Develop Foundational Skills

Growing up, I have noticed that when I become good at something, I am also becoming better at other different but related skills. Let me give an example. Back then in primary school I am not good at maths, however during one school break I decided to learn some Singapore maths which is completely different from the maths taught in school. At first it was a complete struggle and disaster, but with time slowly I became better and able to solve most of the questions. When school reopens I noticed I can solve the maths taught at school easily. So the questions is, why is it that given Singapore maths and maths taught at school are completely different yet getting good at Singapore maths makes me become good in school maths.

My interpretation is when I am getting good at Singapore maths, I am also getting good at other subtle but crucial skills such as framing a given situation into maths equation or manipulating equations. In other words, I am picking up these small mental models which are transferrable and helps me greatly when I am doing school maths.

Now the question is are there any skills that I can learn that will indirectly benefit other areas of my life greatly, I called these high ROI skills foundational skills.

At this point of life, I discover 2 foundational skills that impact me the most. First is learning to code which developed my computational thinking. Coding teaches me how to break down a problem into multiple steps and components, reading codebases helps sharpen my logical thinking skills, debugging makes me more observant on even minute details and designing a system taught me to consider multiple edge cases that might go wrong.

The second foundational skill is reading philosophy critically. Reading critically here means considering arguments for and against the claims made by a text and also the historical context when the claims are made. After reading hard philosophical text, I find that I can now grasp most concepts that I encounter in my life and job pretty easily, I can analyze people's argument better and see things from their point of view, it makes me better at thinking abstractly and I noticed my coding skills improved a lot as well.

Time is a scarce resource, focusing on developing foundational skills gives us the highest ROI and is one of the best decision I have made in my life.