A Complete List of Skills You Need for Enduring Success

Understand why technical skills are not enough

What Skills do I Need to Develop to Become Successful in My Field?

Rise and Shine — Image by the author (Midjourney)

One questions that I am frequently asked during the Q&A sessions of my lectures is:

What skills do I need to develop to become successful in my field?

Because I sit at the intersection of design and computation, when people ask about skills, they usually refer to technical ones.

They expect me to tell them the name of the software or the programming language they need to learn to become successful.

I say:

Technical skills help us get better in what we do, but they don’t necessarily make us successful.

Here is the reason:

The question above focuses on the technique of making, which is falsely thought to be the cause success.

Rather, success is a byproduct of a process, during which we discover ways to use the tools to produce meaning and value.