To learn a new skill, one must go through the four stages of competence. When I came across this post on Reddit, it struck a chord and I knew I had experienced going through these stages before. Here I am, trying to learn new skills to make a living out of, and these are valuable lessons I could use now.

Since the articles I linked to above do a much better job of explaining the stages, I’m going to talk about how they applied to me when I was learning how to climb.

The first stage - unconscious incompetence, doesn’t make itself obvious when it sets. But it’s helpful to recognize the stage when you start the journey of learning something new. When I started climbing two years ago, I would try to stick to the wall as much as possible. While I was technically climbing walls, I wasn’t using my strength efficiently, and would tire out halfway up. Then someone told me to keep my elbows straight. I struggled to do this, but did it anyway, in spite of not knowing why. This was me in the second stage of conscious incompetence. I bolstered my theoretical understanding of climbing technique and applied these lessons during every visit to the gym.

After many weeks of struggling on a single route, I developed a process of trying out different things to solve a difficult problem. During a conversation with an experienced climber, I unlocked the secret to the straight elbows tip. The elbows being straight were the result of good climbing practice, and not the cause. Therefore, straight elbows were simply a sign of good technique. They indicated that the climber’s body weight rested on her feet, and were not carried by her arms. A good climber only uses her arms as a hook, and not as a pulley. The primary force that sends a climber up must come from her feet.

This knowledge helped me identify when I was doing things wrong, which in turn enabled me to find ways to fix it. With each technique I learned, previously learned techniques manifested themselves naturally.

With climbing, as with anything else, the journey doesn’t stop there. While it becomes easier to spot areas of improvement, and move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence, while the techniques you already have nailed down become an unconscious part of your practice, thus embedding those techniques into the unconscious competence phase. You’re continuously going though the stages as you get better in your discipline, and recognizing this early equips you to traverse them faster.

To learn something new, it is helpful to analyze how you learned something new and recognize how you went through these stages of competence, so that you can pick activities that push you forward in the cyclical stages that you need to go through to get better. Borrowing some words of wisdom from Nick Offerman - go pick a discipline, and get cracking!