Build a Better Future by Boosting Overlapping Skills
Do you deliberately grow your skills? Will you?..
I was reviewing my old notes when I stumbled on something shocking. It was a link I’d saved 10 years ago, when my life was drastically different. It was a piece of advice about improving your skills, and it might have been the foundation for everything that followed in my life.
Long before 2016, before we entered our current age of bizarre news, before he became an unhinged self-proclaimed political commentator, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, was a damn fine blogger. His advice on life, business, and success was spot on. This blog post from 2007 changed my life.
When I first saw it, I was 26, working in the most junior analyst position imaginable, and constantly trying to find some way to get ahead, some hack, some secret knowledge. I devoured Paul Graham’s lectures and essays. (They are quite good: you should read them. Head over yonder.) I took long Greyhound road trips to Omaha to listen to Warren Buffett’s shareholder Q&A sessions. (You didn’t need to own shares: each year, he flooded the market with $5 passes so anyone could attend.) I checked out library books on strategy, on business, on unorthodox thinking. I was making $14 an hour in a hot sweltering building with no air conditioning, and I lived in the…
