Something I've learned from the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is that once you achieve expertise/mastery at a skill, it becomes much easier to learn other skills at the competent/proficient level. In other words, you learn how to learn, when what you're learning is hard and requires much effort.

Having achieved expertise/mastery at a couple of different things (software deployment, guitar playing, other things), I find all sorts of common patterns between these seemingly unrelated skills, patterns I can then reapply for other skills. For example, being an improvisational musician has made me keenly aware of the passage of time, and immutable deadlines - an awareness that helps me with every other skill that involves the passage of time.