5 Essential "Meta-Skills" For Faster Learning

The game within the game.

Photo by Chris Kendall on Unsplash

In order to build a skill – be it Jiu-Jitsu, article writing, public speaking, or anything else in your life – you need to develop what I’ve come to think of as “meta-skills”.

Subskills — foundational skills — that will allow you to learn faster and do your work better. Subskills that are transferrable across domains.

Unfortunately for a lot of people, these meta-skills that are the foundation of true improvement are far more difficult to learn than the actual skills themselves. This is because they don’t know what they haven’t learned.

The result of this is that most people end up progressing to a fairly high level on their own, but they progress with some gaping holes in their “game”.

It’s like getting really good at Jiu-Jitsu, but never taking the time to learn how to wrestle. It’s like learning how to write, but never how to publish work that makes an impact.

It’s partial learning. Partial improvement.

It’s because you’re missing the important skills.

Let’s look at the 5 essential “meta-skills” that will help you close gaps in your learning, learn skills faster, and patch up the holes in your game that already exist.