5 ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine

At this point, I bet you know most of the things about the virus, like how to protect yourself with FFP2 or N95 masks, wash your hands or keep a safe distance. You are also aware of every kind of discovery about how the Coronavirus can be treated or how important is to ask the local immigration to extend your Visa if you got stranded. So I will not spend time with that. Rather, I want to list here 5 ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine.

However, if there is one thing I have some experience, is to be in the middle of a crisis.

                I have this strange ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

                I got stranded in Qatar once. Likewise, my wife and me found ourselves in Yerevan during the 2018 Armenian Revolution. And then there are all the civil unrests I witnessed in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Lebanon.

Still, all those finished in few days or weeks. As much as I saw the revolution explode in Armenia, I also saw them celebrate with fireworks when it finished. Meanwhile, the pandemic crisis we are experiencing now is already completing one month.

We do our part by staying at home and flattening the curve to avoid hospitals to get overloaded.  In other words: Quarantine.

Here is for you the list of 5 ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine:

1. Practice Deep Work.

As Much as we are tempted to compulsively watch the news and scroll our newsfeed, this is a trap. Avoid living in the shallows of the Internet (grabbing the term coined by the author Nicholas Carr in his book with the same name). The time we spend at home is a great opportunity to train the capacity of reaching the maximum cognitive ability of our brains.

Great creators and entrepreneurs voluntarily “quarantine” themselves every year to achieve that. Bill Gates, for example, two times per year, isolate himself just to read and think. We call it Deep Work (another author-coined expression, this time by Cal Newport). In short, it consists of long hours disconnected, concentrating in a single task that demands a lot of our brain-power. It will boost your cognitive capacity to whole new levels.

2. Learn Speed Reading

This is one of those meta skills: Abilities that help you acquire another abilities. With time, they exponentially increase your value. Since I learned speed reading, the number of books I read increased from 12 in 2018, to 36 in 2019. Even that being the year I started my new business and got married, two very time-consuming things.

With the correct methods, not only your reading speed will increase but also your content retention. It is not something that will take you a lot of time to learn, but you will need to practice it.  The book from Justin Hammond, Speed Reading: How to Double (or Triple) Your Reading Speed in Just 1 Hour!, is a good start.

3. Engage in Dynamic Language Learning

If you ever went to a language school, you probably remember those endless classes of grammar that you forgot everything after 2 hours.  This is why I am an enthusiast of dynamic language learning. This means acquiring a new idiom by practice, without spending time with grammar and rules. Just think about you and your native idiom: How did you learn to speak it? With your parents and little friends talking to you or having grammar lessons when you were 3 years old?

I achieved conversational level in one of the most difficult languages of Europe (Polish) entirely by this method, using a website called Lingq. Now I am learning Russian there. Give it a try!

4 – Binge in Coursera (or similar websites).

Imagine you went on a machine, back to the century XV, when universities and knowledge were accessible only to very few people. There, you told to one of those students from the Middle Ages that nowadays, the best universities of the planet give access to some of their best content for free, to anyone, anywhere. He would find you absolutely insane to not grab this opportunity.

Coursera give access to an entire range of courses in different fields, so there will be plenty of useful material for you there. I completed the Game Theory course provided by the University of Stanford and was a ton of mind-sharpening material.

5 – Read, wait and look to the sky.

If you paid attention to the points 1 and 2, you saw I recommended some books. There are plenty of good reads waiting for you (actually, there is a social network called Goodreads where people can share their reading lists and reviews. You can find me there). There you can find many other books with additional ways to develop life-changing skills during your quarantine

Last, but not least:

Wait.

Everyone I know is struggling, be it economically, physically, or both. But it is going to pass.

And just like when the revolution in Armenia finished, there will be fireworks.

When it happens, do not forget to look to the sky and remind the experience you just went through.

Author: Levi Borba, founder of Colligere Expat Consultancy, former RM specialist for the world´s greatest airline,  co-founder of Nearby Airport Hostel Warsaw and author of the book Moving Out, Living Abroad and Keeping Your Sanity.