Examples that come to mind: cooking food, driving a car, computer programming, reading books, and maintenance of home utilities.
The skill can be related to any of the following: - Human capital and necessary personal assets - Physiological - Intellectual - Economic - Emotional - Social - Technical - Ecological
If you live in the middle of the jungle, essential life skills will be much different than in SF.
I think we should divide skills into three types and then into three categories and adapt for your situation.
You should be very very good at 3 things:
- something that makes you money (programming, accounting, etc)
- a physical activity (lifting weights, soccer, etc)
- something you do for fun (woodworking, cooking, etc)
(for some woodworking can be making money and programming the fun part, switch as needed)
Then you should do the same but have 2/3 in each category but just as an ok/good level (can cook a normal veggies a steak meal or fix an electrical socket)
Then again, do the same for each category but for a very minimal understanding about it, but have as many as you can. You may not know how to so a butt joint, but can saw a piece of wood or drill a hole, etc etc.
This way, you are a more rounded human being, but also open your mind to other activities you wouldn't normally which may even go up in the hierarchy, but even if not, it may help you with other ones.
It also means you will almost always have something to talk about with anyone.
(and more generally: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854592298.html )
The path to happiness is not always the highest paying job or early retirement. Sometimes the most efficient solution is realizing that the problem is not worth solving. Sometimes there's a low hanging source of wealth that nobody has ever tried for. Sometimes you're always tired and burnt out because your source of entertainment is not entertaining.
It's a key skill to always check yourself. Are you really staying in late at work to do work or is it because you're used to doing 8 hours of work in 15 minutes? Do you really want the soda over the bottle of water or is it because the water is unfairly priced?
And from that self-awareness, actually build your own identity instead of having your identity built by others.
We can’t affect where we are, but we can affect in which direction we go. There is a space between stimulus and response, as Viktor Frankl said.
Some of the feelings and thoughts we have are automatically generated by our mind based on previous experience. They are the homo sapiens equivalent of speculative execution. To the extent that we choose to listen to them they will continue to weave the story of our life. Some of our neural networks are pattern matching for an environment that no longer exists. We should accept their presence for what they are, optional perspectives with an uncertain basis in reality.
I remind myself of this daily. Knowing that I have the ability to grow, cope, and learn new things. This wisdom has given me the courage and temperance to adjust the patterns in my life that are no longer serving me.
Does anyone else think like this? Comments are much appreciated.
Some things that I found very valuable to learn more about:
- Being more aware (present) of your thoughts and emotions. - Ability to get de-attached from an emotional situation. - Ability to tame the brain's obsessive thoughts. - How our bias affects our reality. - Separating what can be controlled from what is outside ones control.
Journaling has been extremely helpful to learn more about oneself and reflect. It is also fun to have a more detailed reference for a normal day you had 10 years ago.
P.S: Any book recommendations about the topic?
You are probably already aware, but what you describe bears many similarities to mindfulness, Buddhistic philosophy, and Stoicism.
From a neurological perspective I personally focus on quality sleep, exercise, and fasting as a way to increase neuroplasticity to speed up adaptation. On that note, it's amazing how feedback and adaptation seems to reoccur on most abstraction levels of reality.
Recommendations:
* What Makes an Effective Executive
* Nine Things Successful People Do Differently
* The Obstacle is the Way
* On the Shortness of Life
The entire comment is fantastic.
- Get a job (including something as simple as getting a summer job mowing grass)
-Manage your money in a budget
-Practice saving money in a savings account
-Plan meals
-Drive a car
-Go grocery shopping
-Prepare food / cook
-Perform basic house repairs with hand tools (hammer a nail, use a screwdriver, understand how a tape measure works)
-Be in relationship with yourself (journaling, learning new things, going to therapy / counseling for unresolved issues)
-Be in relationship with others (communication / conflict resolution / counseling for unresolved issues)
-Be generous with your time / money / life
*
I'm reminded of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- which might be a good outline for 'essential skills to function as a human': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
- Communication skills -- too many to list, but uber-critical for most jobs / relationships / contexts. Only 10% of my job is actual tech; 90% is communication
- Cooking -- you're gonna have to eat for the rest of your life, so get some basic skills
- Basic understanding of cars -- still going to be a thing for the forseeable future and worth knowing a little bit about
- Basic understanding of computers -- like cars, this is a tech that's going to define your life, likely for the foreseeable future. Most of HN are tech focused, but if you're not, understand it as much as possible
- Basic understanding of housing tasks -- too many skills to list, but you're gonna have to live somewhere as a renter or owner for the rest of your natural life, so learn a bit about how your plumbing, electrical, drainage, etc. works.
- Basic finance -- you're gonna have to buy shit for the rest of your life. Understand how mortgages, credit cards, interest, inflation, etc. works. Learn enough to be confident and skeptical, since there is a lot of snake oil and obfuscation here.
- Make something with your hands -- candles, woodworking, cooking, welding, pottery, whatever.
- Something physical -- sports, gyms, running, even if just long walks with the dog. Take a weightlift course, or do some soccer training clinics, or just read a runner's mag sometimes, whatever.
However I have two things that I think I do know enough about to add here:
- Presenting. Doing work is not sufficient is no-one knows about it. In most work contexts being able to present your work is important for getting recognition for it. This doesn't necessarily mean formal presentation with slides etc., but being able to speak up for yourself in a group setting is a good minimum. It's also useful for interacting with govt officials like the police.
- Maintaining your body. Know enough about your body to keep it working well (exercise, stretching, and so on) and recognise common problems before they become big issues (e.g. identifying skin cancers)
Finally, I think any answer is going to be biased by context. As someone has already noted in this thread, driving is an essential skill in some places but not in others. It would be better to give context for the people who you might be teaching.
About being an expert, I feel that everyone should be qualified to share what skills they think are essential. There is no right answer here.
Perhaps everyone could briefly mention their context along side the skills they recommend.
+1 for presenting (sales).
As a technical person growing up, I always put mental-health stuff in the "soft-science" mental-basket, right next to marriage counselling and green tea for weight-loss. These days(i'm 38 now) I'm appalled at how "for granted" I took mental health(depression, focus, motivation, work-life-balance) and spend a great amount of time looking into it and trying to better mine.
OH and as a 2nd skill it will be "communication" also something I neglected as a "super-tech-nerd". Writing good code in teams, is as much an exercise in social-structure and etiquette. Doing code reviews I've noticed I'm more or less critical depending on who the author is of the code and if I like them or not. We really should be doing code-reviews anonymously.
Coding in a multi person team can be hard if you can't get your point across or get social buy in from your team and of course when the differences happens, you need some kick-ass communication skills. I younger me would have just sworn and walk away calling everyone stupid :)
I've been saying for years every comp.sci program should have at least 2nd year communication courses, right next to calculus.
Edit:"Super-tech-nerd" refers to me being really really into tech. Not that I'm on equal footing of say Linus Trovalds or Jeff Dean in terms of tech-skills. Afrikaans is my first language. English very-far-distant second.
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The rest can be derived.
Time, money, and mood seems to me like the three most important limited resources we have. The next natural step is to apply cognitive tools from economics on each of them. The etymological origin of the word is basically "allocation of limited resources" after all. I've found this to be immensely useful.
In the city where I live now I know quite a few people for whom it's not worth it to invest that kind of money because the public transport is good enough. However on the country side where I come from there is not a single person who doesn't have a driver license.
Just about every resource you might ever want is controlled by someone else. Every interaction you have with someone else to acquire resource is a negotiation, whether you think about it that way or not. Most other skills are learnt through others.
I know a not-insignificant amount of people who are under the impression that by earning extra money to kick them into a higher tax bracket they'll earn less net money. People actually turn down promotions over this.
Also, almost everyone doesn't understand corporate taxation (especially journalists). I've seen way too many articles proclaiming that companies paid $0 in tax on $X revenue. Doesn't matter if they lost money by investing in people or R&D -- still evil somehow.
...and more generally...
-Robert A. Heinlein
You don't have to be a great butcher and a programmer simultaneously, obviously.
This should be done with mindful attention to the edge of your awareness, determination and grit towards achieving your goals, openness to changing direction and values, compassion to the situation of all involved and skeptical suspension of beliefs - particularly your own.
I guess you can call put this in the category of metaskills.
This will give you superpowers.
Once you figure out a little bit about why you do what you do, then you can begin to motivate yourself, react less fearfully, etc.
I'd like to believe the HN crowd is only slightly more refined than the hoi polloi but yea.
I've come to a whole new understanding, as a computer scientist that signalling still matters and we just suck at it.
If you read the comment you wrote you may see that it casts all pre-computer people who actually dressed up in a very poor light and I'm sure some of them could set us straight on many things related to life skills.
The standard signals are a shirt and tie, jacket and pocket square with other accessories.
Now we're on a different playing field with other less overt details and our vehicles have become our outerwear.
We've both got each other thinking a little. Fist bump to that!
find out what makes you happy, obvious but difficult in practice.