5 Things We Need to Learn In a Time When We Can Learn Anything
A psych test says I have high intra-personal intelligence. Being able to step outside myself and see my mistakes prompts me to constantly learn about how I can be more effective in life.
Our world is powered by the speed of information exchange, and with it, hyper-growth and opportunities. I realized that I must all the more be equipped with essential skills to navigate our rapidly changing time.
I want to share with you five of the most powerful skills I think we should all develop today.
1. Emotional Intelligence
The ability to understand emotions
An increasingly automated world demands more human capabilities. We have become used to working with machines, and because we no longer need to operate mechanically as much as we used to, today’s jobs require more complex cognitive functions.
Along with this is the need to understand the decisive part of our brains — the limbic system, capable of sending shockwaves of emotion that influence our cognition. Knowing how emotions rule over us and other people can help us better manage our behavior and responses to situations beyond our control.
According to Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence has twelve components, organized into four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Emotional Intelligence helps us navigate through the nuances of daily experience, which comes with an invisible layer of emotions. Having a clear grasp of how it plays a role in different contexts can help us improve the way we build and handle relationships.
2. Meta-Learning
Learning how to learn
“In a world of spaceships and supercomputers, our education system still uses methods that are as old, and as ineffective, as the horse and buggy.” — Jim Kwik
Our education system isn’t responsive to the opportunities (and pitfalls) the information age presents. Nowadays, anyone can learn anything online for free. Yet, most of us don’t how to focus nor make a roadmap of what, when, and where to learn to achieve our goals as we’re constantly thrust with a welter of information about random topics that don’t add to our repertoire of skills and abilities.
More information = more chaos. Order is critical.
We can easily create our own curriculum and self-educate our way to success, but we initially struggle with where to begin. Instead of pushing outdated textbook content to students, schools should teach them how to self-educate online and provide avenues for them to distill and practice them.
Fortunately, we can learn how to self-learn.
How effectively we learn is a product of three factors: mindset, method, and motivation. Folks like Jim Kwik, a well-known brain coach, teaches people to develop the right habits to maximize our brainpower. We can listen to people like him, and we can also immerse ourselves in the universe of psychology and its many subsets. The breadth and depth of research are astounding and widely accessible.
We must pay attention to processes: the way we think and the way we learn. Is it cluttered? Does it get lost in the details? Does it go around in circles?
Reflection helps. Mindfulness meditation helps. Through them, we attune ourselves to the idiosyncrasies of our minds.
Our inner world is as knowable as our outside world. The more we recognize it, the more we can control it.
3. First-Principles Thinking
Breaking things down to their essence
Popularized by Elon Musk, First-Principles Thinking is about having a physics orientation when making decisions. Rather than by analogy, we break something down to its essential components or foundational truths, then put them back together in a more effective way. “Deconstruct and reconstruct.” This way, we can think for ourselves.
For SpaceX’s rockets, Musk was charged astronomically high by aerospace manufacturers. Using this method, he broke down a rocket’s parts to arrive at its most basic components — the raw materials and did some calculations. He realized he could make his own at 2% of the price he was charged, sell them at 1/10th of its price in the market and still make a profit.
I apply this by accessing the most reliable source of information available, rather than its derivative. For instance, in wanting to know what workplace measures to take for virus mitigation, I read the official circulars from the Department of Health instead of news articles and chain messages.
By practicing First Principles Thinking, we can make sound decisions based on facts and draw less from unreliable sources, social pressure, and old conventions. As we reframe problems, we create novel solutions that radically challenge accepted norms.
4. Critical Thinking
Making decisions with many variables
If you were faced with a promising career opportunity that requires you to sacrifice valuable time for significant projects, will you take it?
It’s not an easy yes or no. There are plenty of variables you have to consider before making a decision. With critical thinking, you know what questions to ask before arriving at an answer. Is this opportunity aligned with my values and long-term goals? How impactful will it be? Will it compensate me as well as the project I’m giving up?
It’s like having a scorecard in your head:
We live in a time where opportunities come to us readily, which often leaves us with a choice. If we want to truly achieve something meaningful, we must be good at saying no. Practicing critical thinking can effectively help us with tying our pursuits to our purpose.
5. Creative Problem Solving
Looking at things in an unconventional way
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford
People who want to make a powerful and lasting difference need to learn how to solve problems in a way that breaks free from conventional thinking.
Alex Osborn founded the Creative Education Foundation in 1954, with the mission of teaching deliberate creativity to the world through Creative Problem Solving (CPS), a process that led to great innovation techniques such as Lateral Thinking, Blue Ocean Strategy, and Design Thinking. The iPhone, Nike’s shoes, and our favorite tech companies are products of this method.
Creative Problem Solving has four stages:
- Clarify, to identify problems as open-ended questions then sharpening the understanding of a challenge
- Ideate, to unbind ourselves by deferring judgment and churn out as many ideas as possible (a method called divergent thinking)
- Develop, to critically evaluate solutions
- Implement, to test for acceptance
Our world is teeming with problems. By using creativity as a process, we come up with novel yet effective ideas to address them at the core.
Equipped with these five skills, I can power through the 21st century with passion, purpose, and productivity.
I hope you, too, can add these tools to your arsenal and see what they can do for you.
Here are some pieces you might also like:
