Learn it, do it, teach it. That’s the formula.
But here’s the part most people miss: the learn it, do it, teach it method is not the end. To truly master a skill, you have to repeat the cycle over and over. Each time through, you’ll learn something new and get better. I discovered this firsthand in one of the most unforgiving classrooms imaginable—the sand pits of the 82nd Airborne Division.
Learning the Skill
As a young Combat Engineer, the first skill I was taught was how to manually throw and retrieve a grappling hook to fish for trip wires and clear a safe path. It sounds simple, but it wasn’t. Painstaking precision was essential, and any mistake could be deadly.
The goal was to throw the hook as far as you could while simultaneously dropping into a prone position and digging your head into the sand. You had to spin the hook like a lasso to build momentum, then release it at the perfect moment to arch it out into the distance while simultaneously hitting the ground before the hook did. Then you pulled it back hand-over-hand while keeping your head down.
The hard part was you couldn’t look to see what you were doing. If you snagged a trip wire and detonated a mine, you wanted the top of your helmet pointed toward the blast, not your face. So you had to learn the entire motion by feel proprioceptively, using nothing but the sense of where your body and the hook were in space. You had to develop a rhythm and trust your instincts entirely, and trust that your training will guide your actions in the chaos.
Learning the technique meant absorbing the fundamentals. But knowing how it was supposed to work was only the beginning.
Doing the Skill
Knowledge means nothing until you apply it. And with the grappling hook, application meant a lot of failed throws. Sometimes the hook came up short. The angle was wrong. The timing was off. My head wasn’t down far enough. Every mistake taught me something the instructors never could. Slowly, over many iterations, my body started to understand the rhythm; the spin, the release, the pull.
After several weeks, I finally had a good feel for it. The motion had gone from something I had to think about to something I simply did. By that point I felt confident and thought I had mastered it. I hadn’t.
Teaching the Skill
When a new replacement showed up, my job became teaching the new guy how to do it. This is where I learned the most important lesson of all: teaching a skill doesn’t mean you stop practicing it. To help him improve, I had to break the technique down, spot exactly where he was going wrong, and walk him through it until he got it right. Teaching him forced me to keep learning.
The way he got it wrong wasn’t always the way I had gotten it wrong. He made mistakes I never would have thought of, which meant I discovered entirely new ways how not to do it. Every error he made deepened my own understanding of the technique. It sharpened my own throws, and it made me better at teaching the skill.
That was the moment I understood what mastery actually looks like.
The Loop That Creates Mastery
Mastery is a loop, not a straight line. Once you’ve taught a skill, you uncover new gaps and new questions. That sends you back to learning, then doing, then teaching again, but at a higher level each time. This is why the formula never really ends. Embracing this endless cycle is what truly leads to mastery.
Think of it like climbing a spiral staircase. Each loop looks similar, but you’re always rising higher. The concepts get deeper, your execution gets sharper, and your ability to teach gets clearer. Teaching that new replacement didn’t take me away from the skill, it pushed me further into it.
The Cycle
Mastering any skill isn’t about talent or luck. It’s about committing to a simple, repeatable process:
- Learn it — build the foundation.
- Do it — turn knowledge into experience.
- Teach it — deepen and reveal your understanding.
- Repeat — climb higher with every cycle.
Whether you’re throwing a grappling hook in the sand pit or picking up something entirely new, the process is the same. Pick a skill you’ve always wanted to master and start the mastery loop. The formula works—but only if you keep it cylcing.
