Expiring vs. Permanent Skills

The Morgan Housel Podcast

Morgan Housel

Business

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Expiring skills tend to get more attention. They’re more likely to be the cool new thing, and a key driver of an industry’s short-term performance. They’re what employers value and employees flaunt.

Permanent skills are different. They’ve been around a long time, which makes them look stale and basic. They can be hard to define and quantify, which gives the impression of fortune-cookie wisdom vs. a hard skill.

But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them quiet importance. When several previous generations have worked on a skill that’s directly relevant to you, you have a deep well of relevant examples to study. And when you can spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, the payoffs can be ridiculous. Anything that compounds over decades usually is.

This episode discusses a few permanent skills that apply to many fields.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back. Thanks so much again for being here. I'm in the middle of a long and grueling book tour, but I always look forward to taking
0:16.4	some time out to record something like this. One of the best things about reading history is not even the times when you find something that's very different from today and surprises you.
0:29.0	To me what's always the most enjoyable part is reading something from 50 years ago, a hundred years ago,
0:36.1	a thousand years ago, and realizing that it's exactly the same thing that would be happening
0:40.8	today. How people respond to different events and risk, how they think about greed and fear.
0:48.0	So what do those things never change?
0:50.0	Of course that was the topic of my most recent book, same as ever.
0:54.0	And I want to go a little bit deeper today with a bunch of stuff that was not in the book,
0:58.0	but I've been thinking about for a while.
1:00.0	Let me give you some examples of these passages you can come across when reading history
1:06.4	where you just think to yourself, oh, that's like nothing changed. That's exactly how it would work today.
1:11.6	There's an author named William Dawson and let me read to you something that he wrote
1:15.7	130 years ago. He wrote quote, it would seem that the anxieties of getting money only be get the more torturing anxiety of how to keep that money
1:28.8	More lives have been spoiled by competence than by poverty. Indeed I doubt whether poverty has any effect at all
1:36.5	upon strong character except as a stimulus to exertion. That is exactly how it worked today. Or take this written by Ernest Hemingway in
1:47.6	1936. He wrote, quote, he remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald, the author, and his romantic awe of the rich.
1:55.7	He thought they were a special glamorous race, and when he found out that they were not, it
2:00.8	wrecked him as much as any other thing that had wrecked him.
2:05.0	That too if you if you have like so much admiration for billionaires and celebrities and
2:10.4	then you realize that they're not any happier than you on high or maybe they're
2:13.8	actually much less happy it's the same thing or take this written in 1934 by a
2:19.4	bankruptcy attorney who was writing about the Great Depression he wrote quote
	...

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