Skill Theming: How to Learn More Skills, Faster

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is skill theming. Learning a bunch of related skills at once as a way to systematically get outside your comfort zone and learn a ton of new things, and

Hypothesis: You learn new skills faster and gain competency by theming similar complementary skills and stacking them together than trying to learn them individually.

As I was reviewing my impossible list, I saw a bunch of things on there that had been on there for way too long. Acquiring the skill itself is likely not going to be impossible, but getting used to doing things that I haven’t done in

So I’m testing that out by batching a whole bunch of skills together and theming them together.

This summer is water + board sports.

The Problem:

I’m “not a water guy”

I grew up in the midwest around concrete and corn, not water.

I played ball sports, not board sports growing up and I seem awkward on them.

The Solution:

Bash out as much water + board activity in one go as I possibly can.

I”ve already started this in some sense. Earlier this year, I already did the following:

✅ Learning to Kitesurf

Other things on the list this summer

• Leveling up kitesurfing
• Wakeboarding
• Wakesurfing
• Leveling up regular surfing
• Bonus 1: Free diving
• Bonus 2: Scuba

That’s A LOT of things. I’m not sure I can get to all of them, but by grouping them together, I can work on a bunch of overlapping skills at the same time and have an overarching focus that doesn’t take any one thing too seriously.

Also – it makes things easy. If there’s no wind on a kiting day, I can rock out one of these as a backup. A few other benefits to this approach:

1. I can actually do more activities in a day even if I burn out or fatigue on one as I can shift to one that requires the same materials, but works other body parts.
2. It creates clarity and focus for filtering if the goal is something you should actually focus on.
3. It removes decision fatigue and fear of trying something (if it fits in the water theme, I’m in)

Also, it’s very on brand – if I’m gonna do something (get comfortable on water + boards), I’m going to do it all the way.

This works out particularly well since there is a decent amount of base equipment/skill overlap, but I imagine that if this goes well, I could also do a wind series in the future with kiting, paragliding, BASE (?gulp?).

I’ll report back on how it goes :).