Ask HN: What is the most attractive, valuable, and learnable skill? Attractive defined as increases your mate value. Valuable defined as increases your income. Learnable defined as fluency in 2 years or less. |
Ask HN: What is the most attractive, valuable, and learnable skill? Attractive defined as increases your mate value. Valuable defined as increases your income. Learnable defined as fluency in 2 years or less. |
Attractive: People love other people who listen to them and provide thoughtful feedback.
Valuable: Communication is basically all that managers, salespeople, politicians, and consultants do. You can make enormous amounts of money without having any concrete technical skills. I have a friend who talked his way to being the head of digital at a massive corporation (moving up through social media ranks). He's 29 and has absolutely no skills other than talking.
Learnable: People will dispute this, but with concerted work and a willingness to go (way) out of your comfort zone, you can learn to communicate. For a lot of people, it isn't worth it. It's scary, embarrassing, anxiety-inducing, and all other manner of unpleasant. That's what continues to make it a valuable skill on its own.
The most successful people (despite this being subjective) I ever met were always people whose priority is communication.
Making a bit of self analysis, my most sucessful times always happened when communication was in the top of my priorities.
attractiveness:
1) rare.
2) It will make you react better to situations, which might make you reliable and dependable. (ex: having a fight with your wife)
value:
1) Few people are interested in being patient, so you will see things where others give up easily.
2) You will be less likely to act in the heat of the moment and consider your interests and the interest of those around you. This will make your boss, partners, etc come to see you in a different light. (ex: office environment during crunch time)
learnable:
1) any skill takes a lifetime to perfect. Acknowledge this, and be a little bit more patient today.
note: empathy <> sympathy
you may question whether empathy is valuable by your income-centric definition, but the ability to understand the other side's perspective, to put yourself in their shoes, has served me very well in business negotiations.