As you learn and practice a new skill, you create neural pathways in your brain that then connect with other neural pathways. And the more you practice a skill, the stronger those connections become. According to research, there are three stages on the process of learning any skill, the cognitive stage, the associative stage, in the autonomous stage, the cognitive stage means that you're just starting to learn something about a new skill. So you're just starting to form new neural pathways, but they are still very weak, and they need practice in order to grow into be stronger. As you keep practicing more and more, you reach the associative stage. And so you gain the ability to spot your mistakes, and to change the approach in order to stop making them.

And the more you practice a skill, the stronger your neural connections will be. And so the better you will be at that skill. The autonomous stage means you've mastered a skill and this only happens when you dedicate your hours, effort, a lot of practice, a lot of focus and dedication. Malcolm Gladwell refers that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. And when you master a skill, it becomes second nature to you. And you can use it anywhere at any time.

And you'll become very creative with it. And it's okay if you never reach this last stage of mastery because there are certain skills that you might only want a certain level of proficiency and you're not willing nor interested to put in the time and hours to master that skill. I relate to this because I love to learn new skills, but I don't really want to master all of those skills. So what I usually want is the ability to use those skills regularly. In kind of basic to a medium level. The video editing is an example where I just know how to edit videos.

I know how to do a few things, but I'm not professional on that. Also playing guitar Just know how to play a few songs for fun cooking in many other things.