Learn as if You Were Going to Live Forever
The journey from 'DJ Sounds Like Rubbish' to 'DJ Mediocre'
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Learning is a lifelong journey. One of the great things about retirement is that you finally have the extra bandwidth—both time and the mental energy—to turbocharge that learning. You can dive deeper into new interests and rekindle your love for the old ones in a way that’s near impossible when you have a full-time job.
Decide What to Learn
What’s on your learning radar? What have you been avoiding because you’re afraid you’ll fail, get frustrated, or just haven’t had the time? Which of your skills could you level up? Hopefully by now you’ll have a solid starting point based on your interests and values, and the hobbies you’re interested in exploring.
Once you have a list of learning projects, Scott H. Young, author of Ultralearning, recommends answering three “Why?,” “What?” and “How?” questions:
“Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you.
“What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them.
“How?” refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when learning. Making careful choices here can make a big difference in your overall effectiveness.
For me, most of my post-retirement learning has centred around my hobbies. I’ve “unlocked” some satisfying achievements: DJing in public for the first time (as you’ll hear about below), winning awards for my home-brewed beer, and massively improving my mountain biking skills and confidence.
My list of what to learn next keeps growing: fixing and maintaining my bike, astrophotography, bushcraft, getting better at identifying native flora, learning to c-walk, scratching, video production, making the perfect pizza, and improving my consistency at tennis. The list is endless—as it should be. After all, if I’m learning as if I were to live forever, there’s no reason to stop adding to the list.
Practice Purposefully
I’m convinced that humans all need something we are “levelling up” in, something that requires effort and dedication. It feels good to get good at something and without a challenge, without that little bit of struggle, it’s hard to feel a sense of progress and accomplishment. For many people, that challenge comes in the form of their jobs. We early retirees need to proactively seek out skills to level up.
The easiest way to level up is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at. Choose one of your learning projects and practice, practice, practice. But the key is to practise “purposefully.” Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, breaks purposeful practice down into five essential elements:
A clearly defined stretch goal: It is much more motivating (and far less boring) to have something specific and measurable to aim towards, especially if it stretches you.
Full concentration and effort: You can’t half-ass it; purposeful practice requires intense focus, paying full attention to what you’re doing and trying to achieve, while avoiding distractions. If it feels easy, you’re probably not learning. Done right, you probably can’t sustain the focus needed for more than 60-90 minutes at a time.
Immediate and informative feedback: Without feedback, you don’t know what you’re doing right—or, more importantly, where you’re going wrong. You need corrections right when the mistakes happen, not days later.
Repetition with reflection and refinement: You gotta put in the reps, baby, paying thoughtful attention to what went wrong and making adjustments.
Making it a habit: Turning learning into a habit is necessary for all of these other science-backed steps to stick.
After retiring, one of my first learning projects was to level up my DJ skills.
I first started messing around with DJing in 2004, borrowing a friend’s decks and mixer while he was travelling. I wasn’t very good—my stage name was DJ Sounds Like Rubbish—and my friend eventually wanted his gear back, so I gave it up.
I didn’t pick up DJing again until 2021, three months after retiring, when I bought myself a second-hand Roland DJ 505 and some monitor speakers as a birthday present. Going all-digital was supposed to be easier than vinyl, and it was. But even with the fancy gear, I couldn’t find the motivation to practise. Maybe it was because of what Ira Glass calls The Gap—that frustrating space where beginners know what good sounds like but aren’t yet able to get there.
I felt stuck on the final ‘Make it a habit’ step. Then, in early 2022, I stumbled across a method which seemed like a useful way to get unstuck. In The First 20 Hours they describe a simple four-step approach that provides a roadmap for purposeful practice, specifically designed to get the first 20 hours of learning under your belt:
Deconstruct the skill into the smallest possible subskills. For DJing, this meant breaking it down into beat matching, song selection, transitions, and understanding the hardware.
Learn enough about each subskill to be able to practise intelligently and self-correct. Each subskill had its own complexities—like mixing different genres or understanding the controller. I signed up for a 19-lesson beginner DJ course through Crossfader, which helped me learn the subskills and their complexities in a structured way.
Remove barriers that get in the way of practice. Physical, mental, or emotional distractions can derail focused practice, and focused practice is essential for progress. For me, this was as simple as practicising DJing at the same time every day, in the same place.
Put in the reps—at least twenty hours. The book drives this point home: don’t stop until you’ve clocked twenty hours of practice. That’s when the magic happens. Keep pushing, even when you’re stuck. The key is consistency, and it’s what finally got me going on my DJ journey. I committed to practising an hour a day, using the Crossfader course as my guide. I didn’t achieve it every day, but from February to June, I racked up over 80 hours, culminating in my first ever gig at a local scout hall. I kept at it (yay for habits), logging another 56 hours by the time my second gig rolled around in October.
Read
You can’t talk about learning without talking about reading. Dr. Seuss had it right, “The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you will go.”
Apart from direct practice, I can’t think of a better way to learn than reading. (OK, YouTube might also make the list with more than 135 million instructional videos. “Pretty close to anything you want to learn you can learn it off YouTube for free.” So said the man arrested for performing illegal surgery.)
Now, I am a reader of some reputation amongst my friends, given that I read or listen to 40-50 books per year, so it’s no surprise that I’d encourage you to do the same.
Here are three tips:
Right now, it might help to read books about transitioning. My favourites are Transitions, Four Thousand Weeks, Time Off, Option B, Die With Zero, and Beginners.
You don’t need to finish every book you start. With around 130 million books published in human history, even reading eight hours a day wouldn’t allow you to finish more than 0.01% of them. Putting down books you’ve started makes you feel like an adult. Like owning cake forks.
When someone recommends a book that piques your interest, don’t add it to a “To Read” list—just buy it. Yay for Kindle.
Don’t Be Afraid to Suck
Of course, learning is cool and all, but you don’t always have to be striving to improve. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Sometimes you just want to have fun, to pick up a tennis racquet and have a hit with a mate without thinking about the Semi-Western grip, racquet face position, and wrist pronation.
And maybe, sucking at some things is a life lesson in itself. It’s a bit countercultural, with our constant focus on productivity and performance, but you don’t have to be awesome at everything you do. I mean, the word mediocre’s original meaning is “halfway to the top.” Actually sounds pretty good when you put it like that.
In fact, that’s my new DJ name. DJ Mediocre. I’m halfway there.