General skills not only help you with a narrow problem but can be used repeatedly to solve other problems.

But building general skills can be challenging because it is built from many specific ones. If you're prepared to do the work, you can find better ways to learn that ...

Learning ideas are useful to a point. To make a general idea useful, some key obstacles need to be overcome:

• We need to notice the idea in other contexts. Research found that people tend not to apply patterns they learn to different domains unless prompted.
• ...

People that develop expertise in multiple areas are able to solve a wide range of problems.

The key is to gain broadly valuable skills:

• Breadth comes from specificity. General skills are built from large libraries of specific knowledge.