Meta competency is the ability to set yourself up for success. Have you ever been in a situations where you thrived, and then you were like hell ya I’m awesome I can do this!
Then your walking around with your head held high like a rooster that just won first place in a seed eating contest beating out the duck that thinks he’s better than you because he can fly farther, when someone asks you to do that exact same thing. Your already feeling like the cock of the walk, so you strut over look over their shoulder and realize you have no idea what you’re doing. Not only do you not know what you are doing you don’t even know why you don’t know what you are doing. So you quickly make something up to not lose face, and run out feeling guilt and shame and wondering if that duck is maybe right and you should have become a T-Rex instead.
How to become meta competent in a given field
Not to be confused with common skills that are useful cross industry. While every work will require different skill and knowledge sets, and each have their own idiosyncrecies that you will have to go out and learn yourself. I have created some categories of.
- Meta Awareness: You got to know how you fit into your work, how your work fits into your field, and how your field fits into general society
- Meta Concentration: You need to remember to always be focusing on your path, building skills and collecting information. People will tell you things are unimportant or unrelated. Often they are right and being able to filter relevant information is important. But also all the greatest arbitrages and new insights come from synthesizing information that people thought wasn’t important or relevant but kept showing up and effecting things.
- Meta Relationship: This is your relationship with your work. Why are you doing this? Whatever answer is real to you is fine, but it’s important that it’s real and that you know it. If you are in it for the money that’s great find out where the most money you can get is. Are you here because you love it? Great what are the parts you love the most and how do you make your work all of that? Is it because you want to have an effect on the world? Great what effect is that and where are the leverage points?
Is this a good relationship Are you getting out more than you are putting in? Is what you are putting in helpful to the people around you and the industry at large? - Environmental Control: A gritty worker can work in all environments, a meta competent worker doesn’t have to. Have you ever competed against someone and it wasn’t fair because their circumstances made it easy for them? Like that but do it on purpose. We will cover relating to bosses, mentors, coworkers, and noobs, as well as making your workspace easy to do work in. Choosing where to and with whom to work is essential for most jobs, as is getting and maintaining the proper equipment like a chef’s knife or a spreadsheet. Either way keep it clean and sharp.
- Idiosyncratic specialization: Learning the specific edges of your field, like weird cases or super specific knowledge that is only relevant to you makes you seem like you know everything and can save projects in a crisis that would have otherwise failed
- Networking and signaling: Signaling is letting people know that you get it and you are ingroup. Every field has it’s own way of showing that you know what is going on and are not so pleb that just showed up. For example in kitchens all cooks know that all salt is the same chemical make up (Sodium chloride) and the only difference is the shape and sometimes color. If you start asking what kind of salt was used in a dish where it was dissolved then people won’t take you seriously.
However with chemists its very different. In chemistry salt is a substance produced by the reaction of an acid with a base. If you assume that salt is table salt they will not take you seriously as a chemist. Neither is more right than the other, the word has different meanings in different circumstances.
