At a certain point in a high schoolers life, they may start to develop thoughts that they have reached a point where they can’t learn completely new skills or gain more knowledge. After all, if it took them this long to develop their current skills, they wouldn’t want to waste so much time developing new ones, right? Not necessarily. That mentality may be more dangerous than you think.

Let’s say, hypothetically, you have two major skills. Imagine keeping that mentality of staying in your comfort zone your whole life. You may learn more about those two fields of yours, but wouldn’t you eventually get bored of studying just those fields for your entire life? Normally, you’re going to want to keep things new and interesting. I’ve personally found that if you need at least three hobbies in your focus to keep you occupied, things tend to stay fresh for a long time. This is because you can rotate between them and once you get tired of working on one, you can switch to another.

Some high schoolers may think that they can’t develop new skills at their age because if they didn’t start early in their life, it will take too long to become competent. I don’t think this is true. Talking from personal experience, I have made serious developments in drawing from 2018 to 2019. I’ve also made decent progress in the fields of coding and music, which I only started working on a few months ago. Obviously, though, my experience on its own doesn’t mean all that much. I think it would make sense, however, that it’s actually easier in some ways for adults to develop skills. If you start developing skills in your teen or adult years, your past experiences will help to get started easier. For example, I started drawing at a very young age, and because of it, I’ve developed a lot of bad habits that need to be broken. With music, however, since I started recently, I now have the foresight to avoid those habits, and build my skills in an effective way.

In the end, it’s important to realize that developing new skills is an extremely important part of life. You never really reach a point where you should stop trying new things. Remember that it will be difficult at first, but if you really feel passionate enough about the skill, you can absolutely push through, and get better. Now get out there, and learn new things!