What’s The Most Important Skill a Person can Learn?

What would you say is the most important skill you can learn? In my experience, it is the ability to learn new skills and let go of old ones. This may seem trite, like a word play or a cop-out (like wishing for more wishes from a genie), but my experience makes me a sincere believer in it.

Working in web design in the last 10 years is an extreme case of watching technology change under your feet and watching your skills become obsolete almost as fast as you learn them. This happens so often that it becomes the rule rather than the exception, and you find yourself in a perpetual state of learning, unlearning and relearning without quite reaching your desired level of expertise.

The Unbearable state of transience

Of course, web technology is not the norm and other fields move at a much slower pace. But more and more technology is touching all of our lives, and many people are uncomfortable with this state of non permanence. People in other slower-moving fields may learn a lesson or two from the fast movers. Here are some lessons I learned:

• The new thing always seems inferior than the one you already know
• When you set out to learn a new technology that replaces the one you’re comfortable with, you always start by believing that the tried and true method you know is better. I believed, really believed, that table-based layouts were better than semantic HTML. I was convinced, really convinced, that procedural php is more efficient than Object Oriented PHP. And don’t get me started about my old conviction that “pure” CSS is tarnished by preprocessors like SASS. In all these cases, I eventually smiled at how ignorant I was. The lesson here is that if there’s universal acclaim for a new way of doing things, don’t stick around the old way, you’ll thank yourself later
• Your value is not in what you already know, but in your ability to learn and build on it
• A teacher in AUB once told me that the most important thing we learn in school is the ability to teach ourselves new things. That is what is truly valuable about education. We shouldn’t get attached to the stuff we already know because we can learn other things in the same way we learned that old thing. A writer’s worth is not in the novels she already wrote, but in her ability to write new, better ones
• Become less sentimental and more practical
• Sentimentality is really the byproduct of attachment to the way something has always been. The “good old days” are only good because they are in your comfort zone, a place where you know how everything is done, with none of the uncertainty and newness. Don’t be sentimental. Horses are not better than cars and paper books are not better than ebooks. There’s something you like very much right now that will become obsoleted soon. Learn to accept that. This is how progress has always been but now this process is accelerating
• Sleep on it
• Finally a practical tip: Sleeping has the magical ability of turning something you were struggling with yesterday into stuff you understand well. The implication of this is that it doesn’t matter whether or not you understand what you’re learning as long as you’re trying hard. You may surprise yourself and wake up tomorrow as a smarter person