deepstash
Beta
5 meta-skills to supercharge every aspect of your life
Learning
The days where a 4-year degree would set you up for life is passing. Constant learning is a fact of life. Learning how to learn enables you to improve every skill you have.
Learn the subjects that bring you joy. Regularly doing this will increase your hunger for learning about other topics that did not initially catch your interest.
189 SAVES
185 READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
8
Key Ideas
Motivation to learn
We have an impressive ability to learn, but our motivation to do so tends to decrease with age:
- As children, we are naturally curious and free to explore the world around us. ...
Knowledge and expertise
In this digital age, knowledge and expertise have been devalued.
What you know is now less relevant than what you can learn, and employers are less interested in hiring people with particular expertise than with the general ability to develop the right expertise in the future.
Access to information
When we can all retrieve the same information, the key differentiator is not access to data, but the ability to make use of it, the capacity to translate the available information into useful knowledge.
7
Key Ideas
Acknowledging our ignorance
The modern world does not encourage people to admit when they lack knowledge or skills.
However, when we don't acknowledge our ignorance, we limit our chances for personal improvement.
The Dangers of Certainty
Although we are naturally curious as children, school teaches us that there is a specific set of facts to memorize and that we should not question these facts. If we don't know something, we're taught to guess.
Once the curiosity has been driven out of us in school and we're moving into the workforce, we're even less likely to say we don't know.
We feign certainty
We're afraid to admit when we don't know something for sure and expect not to see uncertainty in others. It can be disastrous.
Consider the case in which a business spent hundreds of millions on an ineffective advertising campaign because they refused even to ask if it was working.
16
Key Ideas
Meta-Skills
A meta-skill is a high order skill that allows you to engage with functional expertise more effectively.
It magnifies and activates other skills and is a catalyst for learning an...
Skills And Meta-Skills
Skills are temporary; meta-skills are permanent.
Learning a second language gives you a skill, a learned ability. A meta-skill, on the other hand, is your ability to learn new languages. Developing that meta-skill, makes it easier to learn a third or a fourth tongue.
Alvin Toffler
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."