Ideas
Nicole Junkermann on Skills as the Slowest Investment
Nothing compounds more slowly, or more reliably. Nicole Junkermann on what a skill costs before it pays, and how to tell which ones keep their value.
Back to the blog
Of all the slow things, a skill is the slowest. It cannot be bought in a hurry, it cannot be delegated, and the early years of acquiring one feel almost exactly like wasting them. Nicole Junkermann keeps coming back to it anyway, because nothing else holds its value quite so stubbornly once it is finally there.
The difficulty is in the shape of the curve. Effort goes in steadily and capability arrives in uneven steps, usually long after the effort that produced them. For a stretch that can run into years there is no visible return at all, and the only honest report anyone can give is that the work was done and nothing has obviously changed. Most people stop somewhere in that stretch, and almost nobody describes it afterwards as the reason.
What makes that stretch bearable is knowing which skills repay it. Nicole Junkermann looks for four qualities, and a skill that has all four tends to go on paying long after the circumstances that prompted it have gone.
- It transfers. A skill tied to one setting expires with that setting. One that travels to the next problem keeps earning in conditions nobody anticipated.
- It compounds with other skills. The useful ones multiply rather than add. Clear writing makes clear thinking visible, and clear thinking makes everything else cheaper to do.
- It survives being out of practice. Some capabilities fade in a season. The ones worth years are those that come back within a week of returning to them.
- It can be practised badly in private. Anything that can only be learned in public gets learned slowly, because the fear of looking foolish quietly caps the number of attempts.
None of these are exotic. Reading closely, writing plainly, listening without preparing an answer, estimating roughly, and doing arithmetic in public without flinching all qualify, and all four of them take far longer than anyone expects. The last one is the most undervalued. A great deal of confident nonsense survives only because nobody in the room wanted to check it.
There is a second reason they repay the wait. A skill is the only holding that cannot be taken, sold, copied or diluted, and the only one that improves while it is being used. It travels with the person who has it, and it does not care what any particular year happens to do. That is a quality worth a good deal of patience.
Late October is a reasonable moment to pick one. There is enough of a year left to start properly, not enough to pretend the start will happen later, and the shorter afternoons make the sitting-still part easier. Nicole Junkermann keeps a running account of what is being learned slowly in the Writing Desk pages, and most of the raw material for it comes out of the Reading Room.
The habit underneath all of this is the same one that shows up in learning by trial: a long run of poor attempts, an honest record of how they went, and the willingness not to rewrite that record once the answer is known.
This article is a personal reflection and general commentary. It is not financial, investment or professional advice.
More from Nicole Junkermann
For more from Nicole Junkermann, read the full profile of Nicole Junkermann, or carry on with closing the year without rushing it and the unfashionable value of infrastructure.