advantage........................

 

In a world where technical skills become commoditised, your character becomes your competitive advantage.

-Nicholas Bate

A stealth cause.....................

 

.......................................of half of our housing affordability issues too:

When shop classes were tossed, so too went a number of practical skills related to organizing, measuring, and safety; skills that many of us still use when making minor home repairs.

The omission of such classes is especially irritating as many of the students who went on to college would have been wealthier and happier had they instead gone to trade schools.

-Michael Wade, from this episode

a life skill....................

 

crucial........................

 

Living within your means is a crucial financial skill for anyone.  It is especially valuable to someone who just fell into big bucks.

-Barry Ritholtz

choose wisely.......................

 

Underrated life skill: Surrounding yourself with people who make you feel better.

Overrated life skill: Surrounding yourself with people who make you look better.

-Mark Manson

rating this mostly true............

 

And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

-as culled from this VDH post

Learned skills.......................

 

Once upon a time, social skills were acquired and honed during front porch conversations with neighbors, Little League games, bowling tournaments, poker or bridge nights, board games, and club meetings.

Those weren’t just meetings and events. They were training sessions in the soft skills that often are missing in the modern workplace. In those old-fashioned exchanges, we learned how to read one another, how to listen and tell jokes and stories along with how to deliver or receive sensitive news. Those are skills that require practice, often involving more than a few fumbles, and are rarely completely mastered.

-Michael Wade

creative readjustments......................

 

You don't want to abandon the skills and experience you have gained, but to find a new way to apply them.  Your eye is on the future, not the past.  Often such creative readjustments lead to a superior path.

-Robert Greene, as quoted in The Way of the Champion

skills.............................

Sometimes, those focused on remaining calm and contained are not always learning the skills necessary to perform, to function in the world.  They may be stable and not raise their voice in the kitchen, but they don't know how to make salad dressing.  They may meditate steadfastly but not develop their communication skills.  While busy generating calm, beautiful states of mind, they are not developing the skills, capacities, and practices that could actually and realistically manifest delicious food or wholesome relationships.

-Edward Espe Brown, No Recipe: cooking as a spiritual practice 

Some useful............................

 

........................................and overlooked skills.

creeping concealment.................

      The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.  And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to "hide the works," rendering many of the devices we depend on every day unintelligible to direct inspection.  Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones) and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.  This creeping concealment takes various forms.  The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards.  By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods.  It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

-Matthew B. Crawford,  Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Ed. Note:  As a college junior, my parents, concerned about my apparent aimlessness, had me take one of those personality tests designed to uncover what profession one might be good at.  All I remember about the results was a warning that I should avoid anything to do with "spatial relations."  That made abundant sense, as I was totally lost viewing a "conceptual schematic."  Would have been easier to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Be careful what you wish for.............

      Driverless cars will finally solve the problem of moving people around with maximum efficiency, by ceding human control to impersonal algorithms.  They promise to bring a messy, dangerous domain of life under control at last.  Traffic jams will likely become a thing of the past, and accidents will be greatly reduced.  So we are told at any rate.

     In this case we can detect a familiar pattern.  Driverless cars are one instance of a wider shift in our relationship to the physical world, in which the demands of competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience.  The skilled practitioner becomes a passive beneficiary of something more systematic, rendering his skill obsolete.  

-Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

thanks Michael

Reconditioning....................

 My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills.  These are not things you are born with.  Yes, there is a genetic range.  And a lot of it is conditioning from your environment, but you can un-condition and recondition yourself.

You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can.

It's a skill.  Just like nutrition is a skill, dieting is a skill, working out is a skill, making money is a skill, meeting girls and guys is a skill.  It starts with realizing they're skills you can learn.  When you put your intention and focus on it, the world can become a better place.

When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you.

When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.

-The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

their special skill....................

 Looking back over the centuries, or even if looking only at the present, we can clearly observe that many men have made their living, often a very good living, from their special skill in applying weapons of violence, and that these activities have had a very large part in determining what uses were made of scarce resources.

-Frederic C. Lane

Patient.............................

 

Auguste Rodin      1897      Bust of Victor Hugo

     Though possessed of great technical skill himself, Rodin did not care for the word.  It was skill—as defined by him, at least—that he ascribed the ease and panache with which so many sculptors achieved unmerited success.  They only saw and reproduced the outer skin of what they saw, and their statues were like empty shells.  "Skill should be distrusted.  What people generally mean by the word 'skill' is the dexterity with which someone evades a problem by fostering a belief that he has surmounted it instead of tackling it honestly.  Myself, I have had an extraordinarily quick hand since my youth.  I could work quickly if I chose to, but I produce slowly in order to do well.  Besides, it never was in my nature to hurry.  I ponder things more, and I want more.  An artist should be patient as well as knowledgeable."

Bernard Champigneulle. Rodin

Opening paragraphs............................

 The central premise of this book is that impossible has a formula.  Whenever we see the impossible become possible, we are witnessing the end result of a quartet of skills—motivation, learning, creativity, and flow—expertly applies and significantly amplified.

-Steven Kotler,  The Art Of Impossible

Not everyone will admire this skill set..............

      All the talking, all the horse-trading came down to sniffing out what the many players needed to come to terms, a process that was Baker at his strongest.  He was at heart a canny pol who knew Congress well, knew who could deliver, knew how to play them off each other just enough to get them to give a little, knew he needed to give enough himself so that everyone could come out of the negotiation feeling they had won.  Baker had a talent for connection.  He could be whatever he needed to be at the moment it was necessary.  The young man who slid back and forth from Texas to Princeton, from the Ivy Club in the spring to the wildcatter's rig in the summer, now applied the same skills on Capitol Hill.

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

Russell as an optimist..................?

    "We have also become, in certain respects, progressively less like animals.  I can think in particular of two respects:  first, that acquired, as opposed to congenital, skills play a continually increasing part in human life, and, secondly, that forethought more and more dominates impulse.  In these respects we have certainly become progressively less like animals."

-Bertrand Russell, as culled from here

Use it, or lose it............................

When was the last time you committed something to memory?  Now that we have 4G phones we don't need to remember anything, really, yet we're also aware this is a small disaster.  Our short- and long-term memories suffer for it.
     Merely doing what one has always done, such as a specialist does, strengthens existing networks but builds no new ones in the brain.  It also means that short- and medium-term memory are used less and less.  The lesson - an intuitive one only recently supported by scientific research - is simple:  if you do not use your memory, it will atrophy.   If you don't visit new places where you are required to orientate yourself by, for example, learning where shops are, finding the way back to your hotel, ore even remembering where you parked your car, then you'll gradually lose even this basic skill.  And it does help to think of memory as a skill.

-Robert Twigger,  micro mastery:  Learn Small, Learn Fast, and Unlock Your Potential to Achieve Anything

The generous long game..............

"If you show up and show up and show up, and care enough to learn to connect, you will have a skill for life."

-Seth Godin, as culled from here