How Do General Skills Get Built?

Few keys to acquiring more broadly useful skills:

• Breadth comes from specificity. All general skills are built from specific knowledge and procedures. There’s no shortcut.
• Deeply understanding ideas helps. While not a panacea, deeply understanding more abstract ideas extends the useful range of your knowledge. But this only works if you really understand it.
• Visible knowledge is built on invisible skill. The ideas and facts depend on skills which are hard to spot. Recognizing where an idea applies and modifying it for your purposes.
• Practice in a range of real situations.