FIRST 20 HOURS - What about skills I'm not excited to learn? by JoshKaufman published on 2013-06-13T23:37:12Z Rebecca asks: "How do I apply your methods to something that I'm less than excited about, but really need to know? Like accounting, finance, marketing..." http://first20hours.com --- SpeakerText Transcript of the Track: Rebecca asks, "How do I apply your methods to something that I'm less than excited about but really need to know like accounting, finance, marketing, etc." Good question. In general, your brain learns best what you're interested in most. And so it's in your best interest if you're really excited about something those are naturally going to be the things you pick up most quickly but life often doesn't allow us, for a variety of reasons, to just focus on the things that we may be super jazzed about learning at a certain point in time. So in cases where you're learning something, less for intrinsic reasons because you're super interested in it, and more for instrumental reasons because you want to do something cool with it, it's important to hook into that 'something cool' that you're going to get out of it when you're done. So I would ask, "Why are you interested?" or "Why do you feel like you need to know accounting or finance or marketing?" What is it that you're going to get out of that? Is it getting better at your job so you can get a raise or get a promotion? Or you're able to start your own business? Or you're able to make a new product and sell it successfully? What's the draw? What's in it for you? If you're able to really clearly define what it is that you get out of the learning process, that can be tremendously exciting in and of itself. So I'm super interested in all things business but I find things like accounting and bookkeeping and statistical analysis not the most interesting things in the world. But oh my gosh, the cool things you can pull off when you know those skills or you're able to use them in a context to get a really cool result, that's exciting. Right. So, it's really important, if you don't have some intrinsic desire to learn something, focus on the instrumental desire. What is it that you get out of it? And as long as you're excited about that outcome you can use that to make the learning process for pretty much anything drastically easier. Hope this helps. <a href="http://speakertext.com/videos/4277767">Review Transcript and Additional Download Options</a> <a href="http://attachments.soundcloud.com/attachment-28693-tracks-96792402-1374379800-0?5ffe3cd">Right-click and choose 'Save As...' to download HTML for CaptionBox</a> Genre Books & Spoken