Whether you’re receiving career coaching or life mentorship to help you achieve your goals Skills, one of the most common pieces of advice that you’ll receive is to work on yourself. Learning new things, even if they’re not always directly related to your goals can help sharpen your mind and broaden your horizons.
Steve Jobs famously said “you can only connect [the dots] looking backwards”, arguing that the skills and knowledge you pick up as you go through life will eventually help you in achieving things.
A calligraphy class, which he could never have foreseen helping him with creating innovative products like the iPhone and iPad, allowed Jobs to appreciate the need for clear typefaces in his software and what was required to achieve this.
Therefore, learning anything new today could be beneficial in the long run, even if it’s just from keeping your mind active and giving you something enjoyable to do. The internet has made learning new skills much easier, allowing you to exercise your grey matter without even getting up from your seat. Here are some great examples that you might want to consider.
Chess
Chess is one of the oldest games in the world and it continues to be enjoyed by millions. Some people spend their entire lives refining their gameplay so they can compete at the highest levels, but it is possible to pick up the basics fairly quickly.
Playing chess has been linked to all sorts of cognitive benefits and it goes a long way to help you think more strategically. Success in chess is about thinking ahead at the moves you and your opponent will be making several moves from now, rather than simply focusing on your current move. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why so many successful people like to play every now and then.
You can learn chess online at sites like Chess.com that offer both tutorials on how to play and the ability to compete against a computer (with varying difficulty settings) and other humans. Learning to play online also means you can play in person as the game is the same both online and off.
Poker
Poker is another game that you can learn online. Being able to play poker offers similar cognitive and strategic benefits to chess as success in this card game also requires you to think ahead and try to out-manouver your opponents to bag their chips.
Online card rooms also offer guides and tutorials on how to understand all the key elements of the game, as well as more advanced strategies that can be useful for more seasoned players.
For example, PokerStars offers its Power Path, an online qualification route for players who want to compete in poker tournaments. It works by providing a series of steps that can be followed to unlock three levels of packages, each one giving you a ticket to an online or live poker tournament. Programmes like this allow you to test and build your poker-playing skills in a competitive environment.
A Foreign Language
Being able to speak another language opens many doors. Of course, being multilingual can make you more attractive to employers but it also gives you access to more culture; new books, new movies, and new music.
It also gives you the ability to engage with more people. For example, learning Spanish would allow you to communicate more easily with people from much of South America and Spain.
Speaking other languages has also been shown to offer cognitive benefits and the process of learning gives your brain quite the workout.
In the past, learning a language required going to classes or even physically visiting a country where it is spoken. Of course, those approaches are still very effective, but they are no longer the only ones you can take.
Instead, it is possible to learn a language from your sofa. Apps like Duolingo and Babble have become very popular for this, but they’re just the start. Online classes and private one-to-one tutors can help take your learning up a level, as can finding a language exchange where you help someone who is learning your language and they help you learn theirs in return.