntarily “quarantine” themselves every year to achieve this level of brainpower. Bill Gates, for example, two times per year, isolates himself just to read and think. We call it Deep Work (another author-coined expression, this time by Cal Newport).

In short, it consists of long hours disconnected, concentrating on a single task that demands a lot of our brain-power. It will boost your cognitive capacity to whole new levels.

2 — Learn Speed Reading

This is one of those meta-skills: Abilities that help you acquire other abilities. With time, they exponentially increase your value. Since I learned speed reading, the number of books I read increased from 12 in 2018, to 36 in 2019. 2009 was the year I started my new business and got married, two very time-consuming things, so speedreading helped me to find time to read in such a busy year.

With the correct methods, not only your reading speed will increase but also your content retention. It is not something that will take you a lot of time to learn, but you will need to practice it. The book from Justin Hammond, Speed Reading: How to Double (or Triple) Your Reading Speed in Just 1 Hour!, is a good start.

3 — Engage in Dynamic Language Learning

If you ever went to a language school, you probably remember those endless classes of grammar that you forgot everything after 2 hours. This is why I am an enthusiast of dynamic language learning.

Dynamic Language Learning means acquiring a new idiom by practice, without spending time with grammar and rules. Just think about you and your native idiom: How did you learn to speak it? With your parents and little friends talking to you or having grammar lessons when you were 3 years old?

I achieved a conversational level in one of the most difficult languages of Europe (Polish) entirely by this method, using a website called Lingq. Now I am learning Russian there. As I wrote in a previous article, this method is hyper-effective with phonemic languages, like those mentioned above. Give it a try!

4 — Binge on Coursera (or similar websites)

Imagine you went on a machine, back to the century XV, when universities and knowledge were accessible only to very few people. There, you told to Middle Ages students that in the XXI century, the best universities of the planet give access to their best content for free, to anyone, anywhere. He would find you absolutely insane to not grab this opportunity.

Coursera gives access to an entire range of courses in different fields, so there will be plenty of useful material for you there. I completed the Game Theory course provided by the University of Stanford and was a ton of mind-sharpening material.

Those 4 methods I learned during occasions in my life where I got stranded, be it the months spent in a Wheelchair, during long hours on airplanes, or moving between countries. What about you: do you have any other method to develop great skills while the rest of the world just kills time?

Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline, writer of the books Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity and Budget Travelers, Digital Nomads & Expats: The Ultimate Guide. You can check some of his articles here.

Subscribe here, for free, to my email list and receive the digital book 20 Essential Hacks for Saving Money While Travelling. Discover the way to cheaper flight tickets and even an upgrade to Business Class! Written by an author that worked during years in some of the best airlines of the planet.

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