Meta-Skills and How to Gain Them

By Glenn Campbell in Istanbul

When you visit a new city, you gain a lot of practical information about it. You learn the main streets, how to navigate the public transit system and what the most interesting areas are. Many of these raw facts may have been available to you on the internet before you left home, but only by going there do you learn how all they all fit together.

If you visit a lot of new cities, you begin to gain a different set of skills. You learn the patterns that most cities follow and the things you can expect from all of them. You also learn general rules for how to approach a new city, so you find the most important parts fast and avoid making costly mistakes. After having visited ten European cities, the eleventh is easy, because you already know how European cities work and have developed a set of cognitive tools for dealing with them.

These higher level rules could be called "meta-skills". A meta-skill is a kernel of pragmatic knowledge that applies to a wide variety of circumstances including ones you have never directly experienced before. Because meta-skills are portable across many environments, they are extremely valuable, much more so than any specific knowledge of a single place or problem.

Life is the process of accumulating meta-skills. Or at least it ought to be. As you gain specific experience in the real world you should be distilling it into universal rules that will help you in a wide variety of endeavors. With a rich toolbox of meta-skills, your passage through life becomes easier. You get more done in areas you know are important and spend less time on meaningless distractions. When new problems arise, even those you have never experienced before, you have a set of tools to deal with them

Meta-skills can help you to understand and deal with other people, even those you have never met before in cultures you have no experience with. One of the great benefits of foreign travel is learning not how people are different but how they are the same. In every culture there are uptight ones and relaxed ones, people you can trust and people you can't. They are all motivated by basically the same things, and you deal with them more effectively by learning how those motivations work everywhere on Earth.

But the most important meta-skills concern yourself. After testing yourself in a variety of circumstances and failing in many of them, you begin to understand your own weaknesses and how you can become your own worst enemy. When disaster befalls you in adulthood, in most cases you can trace it to a foolish mistake you made. Somebody robbed you, but you gave them an easy target. Someone broke your heart, but your own expectations of them were deluded. Understanding how things that happen to you arise from your own actions is a fundamental meta-skill but a remarkably difficult one to learn. All children believe in magic, where the rules of cause and effect are suspended. Maturity is learning to deduce the real underlying mechanisms behind the things that happen to you.

The most valuable meta-skills involve managing your own ego, so it does not distort your vision or lead you to self-sabotage. Ego arises from our personal emotional investments. When we become engaged in a certain path and spend a lot of our resources supporting it, we have made an ego investment. As our investment builds up, seeing things any other way damages our self-esteem and can be extremely painful. If we happen upon a new path better than the one we have already invested in, we are tempted to close our eyes to it, even actively suppress it, because the cost to our past investments is so great. We would rather shoot the messenger than accept the message. Of course, the message will usually come back to haunt us in a different form, but by the time it returns we may have already done great damage to ourselves. Instead of spending two years in a failed marriage we may spend seven years in it because our huge emotional investment in it has disrupted our ability to see what is obvious to everyone else.

The ego management meta-skill lies in correcting for our own inevitable distortions and self-deceptions. After making a number of stupid, disastrous, ego-based decisions, we may learn to recognize our own investment bias, subtract it from our perception and see our own actions as an outsider would. "That's a stupid idea," is something we should learn to tell ourselves without waiting for the world to tell us in a more painful way.

Learning how our own ego works can contribute to the further meta-skill of predicting it in others. Every individual around the world is driven by ego. Each has made his own emotional investments and is very sensitive about any challenges to them. Part of our meta-experience is learning how difficult it is to change these patterns in others. When you meet someone, they have already traveled substantially along their investment path, and it is not usually within your power to change them. Instead, your role is usually to navigate around their sensitivities so as to not trigger a defensive reaction. If you want to get along with humans, from Dakar to Detroit, you learn to tiptoe around their questionable investments and navigate instead to the things you have in common.

Meta-skills are not always easy to put into words. Much of this knowledge is non-verbal and non-shareable. Finding yourself in a new situation, it may remind you of old experiences, so you dredge up that data for relevant lessons. Having had a lot of past experiences gives you a lot of tools to work with. This tends to give a natural advantage to older people, who have had more time to assemble their toolbox, but age isn't the only factor. We know there are plenty of stupid old people and few young ones who learn quickly. As important as raw experience may be, you also have to use it well.

So how do you obtain these tools? What are the meta-skills of learning meta-skills?

First, you need a lot of real-world experiences, because these are the raw materials for all meta-skills. Books, websurfing and formal education can give you a useful body of background knowledge, but that's not the same as firsthand experience. Reading a hundred books about France is no substitute for actually going to France. When you do go, you'll probably find that most of those books were bullshit. They may have been factually accurate but not relevant to life on the ground. Only when you start to personally interact with the world do you have a chance to test your theories and make mistakes, and mistakes are the starting point of all meta-knowledge.

If you are young, you don't have a lot of experiences to draw on, so your logical action is: Go out and get them! Travel is a good source of experiences if you can afford it. If you can't, then try exploring a variety of jobs, people and places within the universe that is accessible to you. When you are young, it is important to have a lot of experiences in a lot of different environments and not get hung up on any one of them. It is fine to experiment with just about anything except fatal risks, addictive drugs and long-term commitments.

People's growth slows when they let themselves get trapped in a single environment and lifestyle. If you spend your whole life in Paris and never leave, you may develop an encyclopedic knowledge of its streets and attractions, but that is not meta-knowledge. It's not helping you with other places and circumstances beyond Paris. To develop meta-skills, at least geographical ones, you need to experiences other cities, and as soon as you do you'll start assembling rules with more universal utility. The funny thing about exploring beyond your home environment is that when you come back you'll start seeing it in a whole new light. If you gain experience in a few other cities and then come back to Paris, you will probably begin to see things there that you never would have noticed otherwise.

But raw experiences aren't everything. You also have to take the time to process those experiences and integrate them into a higher schema. It isn't enough to have things happen to you; you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what has happened to you. If you make a big mistake, as all of us do, you have to turn it over and over in your mind, analyzing it for potential future lessons. We don't learn a lot from our successes but our failures are a gold mine, provided we don't run away from them but distill them for their truth.

To assemble meta-skills, you have to allow yourself a substantial amount of unprogrammed thinking time. Sitting in your room staring at a wall is good. Watching TV or reading a book is not, at least in terms of helping you process past experiences. Learning doesn't come from the experience itself; it comes from analyzing the experience afterwards and distilling lessons from it. This takes time and uninterrupted brainpower. Great revelations about your own past and future can come to you on the train to work, but not if you have an iPod plugged into your ears.

A healthy ratio of processing time to experience time can be huge! It is okay to spend ten hours thinking about a ten second experience if that experience is one you never expected. From the unexpected often comes the most useful meta-knowledge. That's the kind of experience you should go out of your way for! There is little to be gained from going back to somewhere you went before or repeating the same activities you are already familiar with. The greatest learning comes from novel experiences that push you out of your comfort zone. You don't have to push yourself into danger, just out of the path you would normally take. If you have to travel ten times to a distant city, why not take ten different routes? Instead of vacationing in the same place as last year, why not a different place, one that stretches your limits?

Comfort is no friend of growth. You learn a lot more from a painful experience than from one where everything goes as planned, so you shouldn't enter into a new endeavor with the sole aim of "succeeding" at it. The education lies in making the attempt and seeing what happens. Sometimes success can even get in the way of growth, because it can lock you into whatever path you were following at the time it occurred.

If you intend to build meta-skills, you need to judiciously avoid permanent solutions and long-term commitments. If you are already locked into a fixed path, then personal growth can be almost impossible because you can't change course in response to what you learn. It is better to construct your life from a series of short-term, ad-hoc solutions whenever possible. Engaging in any almost any meaningful activity requires some sort of commitment of your future time and attention, but to assimilate whatever you learn along the way you must retain the freedom to change. This is part of what separates people who never learn life's lessons from those who learn them quickly and easily.

Meta-skills involve processing life's lessons on an ever-higher plane. Instead of just learning how one city works, you try to understand how all of them work. Take your experiences with a few people and expand them into universal observations about human behavior. Instead of just asking, "Why did this happen to me?" ask "Why does this happen at all?" and figure out ways to avoid this kind of disaster in the future.

Meta-skills at the highest level are called "wisdom". You gain it by stepping out into the real world, making mistakes and learning from them. There is no wisdom without experience, but the truly wise distill the greatest possible value from every experience, good or bad. The wise also engineer their future experiences to gain even more wisdom.

If you want facts, go to the internet. Wisdom isn't about that. Wisdom is a finely tuned method of processing the world based on past experience. You gain it through real-world engagement and a fair amount of detached meditation. You can live on a mountaintop if you want, but you must also to visit the village and haggle in the marketplace, because those are the places your wisdom comes from.

How to Become a Great Artist

By Glenn Campbell in Istanbul

How do you become a great artist? This is a frequent preoccupation of young people who feel they are destined for great things but don't know how to go about it. Almost everything you hope to accomplish is an "art". Whether you hope to become a great filmmaker, writer or painter or you just want to make a lot of money in business, there are certain finely tuned skills you need to acquire. How do you go about obtaining them?

To become skilled in his chosen art, the budding artist usually attempts some logical seeming actions:

1. They buy all the proper supplies and equipment for the art. For example, if you hope to become a great photographer, you first invest in a lot of expensive camera equipment.
2. They enroll in a course. To become a great photographer, you sign up for a photography class at the local community college.
3. They seek a patron. You try to find someone with money or connections who will recognize your raw talent and either support you while you are learning or give you the "big break" you need to get attention.
4. They try to find an environment of like minded people who are also seeking the same skills, who will critique each other and give emotional support to each other on their path to greatness.

These steps seem like they will turn you into a great artist, but in practice they don't work! Why not? Because they tend to distract you from the core requirement of becoming an artist, which is PRACTICING YOUR ART! You have to go out and DO IT, regardless of your equipment or social environment. This is the only way to refine your skills. If you aren't willing to "do" your art—on your own, with the equipment you have, without anyone directing you or giving you praise or guidance—then you aren't going to become a great artist.

To become a great photographer, you need to get out into the real world and start taking photos, right now, with whatever camera you have. You cannot wait for better equipment. You cannot wait for a course to teach you what to do, or a patron or a support group. You have to do it NOW with whatever resources you have or you aren't seriously committed to your art. This is true no matter what your chosen medium may be: You have to do it to get better at it.

There is nothing wrong with having good equipment, but if you find yourself waiting for better equipment before you start your career, then you have fallen into a trap. People like to say, "I'll start taking better photos when I have a better camera," which usually turns into a big fat excuse for never doing it at all. Almost everyone in the modern world has a cellphone camera or equivalent—use that! If your pictures look like crap, it's not the camera's fault; it's your fault for not recognizing the constraints of your medium and tailoring you compositions accordingly. If your cellphone photos are crap, it is pretty much guaranteed your pictures from a $1000 camera will be crap too, because you haven't learned the meta-skill of constantly improving yourself within the resources you currently have.

Every medium and piece of equipment has its constraints and limitations. That is the nature of art: Art is the distillation of the complexities of the world onto a restricted medium. Every great artwork is essentially a cartoon, taking complex ideas and expressing them in a few strokes on a constrained canvas. It is the artist's responsibility to understand the parameters and characteristics of his canvas and adjusting his output accordingly.

It is also tempting to wait for a teacher to tell you what to do. Education will take you through a programmed series of steps over an extended period of time, progressively teaching you the technical skills of your chosen art. The only question is whether this is a better learning method than just taking pictures, looking at the results, adjusting your composition and experimenting with all dials and settings on your camera. In the huge amount of time you spend sitting in class, mostly going through material you are already know, you can usually make a lot more progress on your own. Anything in a textbook is something you can probably pick up on the internet when you are ready to absorb it. The main trouble with classes is they go at the instructor's pace, not yours.

An essential meta-skill of the great artist is to be able to look at his own work, judge it dispassionately, then use that knowledge to improve his own work in the future. No class can teach you this skill, and practice alone won't get you very far unless you have it. "Practice makes perfect," is a false assumption if you don't stop occasionally, look dispassionately at your product and adjust your methods accordingly. Many people practice all their lives at their chosen art and never get better, because they never stop to observe their own work. Once you have the meta-skill of dispassionate self-observation, then all you really need to gain practical skills is to do your art—a lot! New techniques will come to your through experimentation and observation, and over time you will build up an ever growing toolbox of them.

Finding a patron sounds nice, but there aren't many of them around and the competition for access to them is usually intense. If you hope to be a great filmmaker, it would be nice to have a major studio fund your movie idea, but that is about as likely as winning the lottery. In the meantime, if your art really matters to you, you forge ahead. If nothing else, your can make movies with your own video camera, which is far better than anything the earliest filmmakers had. If you can't make one compelling YouTube video after another, without a budget, then frankly you're not a great filmmaker and don't deserve patrons.

The trouble with looking for patrons is the sales effort can end up soaking up all your time and standing in the way of actually practicing your art. There is usually a waiting game involved, and while you are waiting, you are not creating. You also face the frustration of dealing with patrons who are usually clueless about your art. They are businessmen, not artists, and they are usually looking backwards not forward. They are always looking back at the last big thing and trying to reproduce it. They don't have the courage or vision to see the next big thing. Only you can grasp where your art is headed, so you will probably have to prove it without them.

An alternative to trying to find sponsors willing support you on faith is to become damn good at what you do, in fact, and prove it with every artwork. If you paint fantastic pictures, ones that  blow the socks off anyone who looks at them, then sponsorship is less and less important, because the work sells itself. You may have to accept that you have to get to this point on your own, without any outside support. To support yourself while you gain blow-your-socks-off skills, you may have to paint signs or houses for a living. You'll have to be creative about finding things that make money in the real world while allowing you to pursue your chosen art.

Look at that quintessential creative dude, Leonardo da Vinci. Now there's a guy who had a passion for his work regardless of his economic opportunities. He had a few paying gigs—painting Madonnas and portraits of rich people—but you sense that those were just the things he did to pay the rent. Underneath was a real passion to understand and fully exploit every medium he was working in regardless of whether there was a patron willing to support that project. Today, he is known for a multitude of ideas and skills, only a few of which he was ever paid for. That's the way you operate if you truly care about your art. You plow ahead, doing what you need to do to stay alive but not limiting yourself to the narrow needs of your sponsors.

Finally, the young artist is often tempted to join some form of support group. Some aspiring writers in the same city might form a creative writing group where each reads his work aloud and the others critique it. That's another nice-sounding idea that doesn't work in the real world. Soon you are spending most of your time maintaining the organization and less time on actual creation. The quality of the feedback you are getting is also suspect. Each of your critics has his own work to promote, and this bias is going to color his view of yours. Is this useful feedback, or are people just patting each other on the back, telling each other what they want to hear?

People join creative groups because they are lonely, because they want someone to hold their hand on the journey. Unfortunately, creativity is an inherently lonely undertaking. You have to be self-contained and self-motivated if you expect to become great in what you do. It is safe to say that history's greatest writers did not become great by joining writers' groups. Quite the opposite: They tended to lock themselves off from society so they could get things done according to their own muse.

Feedback is certainly helpful when it happens and you can't afford to ignore it, but it has to be honest and unbiased feedback, not a pat on the back from a friend. The fact is, good feedback is very rare in the real world until your final work is released and it is too late. Instead, you have to rely primarily on your meta-skill of self-feedback, looking calmly at your own work and seeing it as it really is.

Becoming great in any art form is a matter of building up a toolbox of both meta- and practical skills. This can only happen by intense, direct, personal experience, coupled with the willingness to look objectively at your own work and modify your techniques accordingly. To modify your techniques, you can't get too invested in the old ones. If you have been painting pictures a certain way for ten years and unexpectedly discover a new technique that is better, you have to be willing to turn on a dime and pick up that new technique, even if it devalues the stuff you have already done.

A committed artist usually looks back on his own past not with reverence but embarrassment. He says, "My god, I can't believe how primitive my work was back then!" Others may not share this sentiment, but it is essential for the artist to continually move on. As he builds his toolbox, old techniques become archaic. Meanwhile, his work gets easier and easier as he spits out more great work with fewer and fewer strokes.

If you are a great artist spewing out great work, day after day, year after year, sooner or later someone will notice. If you are a Leonardo, the market may never fully understand you until you are long dead, but at least you'll sell a few stunning Madonnas here and there.

The old-fashioned way of becoming a great artist is to consistently produce great work. There is no shortcut to getting there. You have to take the time to practice your art and build your toolbox.


For related essays on creativity, see my Virtual Film Studio.