Meta-Skills
Aspiring Generalist is an Understandary project.
Meta-Skills
A meta-skill is a skill that allows you to acquire and hone other skills more successfully or efficiently.
This isn't a formal concept in the sense that there's research supporting its existence, but it's a common enough topic within fields related to learning and personal-development that I think it can be a useful way of thinking about the knowledge and know-how we pursue, because if some of what we learn will tend to amplify our future learnings, incorporating of those meta-skills into our overall learning routines might be prudent.
Here's a handful of (what I consider to be) meta-skills I've personally benefitted from practicing and developing:
Communicating (sending)
Writing and speaking, especially, have proven to be valuable means of transmitting information to others. But creating and paving conversational paths with folks I might learn from, which in turn helps build strong relationships and allows me to learn from people I might not otherwise have met, is also fairly vital.
A daily writing habit and speaking more intentionally (figuring out what "clear communication" might mean for how you speak, who you speak to, and what you're trying to convey) are habits worth considering to hone this meta-skill.
Communicating (receiving)
Listening and reading are two incredibly useful bundles of information-gathering skills that can help us identify, access, absorb, and understand more of what we take in via these channels.
We learn more from the world and from other people when we're better at perceiving and receiving the knowledge and perspectives they gift us.
Reading a lot (and lots of different sorts of things), and practicing active listening are good starting points for exercising these meta-skill muscles.
Mulling
This is a term I tend to use for the combination of sitting and thinking about tricky problems or topics I don't yet understand, and looking inward to process things about myself: my pasts, my behaviors, my capabilities, and so on.
Understanding how to turn things over in our minds, to derive meaning from this process, and to then implement what we learn in the world beyond our brains is important if we want to make use of all the stuff we're learning.
Meditation and/or some kind of mindfulness practice can help with this, but so does simply setting aside a few minutes a day to do absolutely nothing but think.
Systems Thinking
There are a variety of definitions one might ascribe to this concept, but I think of it as a way of looking at things that allows us to see the bigger picture—the whole system, and the systems making up the that system, and on and on and on—rather than just individual parts.
Thinking in this way also encourages us to look for both larger and smaller systems in everything we learn, which in turn can help us pick up knowledge that might be applicable (and portable) between delineated fields of inquiry.
For instance: learning the basics of composition and visual hierarchy can help you paint a landscape, take a photograph, or organize furniture in a living room.
Focus & Prioritization
The ability to decide what to do, when, and in what order, is immensely helpful when it comes to wading through the myriad options many of us have when it comes to applying our time, energy, and resources.
The ability to focus on things in the right order and with enough intensity, clarity, and discipline to finish those things before moving on to the next endeavor, ensures we don't drown in a sea of well-intentioned ambitions, none of which ever get done because of "analysis paralysis" or an enthusiasm that keeps us bouncing from passion to passion (which makes it difficult to ever go beyond the superficial in any particular pursuit).
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You could argue that other meta-skills are more important than these, or that the whole concept is bunk and not worth thinking about.
But I would argue working such skills into one's learning routine tends to be a good investment, because it often leads to more successful outcomes in many other things we might someday decide to try.
It's like working on one's health: if you're not healthy enough to be able to think and focus (and ultimately, be alive) you can't capably invest yourself in anything else.
Becoming healthier can make all your bodily components—including your brain—work better, though, and refining meta-skills you identify in your own life often results in similar benefits.