Maybe you graduated top of your college class. Maybe you have an MBA and complete the Saturday edition of the New York Times crossword in one sitting. Maybe you pride yourself on your ability to correct your colleagues’ grammar and email typos. Unfortunately, says Professor Edward D. Hess, none of that will matter as we advance in an increasingly tech-driven world.

“You might consider yourself a great intellectual, but book smarts won’t be all that relevant as companies increase their use of robots and smart machines,” says Hess, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business and author of Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization.

“What will matter is being an adaptive learner—someone who knows what you don’t know and how to learn it by asking the right questions, someone who can think critically and innovatively, someone who can really listen with an open mind and collaborate well with others.”

Here, Hess examines the 21st century learning skills you will need to be successful in a tech-driven world:

Get comfortable with “not knowing”
None of us are as smart as we think we are. And smart people know this. To learn, we need to know what we don’t know.

“In the technology-enabled world, how much you know will be irrelevant, because smart machines and the Internet will always know more than you,” says Hess. “What will be more important is knowing what you don’t know and knowing how to learn—in other words, the smartest people will be focused on continuously learning. It is important to learn how and when to make your thinking more intentional and deliberate. You must actively seek to develop your critical thinking and innovative thinking skills.”

Quiet your ego to embrace open-mindedness
Humans are naturally unwilling to listen to challenges to our thinking. But to become a more effective learner, you’ll have to train your brain to be emotionally non-defensive. You can no longer define yourself by what you know or by your ideas. Rather, you should define yourself as a good learner who uses good thinking, listening, and collaborating processes.

“Today people must learn to stress-test their beliefs and preconceived notions, not constantly seek to confirm them,” Hess notes. “To make that process easier, people will have to learn to separate their ideas from their self-worth. Changing a previously held belief doesn’t mean you are a bad or stupid person. It simply means you’ve learned to adapt your thinking based on new information or facts that you’ve received.”

Be an “inner-directed” learner
Too often people are driven primarily by external rewards. Seeing learning as a way to obtain more money, respect, or love can result in your not accepting challenging learning opportunities because you want to avoid failures and making mistakes. In a business world where human contributions will come primarily through innovation—a process in which failure is a given—those motivated to avoid mistakes or failures will not be successful. Learning is its own reward.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes
Along with the fear of failure discussed above comes a fear of making mistakes. To proceed more courageously into the future, you need to adopt a different mindset about mistakes. Rather than look at them as something you’ve done wrong, it’s important to begin looking at them as learning opportunities.

“Learning is not an efficient 99 per cent defect-free process,” explains Hess. “Far from it. Mistakes have to be valued as learning opportunities. In fact, as long as you aren’t making the same mistakes over and over again, mistakes can be good. The key is making sure you’re learning from them.”

Be willing to try
People who are confident in their own ability to meet a challenge or take on the unknown (within reason) are more likely to try new things. They believe they will be okay dealing with newness or uncertainty. “This confidence is called ‘self-efficacy,'” notes Hess. “To put it most simply, if we believe we can do something, we are more likely to try it. People can build self-efficacy by putting themselves in challenging situations that they have the ability to handle well. As their confidence grows, they’ll be more willing and capable of taking on even more challenging tasks.”

Develop your emotional intelligence (EI)
Emotional intelligence, generally understood, is the ability to be aware of and manage one’s emotions. It plays an important role in your ability to recognize and appraise verbal and nonverbal information, to access emotions in order to aid in creativity and problem solving, to process your own feelings and assess those of others, and to regulate your own emotions and manage those of others. Managing your emotions and understanding those of others will allow you to be a successful collaborator.

Seek out constructive feedback.
Negative feedback is essential if you want to become the best in your field. It’s important to pause and reflect rather than automatically defend, deflect, or deny when you receive negative feedback.

“Rather than getting the kind of specific, constructive feedback that can help us improve our skills, most of us will receive guarded or politically correct feedback that is fairly useless in practice,” notes Hess. “Thoughtful and constructive feedback is a valuable thing, especially when you can foster your mindset to absorb and not deflect it.”