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How to Become an Expert at (Just About) Anything

It’s not as hard as you think

Kyle Chastain
5 min readJan 12, 2024
Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

It doesn’t take years of experience to become an expert.

Four years ago, I decided to take online writing seriously. I had a job I hated, and I wanted to learn how to make money doing something I loved.

So I invested in learning the skills necessary to become a good writer. I worked on generating ideas, crafting headlines, and writing content that solved people’s problems or provided insight.

In the process, I generated hundreds of thousands of views on my Medium page alone. The company that created a course I took hired me to write for them full-time. I didn’t spend decades becoming an expert to get them to hire me. But I got good enough to their attention.

I still don’t consider myself an “expert” writer in the traditional sense. But some of the best experts are people who are just one or two steps ahead because they’re still close to the problem you’re trying to solve.

The steps I took to get here were unconscious to me at the time, but looking back, I can see them clearly. I can’t claim to have invented these steps. Other writers have likely categorized them in different ways but learning a new skill follows a pretty standard process.

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Kyle Chastain
Kyle Chastain

Written by Kyle Chastain

On a mission to become a better writer and storyteller | Building my "Insight" newsletter to 10k+ | Create the life you want: https://chastain.substack.com/

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