most skills aren’t like riding a bike

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, an 18 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

this publication is a place for me to reflect on productivity, health and tech, and drop unique opportunities in the space right to your inbox daily. if you’re new here, sign up to tune in! 💌 

btw, feel free to reply with topic ideas you want me to write about for future posts.

onto today’s topic: most skills aren’t like riding a bike 🚲️ 

s/o to aaryan for inspiring this post.

once you nail riding a bike, it sticks. forever. you can go back to it at any point in your life and pick it up again in <10 mins. you don’t even need to master riding a bike in order for the skill to stick, just grasping the basics is enough.

this doesn’t apply to a vast majority of other skills. the reps matter! it’s why you don’t remember the content from your grade 12 chemistry lessons or why you can’t immediately code fluently in python after dropping it for a couple years. 🤓 

skills and maintaining the status of calling it your skill requires consistent practice and meaningful experiences stacked on top of each other until the tower is so high you can’t possibly forget about it.

as time goes on, this tower also starts to shorten. you gotta keep stacking to keep the skills. riding a bike is just one outlier case. it’s pretty annoying to be honest. why can’t i just hit a certain exp like in games and permanently have a skill status? 🕹️ 

that learning curve when trying to get back into an old hobby is exactly what deters so many people from pursuing it again — it takes longer to relearn the skill than to actually make progress with whatever project you wanted to work on. this is why it’s good to make revisiting valuable skills a consistent practice. haven’t brushed up on your video editing skill in a few months? block out a few hours this weekend to catch up!

your skills need maintenance the same way a car does.

what skills are you actively building up right now?

daily opportunity + resource drops 🔍️