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Untaught Skills
Why self-development is critical for learning business meta-skills
It’s strange how many business skills are never taught to us. Despite their impact on our daily work, talents such as writing, presenting, and managing people, are left to people to develop on their own.
For example, the last significant writing many people did was at university, where the emphasis was on sounding as smart as you can. This involves long words, endless sentences, and far too many semi-colons. You don’t hit a fifteen-thousand-word dissertation target by writing concise prose.
While you remain in academia, this fancy-pants writing serves you well. But outside of school, punchy writing is much more useful. Simple words and short sentences convey thoughts more effectively than flowery prose. And without long words to hide behind, your thinking is laid bare for all to see. Better writing forces you to organise your thoughts.
Several years ago, I realised I had fallen into this trap. I thought I was a reasonably good writer, but I was wallowing in fancy-pants mode. To help shake me out of this, I read many books on the topic. Several Short Sentences about Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg and On Writing Well by William Zinsser were the most transformative for me. I discovered good writing is revealed through editing, and…
