One Most Important Life Skill to Lead A Resourceful Life
“Old ways won’t open the new doors” ~ Anonymous
The most valuable skill which can help one in entire life is the skill of learning new things always. It is like creating an “Instruction Manual” for our life.
Why? let me try to explain below.
I think the most precious asset all of us have with us is “Life”. You would see that all the assets of the life come with a detailed instructions manual to operate it. Be it a normal kitchen appliance or be it your expensive vehicle, every asset has an operation manual. But life doesn’t have any instructions manual
So how do we usually operate life?
We are given instructions by our environment to live our lives. You are told in childhood about what you should do and what you should not do. Since you were kid, and presumably no understanding of the world, so your immediate well wishers in the world started to feed instructions in your mind.
And most of our lives are operated by such instructions. You and I may be proudly saying that we have certain values and beliefs of our own. But if we dig deeper and introspect, we would realize that these are mostly borrowed and coming from our own circumstances.
If you are born in a Hindu vegetarian family, then you might think eating any kind of meat is against your personal values. But for a moment imagine about a child born in a US or UK or China, the child even cant’ imagine that this eating habit could be even considered as a subject matter of “Values”.
So our values and the way we operate our lives are all borrowed.
But there are two ways of borrowing the values.
One is accidental i.e. whatever comes in our environment, we borrow the values from them. Here you are not sure that whatever you are getting is best for your life.
Fortunately, there is a better way of operating your life. It is to borrow values from such resources that somehow resonate with your inner magnetic north (which pulls you) i.e. your true life purpose.
What if we are able to get best instructions of the world to operate our lives?
And that is quite possible to do.
You can read books about the people who you emulate. The great personalities on the earth had all one common trait and that is learning new things.
Because life happens in the form of unfolding and it always brings new uncertainty in front of you. If you have simply followed the operational manual of life as fed by your circumstances, you have a limited knowledge to cope up with the uncertainties.
But if you have developed a curiosity of learning the new things from the best of the best in the world, you would already be aware about how these people have handled the uncertainties of your life.
So You have already upgraded your life instruction manual by your efforts. Life will come to you comparatively much easier (or atleast sound easier to you) as compared to a person who has kept his understanding limited to only things which came on his way through his circumstances.
Continuous learning is something which is the habit of all the titans of world. Warren buffets reads 80% of his day. Bill gates reads around 50 books a year. Elon Musk has a consistent reading habit.
Charlie Munger, who is the right hand of Warren buffet was fond of making mental models after studying the various fields of knowledge. This is termed as worldly wisdom.
Here’s a great description of the concept of worldly wisdom from Robert Griffin’s book “Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor:”
Munger has adopted an approach to business and life that he refers to as worldly wisdom. Munger believes that by using a range of different models from many different disciplines — psychology, history, mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, and so on — a person can use the combined output of the synthesis to produce something that has more value than the sum of its parts.
Another way to put it through this statement of Justin Musk (Elon Musk’s ex-wife):
“Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life.”
To conclude:
Stay Hungry and Stay Foolish ~ Steve Jobs
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