The world is changing, very fast, as are the life skills needed to navigate it. However, there are some capacities which are still considered more necessary to be successful. The Pew Research Group conducted a survey on several thousands of Americans in order to identify which life skills were considered as the most critical. Here are the top 3 life skills according to the study;
1. Communication skills
Communication skills ranked as the most important. People may differ in how they are able to communicate, but good communicators generally have better lives in many ways. They not only tend to have better marriages, but also make more money. Moreover, communication skills are the first qualifications that employers look for when they analyze job applications.
2. Reading skills
Like communication skills, reading skills seem to be a basic ability that everyone has which doesn't really need to be trained further. But this is not really true. Most students spend time reading in high school and college, but this good habit tend to fade in adulthood. So what is the issue? First, reading make you more intelligent. A study on 1,890 twins showed that the participants who had the best reading skills performed better overall in intelligence tests... even in nonverbal domains.
3. Math skills
Even if math skills are clearly more easily measurable than communication and language skills, they are still undervalued in comparison to more work-related skills and involving math, such as engineering, science, or business. In fact, strong math skills are at least as useful as communication and reading abilities. Research has even revealed that having good math skills at an early age is the best predictor for later academic success. The main problem is the old and lasting popular belief according to which some lucky people would be born good at mathematics, while others would be just born cursed at it. A very ludicrous and wrong concept.
Picture: Newcomer at school, by Emily Shanks (Wikipedia)
