Expiring vs. Permanent Skills · Collaborative Fund

Robert Walter Weir was one of the most popular instructors at West Point in the mid-1800s. Which is odd at a military academy, because he taught painting and drawing. Weir’s art classes were mandatory at West Point. Art can broaden your perspective, but that wasn’t the point. Nineteenth-century West Point cadets needed to be good at drawing because cartography was in its infancy. High-quality maps of the United States – let alone, say, Mexico – were scarce, if they existed at all. Military officers were expected to draw maps on the fly and record a battlefield’s topography. It wasn’t a niche; it was vital to war. Weir’s favorite student, who passed the time at West Point drawing river bends and mountain ranges, was Ulysses S. Grant. West Point no longer offers drawing or painting classes. Its sole cartography course emphasizes mapping software and technology, as you might expect. Drawing was an expiring military skill. Critical in one era, diminished in the next, unmentionable thereafter. A lot of things work that way. Every field has two kinds of skills: Expiring skills, which are vital at a given time but prone to diminishing as technology improves and a field evolves. Permanent skills, which were as essential 100 years ago as they are today, and will still be 100 years from now. Both are important. But they’re treated differently. Expiring skills tend to get more attention. They’re more likely to be the cool new thing, and a key driver of an industry’s short-term performance. They’re what employers value and employees flaunt. Permanent skills are different. They’ve been around a long time, which makes them look stale and basic. They can be hard to define and quantify, which gives the impression of fortune-cookie wisdom vs. a hard skill. But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them quiet importance. When several previous generations have worked on a skill that’s directly relevant to you, you have a deep well of relevant examples to study. And when you can spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, the payoffs can be ridiculous. Anything that compounds over decades usually is. A few permanent skills that apply to many fields: Not being a jerk. Being a jerk offsets being talented one for one, if not more. They don’t teach this in school, but it’s the single most important career skill. Part of this includes empathizing with jerks who are being jerks because they’re dealing with stress. The willingness to adapt views you wish were permanent. Accepting when expiring skills have run their course. A lot of what we believe about our fields is either right but temporary, or wrong but convincing. Sam Arbesman’s book The Half-Life of Facts makes this uncomfortably clear. “Medical knowledge about cirrhosis or hepatitis takes about forty-five years for half of it to be disproven or become out-of-date,” he writes. “This is about twice the half-life of the actual radioisotope samarium-151.” Getting along with people you disagree with. Equally smart people can come to different conclusions. And as Larry Summers once noted, “There are idiots; look around.” Some of these people can be avoided. Many can’t. You have to deal with them diplomatically. People who view every disagreement as a battle that must be won before moving on end up stuck and bitter. Getting to the point. Everyone’s busy. Make your point and get out of their way. Respecting luck as much as you respect risk. Acknowledging risk is when something happens outside of your control that influences outcomes and you realize it might happen again. Acknowledging luck is when something happens outside of our control that influences outcomes and you realize it might not happen again. Staying out of the way as much as you offer to help. You can add as much value by getting out of people’s way and minimizing your burden as you can by actively helping. This is especially important for two groups: new employees eager to get involved, and senior managers eager to get involved. Accepting a certain degree of hassle and nonsense when reality demands it. The ability to be comfortable being miserable. Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, said the most remarkable thing about the president’s paralysis was how little it seemed to bother him. He told her: “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say ’that’s all right,’ and drink it.” A useful and permanent skill in a world that’s constantly breaking and evolving. The ability to distinguish “temporarily out of favor” from “wrong.” Endurance is key because every industry is cyclical, and putting up with its dark days is the only way to ensure you’re part of the good ones. Gracefully exiting when you realize that whatever fueled past success doesn’t work anymore is also key. Warren Buffett says his favorite holding period is forever, then dumped $7 billion worth of airline stocks based on a few weeks of data. That might lo

“Have you ever watched Inside the Actors Studio? The host, James Lipton, invariably asks his guests, “What factors make you decide to take a particular role?” The actor always answers: “Because I’m afraid of it.””

— The War of Art by Steven Pressfield https://a.co/byFeRJx

“Heaven and Earth are meeting in a storm that, when it’s over, will leave the air purer and the fields fertile, but before that happens, houses will be destroyed, centuries-old trees will topple, paradises will be flooded.”

— Aleph by Paulo Coelho https://a.co/cfOu5ja

“When a sense of dissatisfaction persists, that means it was placed there by God for one reason only: you need to change everything and move forward.”

— Aleph by Paulo Coelho https://a.co/0J87Lcb

““You’re not here anymore. You’ve got to leave in order to return to the present.””

— Aleph by Paulo Coelho https://a.co/6FWXQN3

““There’s no point sitting here, using words that mean nothing. Go and experiment. It’s time you got out of here. Go and re-conquer your kingdom, which has grown corrupted by routine. Stop repeating the same lesson, because you won’t learn anything new that way.””

— Aleph by Paulo Coelho https://a.co/6b8GNXf

“In India, they use the word ‘karma,’ for lack of any better term. But it’s a concept that’s rarely given a proper explanation. It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.”"

— Aleph by Paulo Coelho https://a.co/0hVgS5H

““I’m filled with doubt, especially about my faith,” I say. “Good. It’s doubt that drives a man onward.””

— Aleph by Paulo Coelho https://a.co/6r1XVVl

“My search for wisdom, peace of mind, and an awareness of realities visible and invisible has become routine and pointless.”

— Aleph by Paulo Coelho https://a.co/hT3kZXY

“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”

— The War of Art by Steven Pressfield https://a.co/6sJg1aj

“In my opinion, the most important lesson that you can learn from reading this book is that you will not get rich quickly by day trading.”

— How to Day Trade for a Living: Tools, Tactics, Money Management, Discipline and Trading Psychology by Andrew Aziz https://a.co/fmI1u8k

The things we really want to do are…

“The things we really want to do are usually the ones that scare us the most. The things you’ll not feel conflicted about are the choices that leave no one hurt.”

— What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question by Po Bronson https://a.co/izynNz8

Ask HN: How do I start my own consulting firm? | Hacker News

Here are some things to consider about consulting:Sales/Selling is the last thing on your list and salesperson is only a maybe. Reverse all of your priorities because selling and relationships are the most difficult things to master for a consulting company and you will die without those skills.In consulting, tech talent < sales/relationship talent. In fact, if you’re great at the latter go ahead and get started now because there are lots of great tech people who don’t want to do it and will come work for you on a nice contract rate.To give you an example of this I once worked with a consultant who was a technical rock star, and another consultant who was supposed to be technical but was actually pretty below average. The below average guy was more successful because he was great when talking with the customers and they loved him. He knew enough to talk through problems at a high level, explained things well, and made them feel comfortable that things we’re on the right track. If he didn’t know something, no problem, he just went and found someone with the answer.Besides those soft skills he knew how to set and manage expectations. You may be used to the best results winning, but if you don’t manage and then exceed expectations it doesn’t matter. People love you when they expect 80 out of 100 and you deliver 88. They will not be happy and often fire you if expecting 100 out of 100 and you deliver 92. You will wonder how you just lost to a competitor who is not “as good” as you.Even if you have pretty good soft skills, do you want to spend time constantly using them? I thought you liked the tech side? If you like both then great because someone has to spends tons of time doing it to sell, maintain, and expand the work and your success depends on how good they are at it.For many people this will all be hard to believe, or they think it’s exaggerated, or that it’s easy to just hire someone to do it. That’s fine, I hope you have great success. Drop me a line in a couple years to say how things turned out.

For would be entrepreneurs he calls them wantrapreneurs

“For would-be entrepreneurs (he calls them “wantrapreneurs”), or entrepreneurs who’ve grown a little too comfortable, Noah has a recommendation—ask for 10% off of your next few coffees. “Go up to the counter and order coffee. If you don’t drink coffee, order tea. If you don’t drink tea, order water. I don’t care. Then just ask for 10% off. . . . The coffee challenge sounds kind of silly, but the whole point is that—in business and in life—you don’t have to be on the extreme, but you have to ask for things, and you have to put yourself out there.””

I remember walking out of the station around…

“I remember walking out of the station around midnight. It was up on the top of this mountain, a beautiful place. I remember looking out and just saying, ‘Oh, my God, when am I going to like this? When am I going to really be happy with the work that I’m churning out?’ I look back on that all the time . . . if I could go back and just tell myself, ‘Don’t stress about it, it’s all going to work out in the end.’”

I think we need to teach kids two…

““I think we need to teach kids two things: 1) how to lead, and 2) how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people. . . .”

— Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss https://a.co/62h4x27

What could possibly be more important than your…

““What could possibly be more important than your kid? Please don’t play the busy card. If you spend 2 hours a day without an electronic device, looking your kid in the eye, talking to them and solving interesting problems, you will raise a different kid than someone who doesn’t do that. That’s one of the reasons why I cook dinner every night. Because what a wonderful, semi-distracted environment in which the kid can tell you the truth. For you to have low-stakes but superimportant conversations with someone who’s important to you.””

Streets Of Cairo – Everything2.com

There’s a place in France{.populated}__, Where the naked ladies dance. There’s a hole in the wall Where the men watch it all

https://everything2.com/title/Streets+Of+Cairo

Because most of us say yes to too…

““Because most of us say yes to too much stuff, and then, we let these little, mediocre things fill our lives. . . . The problem is, when that occasional, ‘Oh my God, hell yeah!’ thing comes along, you don’t have enough time to give it the attention that you should, because you’ve said yes to too much other little, half-ass stuff, right? Once I started applying this, my life just opened up.””

Well I meet a lot of 30…

“DEREK: “Well, I meet a lot of 30-year-olds who are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? They get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing, because they want to do them all: ‘Why do I have to choose? I don’t know what to choose!’ But the problem is, if you’re thinking short-term, then [you act as though] if you don’t do them all this week, they won’t happen. The solution is to think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another.”