Metacognition may be the most important skill

Metacognition is the ability to step outside of your thinking process to observe, reflect, question, and improve it.

You can be good at metacognition in one domain (eg academic learning) but not in another (eg relationships).

It’s harder to perform metacognition as the difficulty of the task increases. This is why it is important to reflect separately.

The main purpose of a therapist/coach/teacher is doing metacognition for you.

From this article:

Conjecture 5 ter. Extreme cognitive talent is the exceptional outcome of unusually effective metacognitive approaches sustained over long periods of time, producing unusually intense and beneficial secondary stimuli.```

“Secondary stimuli” from the article refers to what goes in your mind as you are taking in primary input (books, movies, whatever). Metacognitive strategies shape this. Are you passively consuming or are you actively asking questions, trying to relate primary input to other things, etc?

Explicit metacognitive practices:

• From How To Read A Book – as you read, ask questions and try to answer them
• Weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual reviews
• Setting aside time to define an ambitious vision, principles, values, etc
• Meditation
• Anki, if cards are written for understanding & improved over time
• Write about what you read
• Reading & knowledge itself compounds – the more you have read and understood, the larger the web of topics you can ask questions about & find relationships between