Photo credit goes to Wesley Fryer.
Skill development is quite possibly the most important facet of being a human being as it encompasses everything that we say, think, feel and do as individuals, as groups of friends or professional colleagues, as families, as religious groups, as nations and as a global collective society as a whole. As you can see in the image above, there are many skills and lessons that schools, friends, family and omnipresent social culture attempt to teach young people so that they can maximize the fulfillment they have in life as well as contribute to making the world a better place for everyone.
Learning to want to make money and then in turn saving money are valuable assets especially in any democratic society that values a free market and capitalism. This then quickly leads into learning how to well, which doesn’t just apply to a merchant’s ability to effectively sell some goods or services but also to convince others of an idea or concept. Problem solving is often one of the most basic and constant lessons in school and in life, which then leads straight into learning to asking questions to seek more information and seeing solutions and learning from your mistakes, finding out what you did incorrectly and then rectifying that to solve the problem correctly in the future. Granted, that may be a difficult thing to translate into the more difficult and advanced problems in life such as saving a marriage or deciding on what home to live in or what career path you’d like to choose, but the same basic principles will still apply. Now public speaking and leading others are skills that often intersect and bounce off of one another, as the highest leadership positions in the world are those that demand great public speaking talent and the ability to identify the skills of others and designate responsibilities accordingly. Now teaching young people how to be creative is a little trickier as it often requires those involved with an individual young person’s life such as a teacher or a parent to keep diligent eyes on what the child’s skills and interests are to see where the two intersect the most and then encouraging them to do something that they are both interested in and talented with. Now teaching a child to never give up and to be a tenacious, patient, and perseverant person is probably one of the most difficult things to do since it requires a child to be challenged and approached with adversity that they have to overcome, something that any parent would hate to allow their child to go through.
Photo credit goes to Juan Cristóbal Cobo.
Since human beings are genetically predisposed to being social creatures (with a long enough deprivation of human interaction we are prone to psychological illness!) so developing social skills is one of the most basic and important skills that we try to instill into children and cultivate throughout our formative years to be as socially adept as possible. It is our social skills that will inevitably determine our ability to make connections with others, form friendships, relationships, make contacts for occupations, and generally help us improve the quality of our lives, not just how efficient they are.
Photo credit goes to Juan Cristóbal Cobo.