“If it feels easy, it’s probably not working”. That was one of the many insights I came across while reading Justin Skycak’s Upskilling. It focuses on uncovering what truly drives skill mastery backed with research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Here are the key takeaways I noted down:

  1. Learning is Hard Work. If it feels effortless, you’re most likely not really learning. True learning pushes your brain beyond its comfort zone. Struggle is a feature, not a bug.

  2. Discipline = Good Habits. Discipline isn’t some magical trait someone is born with. It’s a system of habits. Bad habits kill progress, while good ones move you toward your goals. Build the right habits, and discipline takes care of itself.

  3. “To Achieve Oversized Success, You Need Oversized Effort”. This was one of my favourite quotes from the book. There’s no shortcut. If you want exceptional results, you have to put in an exceptional amount of work. Effort scales with outcome.

  4. Learning Happens in Stages. First, you’re taught. Then, you’re expected to work. Finally, your work gets torn apart with criticism. That’s the cycle. Embrace it.

  5. Become “Alien-Level” Skilled. These are the elite skills that separate you from the average. The people who develop rare, high-level skills unlock doors that others don’t even know exist.

  6. Fundamentals Are Everything. If you skip the fundamentals, they’ll come back to haunt you. You might ignore them now, but they’ll be waiting for you down the road, usually at the worst possible time.

  7. Keep Your Foot on the Gas. You should imagine that you are a car. If you take your foot off the gas, you slow down. If you stop, you stall. You have to always stay in motion.

  8. Don’t be a perpetual student, dilettante, or wannabe. Real learning isn’t passive. Watching tutorials, reading books, or dabbling won’t make you actually skilled. Deliberate practice: measured, structured, and intentional effort is what does.

  9. Learning = Memory. A lot of people try to separate the two. One common misconception I heard growing up was “understand, not memorize”. But the two are not different. Learning is information processing. Therefore, for information to be processed, it has to be stored somewhere. It’s not just exposure to information that leads to learning. It’s about making that information so deeply embedded in your long-term memory that it becomes second nature.

  10. Familiarity Is Not Learning. Recognizing something isn’t the same as knowing it. A certain type of “exam” comes to mind here. Just because something looks familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That’s the illusion of competence and it might be one of the most difficult illusions to fight.

  11. Test Yourself, Relentlessly. You want to know if you’ve actually learned something? Prove it. Use retrieval exercises, practice problems, practical implementations etc. If you can’t perform under pressure, you haven’t learned it.

  12. And lastly, don’t fool yourself like Feynman mentioned. You know when you’re half-assing it. Be honest. If you want results, put in the work.