Life Skills

Life Skills- or what they do not teach you at school. Your teacher has never taught you to be good in bed! Or the odds of scoring different hands in a game of Poker. Or the extensive statistical analysis required before making a bet on a football match. But this post is not about these skills. Neither is it about skills like cooking and stitching, which incidentally are becoming increasingly common in school curriculum. Rather, this post talks about certain behavioural aspects that should be inculcated in everyone….but are overlooked because teachers themselves are unaware. Or even if they are aware, they do not pit it into practice.

Right from the beginning, the learning curriculum is focused on the external aspects of nature. We study Newton’s laws in middle school, differential equations in high school, and the working principle of a Field Effect Transistor in the University (I am from an Electronics and Communications Engineering background). Somewhere along the way, we also have Moral Science, Social Science, and Literature in the syllabus. These do go a long way in shaping our perception of the world, and in inculcating a set of beliefs through which we go about our daily lives. Unfortunately, none of it is sufficient to truly master the art of living (nothing to do with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s eponymous organization). Life skills are meant to be learned and practised by everyone, irrespective of their beliefs and socio-political ideology.

Life skills are a broad umbrella of concepts taken from eclectic fields of study like Psychology, Philosophy, Behavioural Economics, Knowledge Management, etc. As these concepts are not taught in high school or in college, most people simply sail through life in a semi-conscious haze. The result is the rise of the coaching/personality development industry, where so-called life coaches charge a bomb to teach the same to adults whose mental confusion matches that of a primary-school kid in a strip club! 

Let us talk about one or two these concepts. It is human frailty to bother about other people. How many of us are not flustered by what someone else did? The truth is that you can control no one but yourself. Whatever someone does, however twisted or wicked it may be; there is some reason to it. And one does not have to know the reason. That is why it makes a lot of sense to forgive. Here people mistake forgiveness as condoning unacceptable behaviour. That is not the case. It simply means letting go of the bitterness that steals happiness from your own life. The person responsible for one’s happiness is you yourself. No source of external pleasure can replace inner joy.

Over here I would like to talk about a corollary to the above point. The world is divided into different schools of thoughts in the religious, social, and political context. All of them have their proponents and each of them has a place. It would do the world tremendous good if people acknowledge their path is not the ‘only true way’, but one of the many roads that can be walked on. On a broad scale, this would lead to a cessation of extremism, and consequently terrorism.

Then there is the ‘Sunk Cost Fallacy’, which leads the best of us to take irrational financial decisions. A sunk cost is money that has already been paid and can never be recovered. And in order to justify the initial cost, one simply keeps paying in spite of the terrible nature of the product/service. Examples include continuing to watch a bad movie or TV show. Or keeping on dating someone unsuitable, because of the huge emotional investment. If only people are aware of this fallacy, they can behave more judiciously.

These are just some points to illustrate that the current crop of humanity is pathetically devoid of life skills. As an old story goes, when a boat starts sinking, all it matters is whether you can swim your way to safety. You may know to design a MOSFET that has a channel length reduced by 1 nanometer, and that simultaneously consumes 1 micro-watt less power. But at that time, that knowledge is not going to help you!