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Episode-1052- The Need for Skill Set Development in a Changing World — 15 Comments

  1. Excellent!
    “With the development of a skill comes self-confidence, and with that self confidence we become a more fully alive human being”

  2. Jack,
    My daughter goes to Texas A&M and my son goes to Blinn. He had hoped to go to A&M on an engineering degree. However, because the demand from students for engineering degrees is so high and competitive, Texas A&M requires that engineering students to enter as freshman. A&M’s SAT/ACT test score requirements have also increased http://admissions.tamu.edu/freshmen/gettingin/tipsApplying/testScores.aspx

    My son has decided to go to Texas Tech in the fall and has been accepted. As for A&M, since a lot of kids want to go there they will first go to Blinn and then transfer into A&M on an Agriculture degree (poultry science) with hopes of then changing majors. Most students find themselves stuck in the Ag Department unable to transfer out and into, say, a business degree.

    Myself, I went to community college without intending to get a college degree. I was a SOTA (student over traditional age, mid 20yr old) At the time I didn’t think I was 4 year degree material. Changed my mind and applied to UNT (then NTSU) as a business major. Going to community college to get all the freshman and sophomore classes out of the way was ideal. It was cheaper and I think I got more out of those classes than if I’d gone into UNT as a freshman.

    Here’s the kick in the pants for me since I’m self employed: all the accounting I use today I learned in community college. I could’ve saved a lot of money and time by not getting the 4 year degree.

  3. Great show on why self development trumps having stuff for survival. The 13 skills website is a great way to lay the foundation to teach Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and kids in schools skills they don’t learn in school. I put the bug in my wife’s ear as a Girl Scout Leader to use the site.

  4. Jack, you were in fine form today! The second main part of the broadcast really brought together a lot of important threads with the skill of a novelist and the touch of a philosopher. Listened just once, but I’ll be going back to this one again and again. I’m drafting my 13 skills now and will enter them the way I have learnt from you: challenging (with the risk of failure), skills that will be useful (if times get tough …), and skills I can impart to others, all described in a way that makes me accountable.

  5. When I was in high school, I know people who can knit hats and make clothes. I know classmates who can fix cars and create electronic items like doorbell and tv scrambler.

    Nowadays, all the clothing are Made in China. When you need to install a doorbell, you purchase it in Home Depot. Check it next time and see where it is made….

    Jack is right. Nothing is made here any more. We do not know how to make anything any more. I believe that’s why we are now in such deep water.

  6. Such a great episode, at times I felt like I was listening to myself, which is either a compliment or extremely narcissistic… 😀

  7. Jack, In Tulsa there are 4 four year universities that use Tulsa Community College to educate for the first 2 years of their 4 year degrees. These 4 year universities are therefore relieved of the expense of maintaining extra facilities and staff. Until today I thought Tulsa was an anomaly in this and that a typical community(2 year) college elsewhere was ill equipped to provide more advanced instruction as you were. I too learned from this. Thanks for sharing.

  8. I work in a major bank in a major city; most of my co-workers are urbanites in their 20s. When people learn I have or work on skills related to canning, hunting, shooting, and so on I usually get 10% who are interested, 60% who don’t understand why I do it, and 30% who mock me for being “behind the times”. Mind you, it’s usually this last group that gets caught in the elevator doors because they have their heads down looking at their iPhones with their earbuds on when the doors close on them.

  9. Liked the show. I know you don’t want to turn it into the gun rights show, but I’m glad you addressed this issue so thoroughly. There are many many people that are truely ignorant about what is going on. And it’s nice to have material to share on the issue.

    Also, I like that you are calling people out that have achieved their 13in13 goals before the end of January. If the goal is so easy to accomplish why bother setting one? It’s like saying my goal was to get out of bed today, and unless you’re 600lbs that is not a worthy goal. It also diminishes the achievments of others that have set high goals for themselves and requires some pain to achieve.

  10. When you were making the example and talking about Gov employees not paying taxes, lawfully they are the ONLY ones that are SUPPOSED TO pay personal income taxes, but, most of John Q Public does not realize that.

  11. Reminds me of the following quote from Robert Heinlein:

    A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
    -Robert A. Heinlein

  12. Jack, you asked for ideas for youtube mini-postings. Could you do lessons on the Constitution and break it down for those who have had little or no experience with learning any of it? That would make a very nice series.

    Thank you!

  13. Ooh! I like the idea of breaking down the meaning of the Constitution. It was so boring in school that most of us missed the essence of it. Jack has enough talent at teaching that I bet we could appreciate it much more than before when we tried to learn it in a dry class room environment.

  14. Hard skills are very valuable. They are only one side of the equation. The other side is problem-solving, seeing the larger picture, having a broad scope and breadth of more generalized knowledge. I’ve heard it said that people will change jobs–what, ten or more times in a career now? So people who get highly specialized training often find themselves jobless with skills that were marketable yesterday but not today. Kinda like how punch card operators were the wave of the future when I was in eighth grade. Not so much today. . .

    I have in mind the kind of classical education that our founders were more likely to have received. Not simply in reading, writing, and math, or honed in to business management, bioethics, or animal husbandry, but in logic, rhetoric, physics, philosophy (the useable kind, not this post-modern babble that leaves man wondering if anything is even real), art, music, literature, theology. These things stood them well in a world much more difficult than ours, more close to the bone, more immediate and demanding.

    I am not advocating this over skills, but that they serve each other wonderfully, and that a mind deep and rich in both is a mind that will survive and thrive, and continue to look out at the world in wonder in even the most difficult of circumstances–when one has a front row seat in Hell, but with a view of the glories of heaven on earth (as one survivor of shipwreck described his experience).