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The example of Ulysses S. Grant being the best student in his class for painting makes it clear that acquisition of these so called expiring skills is associate
by vii 6y ago
The example of Ulysses S. Grant being the best student in his class for painting makes it clear that acquisition of these so called expiring skills is associated with long term success. The list of non-expiring skills has good intentions but the entries are weak and unjustified. It's odd that the article keeps emphasizing getting along with people so many times as a non-expiring skills when President Grant was famous for being strong-willed. It might be inferred from his career that conflict even with authority is actually a valuable skill, though you could argue it goes with the many bad behaviors he exhibited which turned out to be not a disqualification for highest office.
To be successful in a competitive field like business or the military you gain advantage by improving your mechanics. These skills, like wielding a sword, drawing accurately as in the article or in software using a particular programming language, allow you to succeed at specific tasks. This causes you to be respected by other practitioners, which gives you practice in the next level of skills for larger scale collaborations.
As tools change, you have to keep up. Leadership skills like motivating people, facilitating decisions, and persisting through adversity are generalisable across situations. However if you are unfamiliar with the mechanics you will trust the wrong people, not know which questions to push on, and persist in expensive mistakes. You can't skip these expiring skills. They are an essential foundation.
- wenc 6y agoVery true. To me, categorizing skills on the dimension of expiring vs non-expiring seems to be implying the latter has greater value than the former. This isn't true in all situations. Foundational skills are just that -- foundational, in that they are a base to build upon. The stronger your foundation, the stronger your base on which other skills are attached. That said, the base itself it rarely enough. I'm sure we've met people who've mastered the foundations but have never done anything interesting in their lives. I have friends who were super good at calculus and linear algebra (the foundations for engineering math) in college but never amounted to much in their careers. On the other hand, it is sometimes in acquiring so-called expiring skills that we begin to see patterns of the foundations skills that would be useful. Thoughtful programmers without CS degrees -- who have written code for years -- often find SICP a revelation that validates or corroborates their experience in the real world. On the other hand a college instructor who's taught SICP for years and can recite it from memory may never know how to apply it because he/she has never learn the "expiring" skills necessary to execute in the real world. Some people change the world on so-called "expiring skills" -- because even though they are only useful for a season, they might be very high leverage during that season, and it gets you into the game. Once you're inside you can pivot. I knew a bunch of folks (with no prior programming backgrounds) who got their start from PHP (an expiring skill) and are doing well today. I cut my teeth real-world programming with Perl (arguably a expiring skill). It was very much non-foundational (I would never do things today the way I did them in Perl) but it was my foray into real-life programming and it got me gigs. I wouldn't have gotten into programming if I had studied programming via a foundational CS curriculum.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoIf you look at all the people who achieved military success the great majority of them had the right skills at the right time. Grant and Sherman were field generals who understood how to adapt the new tactics and technology. Eisenhower and Zhukov were staff officers who knew how to juggle the interests of many competing stakeholders. Eisenhower in particular was very light on "expiring skills"