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What is that skill? How did you become good at it?
If there are books or tools or other resources that helped you in achieving that please share your story with us?
I learned passing reading comprehension of Chinese in high school. My parents were immigrants and I left China after kindergarten so I never could read or write Chinese - this always rustled me the wrong way because I didn't like the tone my mother used when she called me "illiterate" and I was too proud to go to Sunday Chinese school (also video gaming took its toll on my social development).
What I did was try to memorize five simplified characters a day - I would write them down in my little notebook, copy them out by hand 100 times each. I have stacks of paper with nothing by Chinese characters written on them stashed somewhere.
I based the curriculum on the Chinese language grade school textbooks. At that rate I would still remember maybe 1-2 of the 5 after 6 months, so factoring the attrition by the two year mark I had enough to figure out the meaning of newspaper articles or simple dialogue. From there it was possible to fill in the gaps of unknown characters by logical deduction. Although even today as a grown man reading in Chinese is a pain.
I learned trial-by-fire after starting our first business, and taking a course helped a lot
Books that helped a lot: - The Charisma Myth - SPIN Selling
Ultimately, learning it not only improved our business but my personal life as well
1. Computer programming, although I was very young. I learned by checking out a book on BASIC from my public library in the '90s. Thankfully, my parents noticed and sent me to computer camp after that.
2. Parliamentary procedure. I learned through active participation in student government when I was in college. There really is no other way to learn it well without being a part of an assembly that uses (and often misuses) it.
3. More recently, accounting, bookkeeping, and basic federal income taxation to support my parents' small business. I learned through books I purchased. One was called "Bookkeeping made easy" and another was something like "Accounting in 100 pages or less". Tax I learned through this book published under the name JK Lasser that goes into detail on taxation. I used to go to Barnes & Noble and read the JK Lasser book to escape from my graduate school studies... which should tell you something about how much I enjoyed grad school.
learned by reading a lot, good teachers, and writing a lot. definitely did not get good "on my own".
i also like to not write well as a poetic exercise. luv to get shit on by a reddit user for my poor grammar when doing internet-speak.
Developed personalized markdown snippets for entire work day (Work Journal), and individual tasks (Meeting Notes, Deep Work, Support Tickets, etc.).
Been keeping track of every work day for 2 years. Next steps are to generate static site with search and move this method into personal life.
(I know, it’s sick to regiment one’s life to text. I blame it on being bit by org-mode years back.)
This was one of the first truly hard and fully unintuitive "physical" things I taught myself over the course of about a month in 2019.
At the time I was living in New York City and youtube kept showing me cool videos of EUC's and I was curious given how solid an option for transportation they were. More range than an e-bike or scooter, small enough to wheel into elevators / buildings easily and safer than scooters (large wheel and surprisingly more stability).
For the first few days I was barely able to go 2-3 feet, every day I added a bit more. Then turning, then bike lanes, then the ability to stop quickly / recover from large bumps.
It was incredibly hard and I almost broke my wrist learning, but it was cool even at 26 to realize I could still learn something seemingly completely impossible.