How To Learn New Skills (fast and easy)

Published in

Thought Pills

3 min readOct 30, 2014

by Yann Girard

I was living in China, trying to get one of my projects off the ground and trying to make ends meet. I didn’t have a lot of money so I had to find ways to earn some more money to pay the bills.

And to earn some money on the side I taught English in Chinese and Japanese companies. I didn’t have a work permit but it didn’t really matter.

In case you don’t know, my mother tongue is German and English is only my third language (after French).

But a lot of people ask me where I’d learned English so well and how the hell I’m able to talk completely free in public without any notes for hours and hours (in English).

I usually told them that I guess it’s because I was raised with German and French and a third language might have been easier for me to pick up. I don’t know…

But then the other day, one of my followers who happens to have a blog as well asked me for an interview (you can actually read it here). Of course I said yes!

While reading and answering her questions I realized something that really blew my mind.

Of all the things I learned in my life, the stuff that really stuck was the stuff that I also taught to other people.

And it didn’t matter whether or not I was an expert or I just learned it myself a while ago or was still in the process of learning it.

It seems that I have unconsciously developed the habit of sharing all of my lessons learned with other people (even though I’m not an expert or anything).

As you might have realized by now, I even started sharing my lessons learned on my blog about all sorts of things that fascinate me and the stuff I learn along the way.

So by reading her questions I realized that the best way to learn new things is to teach them to others at the same time.

To me it somehow feels like the moment you try to explain things to others you start to not only understand them a lot better but they somehow magically become a part of you.

Just like the English language has somehow magically become a part of me while I was teaching it to others…

Photo by Doctor Popular