I used to blog in the early 2000s. I covered Web design and user experience; it was mostly analysis and some ideas for better computer user interfaces. While it was important to me personally, at that time I didn’t know how to make the kind of impact I wanted - via writing, product design or otherwise. I lacked the necessary skills to turn my ideas into a meaningful body of work.

The next 20 years of professional life led the evolution of my interests. I was fortunate to work in young IT companies that were often managed with a laissez-faire approach. There I realized how many barriers there are to implement new ideas, any ideas at all. It can be true even for small changes within an existing team, product or department, let alone when someone wants to start a new company to do something worthwhile.

By observing internal dynamics at these businesses, I was getting increasingly interested in how individuals get good at what they do:

• How do effective people learn and make their decisions?

• What makes them acquire a given skill at a given time?

• Who are their mentors and how do they guide them?

• How do they get others to cooperate and make an impact?

• Also, if so-called talented individuals have clearly worked for years or decades to develop their skills, why do so many people still believe it’s mostly talent that matters?

I gravitated to roles that involved analysis, decision support, teaching, and identification of developmental needs. It was getting less about any particular product idea or change, and more about the process of growth and cooperation.

How to structure lifelong learning?

This leads us to the central topic I wish to explore and invite you to do the same:

Can we structurally improve how we acquire useful knowledge, skills & behaviors?

Here’s why I think it’s relevant:

Everyone acquires their life skills from scratch — over 100 billion people so far.

Desired “curriculum” of skills and habits keeps shifting — the world is changing fast, as does the our collective knowledge & technology. Emergence of AI increases uncertainty in this regard. In addition, we need to account for each person’s unique interests, capabilities and life trajectory.

The way people learn vital life skills is often not great — often at the wrong time (too late to prevent harm), inefficient, incomplete, hard to translate to consistent behavior, scattered.

We often lament the decreasing standards of education — but it’s unclear what specific action we could take to improve the minds of those we are concerned about.

We pay the price for our ignorance — despite the fact that many of our predecessors have solved equivalent problems. While we can’t know in advance where life takes us, it’s no fun making impactful decisions being unprepared or even unaware we’re making them.

Digital channels distract us and overload us — with so much irrelevant or low quality information, it’s not sufficient to simply offer more content. We need priorities, tools, systems.

In other words, we will explore structured ways of leading a better life, with a heavy focus on learning.

Invitation to practice

It is truly unfortunate that in most learning contexts we simply do not practice enough. Everyone thinks they do, but more often than not we just skip the tedious exercises and painful failures. It’s too much effort for too little (immediate) value.

Here on Living Competence you will find opportunities to get at least some practice with the skills and concepts we cover. Much of this practice will be intellectual, emotional or social in nature.

To experience what I mean, how about you think about the following question for a minute?

I listed 6 issues above as motivation for the exploration of structured learning - you see them under “How to structure lifelong learning”.

Which of these issues do you consider universal, and which are highly situational? (e.g. do not apply to the young or the elderly, to the poor or the rich, in some professions or geographies)

I hope it provokes some interesting thoughts.

Welcome to Living Competence!

— Jakub