How to Build Skills That Matter
In times of difficulty, you want your efforts to matter. Not just to pass the time, but to build something that endures.
Recently, I shared why I think now is the best time to start an ultralearning project. Not in spite of the anxious time we’re living in, but because of it. Taking resolute action through uncertainty allows you to improve the things you can actually control, instead of breaking under what you cannot.
Today, I’d like to continue that theme and talk about how you can structure your efforts so that what you are learning actually matters.
The Peril of Indirect Projects
In my book, Ultralearning, I cover the research on transfer. It’s not pretty. Countless studies confirm the fact that much of what we set out to learn doesn’t actually transfer to the situations we need it. Consider just a few cases:
- In one study, students who took high-school psychology courses didn’t end up doing better at college level psychology.
- In another, those who had studied economics didn’t do better at questions of economic reasoning than those who hadn’t.
- Psychologist Howard Gardner even adds that there is now an “overwhelming body of educational research” that “students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.”
