Level Up Unexpected Skills
What’s something unique you’ve learned recently?
We love learning in my household.
My wife has several years of experience teaching kids from pre-K to eighth grade. I have several years of experience teaching adults as a learning designer.
Our DVD library (yes, we still have one) contains over 500 different titles. At least 20% of those are documentaries or educational programs.
When we watch youTube, we spend at least as much time watching Sci Show or TED Ed as we do anything of pure entertainment value.
Learning is just what we do. Even when it doesn’t seem to have a lot of immediate value.
I mean, why would we need to own a movie about the history and creation of the Grand Coulee Dam? It’s just interesting, that’s why.
We absorb a lot of information and knowledge that we don’t use in our everyday lives. Or, perhaps, information that we use in unexpected ways.
Keeping the brain sharp
According to an article in Cognition Today, there are tons of benefits to learning skills you don’t need. Source: 9 Reasons why you Should Learn a New Skill even if you don’t need it! - Cognition Today
My favorite of these reasons is that learning skills increases your cognitive reserve.
“Cognitive Reserve is the residual effect of learning that keeps your neural connections strong and reinforced, which then becomes a global capacity to compensate for damage and biological deterioration. You will literally be making new neural connections to acquire that skill, thereby strengthening some areas of your brain. It also helps you counteract the cognitive decline due to old age. People with a low cognitive reserve are at risk of early dementia and age-related memory loss. Those with high cognitive reserve have extra mental processing capacity and a strong defense against memory loss.”
Sweet.
It seems like if I keep learning new things, I stand a better chance of not having serious cognitive decline when I get older. Which is good because older, for me, is coming sooner than I’d like to admit.
So it seems like learning, even if it’s just for the sake of learning, might actually be good for us.
But can we focus our learning habits in ways that add even more value?
The answer to that obviously rhetorical question is “Yes.”
Transferability
According to the same article in cognition Today:
“These skills can also become a reason for creative problem-solving because the brain has more resources and actionable skills to improvise, plan, and execute successfully. Creativity largely depends on what you know in one field and how you can apply it to another field. Just by learning something new, you are potentially making yourself more creative in every other domain you possess skills in.”
In other words, we can transfer skills between contexts. The more similar two skills are, the more easily we can transfer that skill.
“So practicing a micro skill like cutting veggies can transfer to acrylic painting because of proper knife management.”
Which is pretty cool.
The article doesn’t say this specifically, but I think that means we can look for unexpected connections between things we’d like to learn and things we need to learn, and then use those connections to help us level up.
A personal example
I love playing tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a fun, creative, collaborative hobby. I’ve gained a ton of life skills through playing and designing these games.
One of the best examples is extemporaneous speaking and improvisation.
As a D&D player, I practice collaborative storytelling in a way that makes me think on the spot. Something happens in the game world, and I have to choose how my character responds. I do this on the fly, with little time to prep or plan, and while considering the resources that are available to me.
As a Dungeon Master (DM), I’m in the position as the chief storyteller. I could choose to plan out adventures in advance and try to guide my players through a set of predefined encounters, but I find that most players prefer to be flexible. They always do things that the DM doesn’t expect.
So I consider it my job, as the facilitator, to be just asflexible and improvisational. For everyone to have fun at the game table, I show up with a few adventure ideas in mind and then just play to see how things unfold.
I had no idea, when I started playing D&D, that I would develop my ability to be a competent public speaker, facilitator, and trainer. Heck, I was a bundle of shyness and nerves away from the gaming table.
But when I started unlocking my public speaking skills through participation in Toastmasters (a non-profit dedicated to the art of public speaking), I found that giving speeches came more naturally to me than I had expected. When it came to my club’s weekly impromptu speech contests, I ended up with a win rate of around 80%. I seriously walked away with more blue ribbons than I knew what to do with.
I owe that to my previously developed skill of improvised storytelling through D&D. As it turns out, I already knew how to take an idea and speak on it for several minutes without any prep time.
Nowadays, I apply that same skill when I facilitate or train people. I don’t’ script what I’m going to say, because I know my audience is going to have questions that would throw me off if I had only prepared to stick to predefined talking points.
Instead, I learn about my topic and prepare in advance with knowledge of the subject or the skill to be presented. Then I show up with a mindset of collaborating with the audience. I usually show up with confidence, and rarely with nervousness, no matter how many people I’ll be talking to.
Which is so much the opposite of how I felt about public speaking 15 years ago. But thanks to learning what seems like an unrelated skill and mapping that experience of what I liked (D&D) to what I needed (public speaking), I was able to level up quickly when and where it mattered for my professional development.
What about you?
Think about all of the things you know and do.
Have you ever consciously connected how one skill is connected to another? Or ever considered how one skill you’ve learned might have been easier because you already possessed a related skill?
If you haven’t, now is a good chance to do a bit of self-reflection. Start by considering your work, your hobbies, and how they may be more related than you think.
Then, share with us in the comments. What’s one skill you leveled up because of another?
Here’s a new skill you can learn
On November 3rd and 5th, 2025, Dr. Nicole L’Etoile and I are running a workshop on how to use NVDA, a free screen reader for Windows, so you can learn how to use it to evaluate e-learning courses and other digital content.
It’s an example of an unexpected skill that could have bigger and broader implications on your personal and professional development.
Learning to use a screen reader can help you evaluate your content using only audio. It can also help you gain empathy and clarity for some blind experiences.
But aside from the obvious, learning this skill can also help you improve how you think about cognitive load, language use, multimodal experiences, navigation structures, and inclusive design.
I recorded the below video to help you get started. It will show you how to use a basic screen reader (Windows Narrator) to download and install NVDA (a more robust tool). I walk you through the entire process so you can practice installing software without using a mouse.
Even if you don’t join us for our workshop in November, I’d challenge you to give this a try. It only takes a few minutes of your time, and you’ll immediately have an experience that most people never do. Imagine what cool transferrble skills you might develop from it.
We’d love it if you could join us, though, and subscribers to this Substack gain a 10% discount off the cost of the course. For more information and to register, visit Hands-On with NVDA.
Now, give this a try
Were you able to successfully install NVDA using only the keyboard? Let me know in the comments.
Then, for more thoughts on how to achieve Growth for ALL, remember to subscribe for future posts.