Things I wish I knew.

Common sense (noun) good sense and sound judgement in practical matters. #streetsmart

Everything you need to know to navigate your life or as the internet calls it ‘Adulting’ are derivatives of a lot of Common Sense and a hell lot of Practical Skills. 

Believe it or not, Common Sense can be taught, and Practical Skills can be learned. You need to learn as much common sense or wisdom as soon as possible. Which should be complimented heavily with a lot of, different, Practical Skills. A huge portion of such ability is directly based upon your knowledge of how things work. How things work, works to inspire you to be able to find a new and novel way around roadblocks, bottlenecks, and problems. [Note: For a saturated situation makeshift solutions work wonders but they are bound to collapse the moment there is growth in the market.] Your solutions need to grow faster than the speed at which problems crop up in life.

So what should you do?

To go ahead from where ever you are in life right now, you need to know how we got here, i.e., The Journey so far. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is a good start. What sets us apart from the rest of the biological world should be your biggest concern and also the thing you’d like to work upon the most. For humans, Knowledge that can be passed down is our biggest chip in the evolutionary race. And if you refuse to cash in on the biggest asset of your species, hoping this is only read by Homo sapiens, then you are on the path to self-destruction.

What this means is to learn, you need to keep learning and never stop. Make sure you learn something new every day and make sure this isn’t gossip! Learn technology, Current Affairs, Politics, Banking, and everything else. 

Our present education system is a product of the industrial revolution that tried to manufacture success on a large scale and this system is mostly dysfunct! Our society and family structures themselves are a result of the cold war era, a person in this system cannot work for 10 hours a day and then manage a home/ family by themselves. The entire system is built on dependencies and pegging one thing against the other. As sad as it is, what can we do now becomes our next concern. How can you use the system in your favour, and if you can, is there a guidebook or rule of thumb to making it happen?

So if we really do need to learn, where can we start? Start learning Common sense and Practical thinking for which, The past would be your best bet. Learn from History, the previous generations, the subject experts, past research etc. and for the question of what can you learn from them? Two things; How they succeeded and why they didn’t!

Next would be learning Practical Skills these are those things which can ‘float your today’. If there is a second reason why your today was bad that would be luck, Most likely, always, the first reason is you did not have a practical skill which was needed that day. You need to start learning Practical Skills as soon as possible. Communication Skills. Research Skills. Technical Skills. Basic Building, Repair and Maintainance Skills. Digital Skills. Banking Skills. First Aid and Basic Medical Skills. And the list never ends!

In one situation or the other, every skill has the potential to become a practical skill, including but not limited to Cooking and Culinary Arts, Fine Arts: Dancing, Painting…, Social Skills etc. Regarding why Social Skills are important here is a small example; there is an eastern saying “Its hard to slap a smiling face.” 

There is an idiom in Chinese culture that I can roughly translate as “You shall not slap a person in the face when he is smiling at you”. This means if a person is showing a positive attitude, you’d better forgive him even if he has made a mistake.

Consider this: A lot of people who do well at school, college and even Universities fail at 'adulting' miserably. Just because they don't know what insurance policies they needed, how to deal with banks or loans, how to play with numbers when money is involved, how to build your ‘Social Networth’ through your social network and multiple other things which can be clearly derived as a mix of common sense and practical skills.

For these, we need to start teaching kids things very early on and for the ‘adults’ who are currently failing ‘to adult,’ there is no time better than now to learn. So start learning things from the basic most; How to write a letter? How to write a CV/Resume? How to this and How to that? Remember you are not responsible for what happens during an abnormal situation, only if you invested in your normal days appropriately.

Thankfully today almost everything can be learnt online. During the present global lockdown and recession, there is nothing better to do than increase your skillset. If you can't learn driving because you cannot step out of your residence, learn a language! Something as small as a language can potentially unlock an entire community to you as a new market to explore.

For most things, you can find an article or even entire blogs, if not Subreddit forms, dedicated to it. Start reading. Start exploring. Join Mailing lists or WhatsApp groups, develop better habits and work your hardest to improve your health and your circumstances. Like I said: Remember you are not responsible for what happens during an abnormal situation, only if you invested in your normal days appropriately.

Discover what all is required to be able ‘to adult’ properly. [Example: Good (mental and physical) Health, Sound Knowledge of your niche, best skill set amongst your contemporaries etc.] and learn the heck out of it!

PS: Learning how to apply said skills properly and efficiently is also learning.