On Skills, Knowledge, And Skill Acquisition

If any of you are interested in how we go about learning, I'm sure you'll have heard of the 4 Stages Of Competence (FYI - it's another of Maslow's pieces. I love Maslow. His Hierachy Of Needs was touched upon a few articles back).

I think this is good, but I've been thinking about my own learning. It's a little bit like Maslow's, but it's a bit different. There are 3 stages:

1. Quality Incomprehension
2. Knowledge Of Quality
3. Skill In Producing Quality

Quality Incomprehension
Say you went to a top quality steak joint when you're six years old. Are you going to turn around and say, "fuck. That was a good steak"? Probably not. Probably because you're not ballsy enough to say "fuck" yet, but mostly because you haven't built up enough knowledge of the general quality of steak to know when one is relatively good compared to one which is relatively bad. Your taste develops as you add more data to the chart.

Knowledge Of Quality
Once you've built up a picture of what quality looks like, you can start working out what exactly contributes to the quality. Was it the delicate peppercorn sauce on the steak? Was the the juicy tenderness? The ratio of fat:muscle?

Skill In Producing Quality
Okay. You've worked out what makes quality. But now you need to know how to create that quality. How hot to make the pan before you add the steak. How much oil to add. How long to show the steak to the pan for each side. How long to put the steak out for before cooking. What to season the steak with. ...how to make the delicate peppercorn sauce (I don't know why I'm talking about this sauce, I don't even particularly like it).

What Next?
To produce anything, sadly, will usually rely on a number of skills. As an Engineer, I could quite easily list a few skills that I need just to maintain and run a single piece of equipment we use here:
1. Technical knowledge of operation of the kit
2. Underlying scientific principles on which the kit works
3. Organisational skills to maintain data so that it can be found & understood at a later date/achived
4. Communication/presentation of results on a level where others can find it most useful
5. Time management
6. Quality assurance/validation of the equipment (create logical tests to make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing - based on my knowledge of the kit)

You'll notice that I made the first two in italics. That's because I'm going to separate these from skills as really, these bits are knowledge, not skills.

The Difference Between Knowledge And Skill
Knowledge lies dormant and waits to be called upon.
For example, knowledge of the kit doesn't help me in and of itself. It needs to be applied.

Skills are applied as an action.
So validation of the equipment is a skill. It requires me to understand how the kit works and then go about creating structured tests to make sure it's outputting what I expect it to be outputting, based on my knowledge of it. I am acting upon the piece of kit, and it is outputting (hopefully) quality information.

Creating Quality: A Combination Of Skills And Knowledge
Acquisition Of Knowledge
Knowledge is almost a pre-cursor to skill. But acquisition of both comes about in different ways. The first thing you need to do it work out what you'd like to create. I'm looking to write a book at the moment, so this is how I usually deconstruct a book to assess it's quality:

Writing:
Grammar, syntax, flow, style, making the writing beautiful.

Characters:
Depth of personality, how relatable they are, how believable they are, how much I love/hate them, how much I empathise with them.

World:
This is usually most important for sci-fi/fantasy books: how well constructed is the world around them? Is it exciting? Does it make you wonder what else could exist in that world? Is it well constructed enough to make sure there's no confusion with how it's made?

Plot:
Pacing, conflict, resolution, clarity in the conflict & implication of the conflict.

Theme:
What is the book trying to say? Does it say it well? Is it clear in it's message? Does it's message move me or change the way I see the world?

This can be further broken down. Let's take the characters section:
How believable they are
This is based on a knowledge on how different people behave, their psychology, incentives, how different people react to various "stimuli" based on their personality/defense mechanisms ect. This knowledge also helps in achieving how much I empathise with them because if their motives are believable and relatable, I should empathize with their plight, as long as they're coming from a place that's rooted in some kind of idea of "good".

So that's the kind of framework I use to assess books, as well as assess/deconstruct anything I'd like to write before I write it. There is a skill in the assessment of quality and how to organise knowledge.

However, the easiest and quickest way to attain knowledge is to be fed it by someone who's taken the time to organise it themselves. Why work discover the world yourself when it's been discovered and organised by someone else, for you to consume as easy packets of information? All you need to do is find what you want to know more about, and then start consuming the information. It takes ten minutes to discover the elements of Helium and Hydrogen exist from someone else. It takes years to amass enough data & the create tests to question it, to produce those tiny pieces of information. A good mentor to point you in the right direction to find the all important relevant information is invaluable (although for now, articulating a good question & google serve as mine. Voltaire said: "Judge a man not by his answers, but by his questions". Nowadays, computer scientists call this - although applied to a slightly different mechanism: "garbage in, garbage out").

But back to writing. After all that knowledge, then comes the actual writing.

Writing Skills
Nothing can prepare me for writing a book, other than writing. I can hoard as much information as I can, but when it comes down to it, I need to apply this to paper. I need to put in the 10,000 hours to become a master. And that's when I realise: it's one thing to critique, yet there's a whole new side to actual writing. Things like imagination now become important just to create things to categorise into my nice little sections.

Half the problem is just realizing the skills you need to develop to be able to create quality. You don't know what you don't know. If you don't know what skills you're supposed to be looking for, they'll usually remain invisible until someone point it out. There doesn't seem to be any site that tells you, "to create this, you'll need this area of knowledge and this collection of skills". You've got to work it out for yourself. I guess there are a million different things you can create, a million different pieces of knowledge/skill that you need to do it. And I guess half the fun of life is in working it out...