Metaskills to thrive in change
The day we are born, our sense making starts.
Somehow we start to make sense of the environment around us - both natural and human made. This sense making comes from some kind of interaction with the environment around us.
First, this interaction is unaided - it is us and the environment.
Next, we see other humans around us, so we start to learn how to interact with them. We start developing skills to interact with other human beings. We have been referring to these as ‘soft skills’ or ‘interpersonal skills’.
Then we start to learn to use tools to interact with, and appropriate the environment around us. We start developing skills to make and use tools. We have been referring to these as ‘tech skills’ or ‘hard skills’.
At some point in time, in between these steps, we start finding answers about self, about existence in general. That's when we start developing skills of self reflection and self inquiry.
At each level we are using some kind of “skill” to interact with our environment - which essentially consists of nature (natural environment), human made environment and other humans.
First we learn these skills somehow unconsciously. Then at a certain point some of these skills become automatic. We keep on upgrading these skills to their newer versions or building newer skills at a speed that the environment around us demands.
As the changes around us become more complex and faster, our ability to develop new skills to interact with the changing environment also starts to need upgrading.
Through out our evolution, faster the rate of diffusion of change, faster has been the response time we needed to develop new skills. But we can be faster up to a point to continue to develop new skills at the rate the change demands.
At a certain point, it could become increasingly difficult for us, both cognitively and biologically, to develop new skills to respond to change (in fact, in some ways the rate of change is already overwhelming us).
In our current environment, and in near future, when AI is, and could be transforming our lives in unimaginable and unknown ways there are two options in front of us to cope with this unprecedented rate of change :
One, to develop skills at the rate of diffusion of change.
Second, to take a step back, pause, observe and reflect on what is in the change (or what parts of change) that makes sense for us to respond to.
The second path is about taking control of ourselves. This path needs us to strengthen our core as who we are as humans. Strengthening this core is essentially about strengthening our mental muscles that help us develop new skills. These core mental muscles are essentially muscles that are foundational to our ability to develop new skills.
There is a direct and positive correlation between strength of these core mental muscles that enable us to develop new skills and our ability to respond to change. These core mental muscles that enable us to develop new skills to respond to change are what we refer to as MetaSkills. Like we ‘have’ our body muscles (biological / physical), we have our mental muscles (cognitive). Similar to the way we need to train our body muscles to be stronger so that we can be fitter, we need to train our metaskills muscles to be cognitively stronger in order to build our ability to respond to change by learning new skills.