Four Things I Wish I Had Learned in School
When I was a kid I was good at school. That turned out to be way less important than I thought it would be. The basic school skills of memorization, arithmetic, and essay writing are fine things to develop. But this narrow range of training omitted many important skills that I would need in life. And worse, this curriculum left me squarely in middle of my comfort zone for 13 years, so I never had to develop the meta-skills of skill acquisition. I was cocky and complacent. When I hit the adult world, the adult world hit back. I was terribly unprepared to navigate its complexity. I found myself needing to develop, on the fly, a different skill-set from the one I had been taught. I needed to work on sensing opportunities, communicating my desires, detecting and removing fantasy from my world-model, attention management, making friends, letting go of resentment, and effective problem selection. 11 years navigating the turbulent currents of independent adult life is long enough that I�ve st...