The single most important skill of the modern era – and how to master it

Let’s cut to the chase. The most important thing you could improve upon is how effective you are at learning. 

By learning, here I mean the ability to absorb and then apply knowledge in a meaningful way. 

Those who master how to learn are highly marketable and recession-proof. The best learners are hard for companies to hang on to because those individuals become attractive and productive assets, and their effectiveness usually coincides with a self-starter quality. 

Efficiency and retention 

To be better at learning, attack it from two fronts: efficiency and retention. 

That is, how fast you learn, and how well you can remember and replicate the information or skill.

If you can learn efficiently, this leads to three critical outcomes: 

1. The distance between incompetence and competence decreases
2. The distance between idea and execution decrease
3. The number of skills you can acquire in a given time increases

When you shrink the gap between novice and expert — the expertise gap — you become a powerhouse advocate for yourself and high-impact contributor to a team. 

Efficiency of learning doesn’t necessarily raise your ceiling (though it certainly can), but it definitively accelerates the pace at which you actualize your potential. 

Once you reach this point, it’s empowering to know that you won’t fall short due to a lack of competence. It would only be because of a lack of hard work or from external circumstances.

Start before you’re ready

Retention, meanwhile, is as important as learning efficiency. 

The best way to remember what you learn is to take action that directly puts new knowledge to use. 

Often, this means testing your hand before you’ve fully mastered the information or skill. The idea “start before you’re ready” is the most immediate way to internalize new information. 

If you want to build a website, you can spend literally forever on YouTube tutorials or coding books, but without material action, you have little chance of retaining the learning. 

One shortcoming of school compared to a job, for example, is that students are mostly embedded in theory and books, with much less emphasis put on “in the field” training. 

That’s one reason most adults don’t remember what they learned in school — the theoretical never made contact with reality. 

I’ve met plenty of brilliant individuals in the academic world, but many of them have never left that space. Staying put in a low-stakes, theoretical world, to me, is not how to build bullet-proof credibility — that comes from action, putting your skills against the friction of reality. 

To be sure, by “action” I don’t mean you should read one self-help book and immediately try to build a million-dollar business. Baby steps over time lead to compounding results. 

You can start with writing in a journal about what you learned. Make the ideas concrete with ink. See if you can decipher the real-world utility of the theoretical. 

Then, determine if the next step is worth your consideration. 

Prioritize through elimination 

Today the world is defined by an abundance of information. 

Social media. Nonstop news. Instant, hand-held access to anything we want. 

But the infinite options and potential hasn’t created a society of genius. Mostly it’s just noise, mental clutter, and people spread too thin to actualize their potential. It’s a lot of blind consumption without intention or question. 

Imagine a world where people only learned what they could actually apply. That would likely reduce the modern person’s consumption of information by 90% — but on balance I don’t think things would be worse off.

Applying this thought experiment on an individual level has a powerful impact. 

Unlocking your potential as a learning machine starts with limiting what you choose to focus on. 

Cut the noise. Be specific and prioritize what you want to learn. 

Do something with the information that you absorb to retain it. Write about it. Build something new. 

Then do it over and over again for a decade. 

Pay it forward

Action helps you retain knowledge, teaching helps cement it. Sharing what you’ve learned with someone else further establishes the information in your head, and also marks a critical step in becoming a source of expertise for that information. 

Plus, knowledge or skills in a vacuum don’t create real-world change. 

Leveling up as a proficient learner should ultimately translate into a more positive, outsized impact on the world around you. 

Here’s the kicker to all this: Becoming the best version of yourself through mastering how to learn isn’t a selfish path. It’s how you gather enough resources to pay it forward through teaching or supporting others. 

You don’t climb the mountain just to get yourself to the top. You climb to trail-blaze for those who are a few steps behind you.

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