How to Further Enhance the Skills You Are Good At

Written by Allen Souksawan 5/3/2021

The human brain is conditioned to take the path of least resistance. We are naturally inclined to want to do what comes easy to us and nothing more. If we are already good at something, we usually won’t stray far from what we can do with ease.

We may choose to believe that there is no more to get out of that skill and that we should just practice and maintain it. However, wanting to stay within our comfort zone leads to us missing out on the true scope of our capabilities.

“The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” - Helmut Schmidt.

What other improvements can we make but are hiding from ourselves? Which leads us to the question of how do we get better when our brain is telling us we are already good enough?

Learning to Gnaw Your Bone

You may be good at something, but how well do you know it to say that you are “good”? In most cases, your scope of knowledge of a skill may be limited by your perception. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.” In essence, it means finding a way to enjoy and explore the things we’ve long been familiar with from a new angle. Usually, “gnawing your bone” is attributed to things like marriage and relationships, but we can apply it to our outlook on our skills and talents in two steps.

Step 1: Define Your Perception of Your Skill

“Know your own bone….”

Sometimes we fail to notice that common terms like cooking or writing are more or less loosely defined concepts that vary depending on context and culture. There are hundreds of different methods to cook food, ranging from deep frying to grilling and many others. So what do you mean by cooking?

The question is where we’ll find an answer. “What do you mean by [skill]?”

By asking ourselves this, we are forced to define a skill by its key elements as well as acknowledge the different approaches there are to it.

Let’s look at an example. Here we have someone named John, who is good at drawing portraits. He wants to find a way to improve his specialty, so he asks himself: “what do I mean by drawing portraits?” Looking at his work, we’ll see that his portraits are absolutely stunning, all lovingly illustrated in pencil. Upon further inspection, John sees that he almost always uses a pencil, with very little deviation in the expression of the people he draws. Every portrait is a person smiling.

John realizes that his previous works reveal that his definition of being good at portraits was just pencil and smiles. He acknowledges that there’s more to it than what he’s used to doing. And that if he wants to improve his portraits, he’ll have to take on a different approach.

Step 2: Explore a New Angle to Your Strengths

“Gnaw at it….”

John decides to use try something different in his methods. One month, he starts using pens instead of pencils to make portraits. While using pens, John is more careful about what he puts down as he can’t erase it. Through this practice, he puts more thought into every stroke of the pen and can draw portraits with more confidence and precision.

In Conclusion

Looking at John, we see a small snowball effect take place with his drawings. After taking a moment to think about what he defines his skills as he discovered a new approach to what used to be his best. In the end, he’s still drawing portraits, but he’s slowly discovering a new way to enjoy drawing and practice it.

Gnawing your bone is not discovering something radically new but finding hidden value in something we think we are accustomed to.

“...bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”

Whatever your skill is, using small changes in your method and practice will eventually lead to small but noticeable changes in how you perform.