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
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.
To me what's always the most enjoyable part is reading something from 50 years ago,
100 years ago, a thousand years ago, and realizing that it's exactly the same thing that
would be happening today.
How people respond to different events and risk how they think about greed and fear,
so many of those things never change.
Of course, that was the topic of my most recent book, Same as Ever.
And I want to go a little bit deeper today with a bunch of stuff that was not in the book,
that I've been thinking about for a while.
Let me give you some examples of these passages you can come across when reading history,
where you just think to yourself, ah, it's like nothing changed.
That's exactly how it would work today.
There's an author named William Dawson, and we read to you something that he wrote 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.
More lives have been spoiled by competence than by poverty.
Indeed, I doubt whether poverty has any effect at all upon a strong character, except as
a stimulus to exertion.
That's exactly how it would work today.
Or take this written by Ernest Hemingway in 1936, he wrote quote, he remembered poor
Scott Fitzgerald, the author, and his romantic awe of the rich.
He thought they were a special glamorous race, and when he found out that they were not,
it wrecked him as much as any other thing that had wrecked him.
That too, if you have like so much admiration for billionaires and celebrities, and then
you realize that they're not any happier than you at high, when maybe they're actually
much less happy.
It's the same thing.
Or take this written in 1934 by a bankruptcy attorney who was writing about the Great Depression,
he wrote quote,
In normal times, the average professional man makes just a living and lives just up to the
limit of his income.
In times of depression, he not only fails to make a living, but has no surplus of capital
to buy bargains and stocks.
I see now how very important it is for the professional man to build up a surplus in normal
times.
Without it, he is at the mercy of the economic winds.
That of course, that's written 90 years ago, and there's like no better financial advice
that exists today.
Okay, one more.
This is an account of Seneca, who lived a force 2000 years ago.
They write quote,
Animes accused him of praying on affluent elderly people in the hope of being remembered
in their wills and of sucking the provinces dry by lending money at a steep rate of interest
to those in the distant parts of the empire.
Again, too, like you want to talk about any loan shark, any big, levered financial institution,
it's the same today as it was 2000 years ago.
So any of those passages, if you just change the date from 100 BC or from 1934, change
the date to 2023 and every single word of it fits right in.
And I just love coming across those things that never change.
And today, I want to put a little twist on that idea and talk about the difference between
a permanent skill and an expiring skill.
Skills in your own life, in your own career, in just everyday skills that you need to be
a good person.
And this is really the same topic because there are so many skills that expire.
Maybe they're very relevant in one era, but they expire because technology changes, society
changes, your career, your life changes.
And then a skill that was valuable in one point of time loses its relevance.
But just like what's so interesting about history, the more interesting skills, the more
powerful, the more relevant skills are permanent skills that are just as valuable today as
they were 100 years ago and will be for the rest of your life and your kids' life and
your grandchildren's life to pass along to them.
Robert Walter Weir was one of the most popular instructors at West Point in the mid-1800s.
It was odd that he was so popular at a military academy because he taught painting and drawing.
And here's the thing, Weir's classes were mandatory at West Point.
You want to be a military officer, you have to take his drawing class.
Now of course, art can broaden your perspective of the world, but that was not the point here.
The 19th century West Point cadets needed to be very good at drawing because cartography,
the making of maps was in its infancy.
So high quality maps in the United States, let alone say Mexico were very scarce if they
existed at all.
So military officers were expected to draw the maps on the fly and record a battlefield's
topography.
This was a little knee skill, this was vital to war.
Robert Weir's favorite student, who passed the time at West Point by drawing river bends
and mountain ranges was Ulysses S. Grant.
Now he was just really important.
West Point today no longer offers drawing or painting classes.
Its sole cartography course emphasizes mapping software and new technology as you might expect.
So here's the point I'm trying to make.
Drawing to a military officer was an expiring skill.
It's not that it wasn't important, it was incredibly important at the time, but it was
not a permanent skill.
And those two things, expiring versus permanent skills, exist in every field.
Both of these are very important.
There are lots of skills today that are incredibly important to your success even if they're going
to expire in the future.
But we treat these skills very differently.
Expiring skills tend to get more attention.
They're more likely to be the cool new thing, and a key driver of an industry short term
performance.
They are what employers value, and employees flaunt.
Permanent skills are very different.
They've been around a long time which makes them look stale and basic.
They can be very hard to define and quantify, which gives the impression of kind of like
fortune cookie wisdom versus a hard skill.
But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them this very quiet importance.
Because when several previous generations, or many previous generations, have worked
on a skill that's directly relevant to you, then you have a deep well of relevant examples
to study and to learn from.
And when you can spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, then
the payoff can be ridiculous.
Anything that compounds over decades usually is ridiculous.
The results become crazy.
So let me share a few permanent skills that have always been relevant, always will be relevant
no matter who you are or what you do.
Number one, and I am being so serious about this one.
Not being a jerk.
JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, he gave this amazing commencement speech last year.
And he said this thing that I thought was so smart.
He said, quote, how do you spot an idiot?
Look for the cruelest person in the room.
The kindest is often the smartest.
What he meant by that I think is cruel people are often just utilizing their basic primal
instinct to attack what is unfamiliar to them, what is the threat to them.
Yes, it takes intelligence, it takes empathy.
And that's why he does such a skill.
Being a jerk offsets being talented one for one.
Like if you are very smart and very good at what you do, but you're kind of an asshole,
it all balances out as nothing.
If not even more.
And they don't usually teach that skill in school.
But it's the single most important career skill that has found.
Part of this includes empathizing with jerks, who are being jerks because they're dealing
with some sort of incredible stress in their life.
Like having empathy that everyone is going through something hard right now.
And some people are going through some very, very difficult things right now.
Is so important in life.
And realizing that by and large, the huge majority of people are just trying to make it
through their day.
And if they are putting off behavior that is unpleasant to you.
Yes, that says something about them.
Also make you ask and wonder what they're going through in their life.
That's making them behave that way.
Alright, number two.
The willingness to adapt views that you wish were permanent.
Accepting when expiring skills have run their course is a very important skill in itself.
A lot of what we believe about our fields in our professions is either right but temporary
or wrong but convincing.
There's an author named Sam Arbisman.
He wrote a book called The Half-Life of Facts that makes this point just abundantly clear.
He writes quote, medical knowledge about cirrhosis of a liver or hepatitis takes about 45 years
for half of it to be disproven or to become out of date.
He points out, this is about twice the half-life of the actual radioisotope, Samarium 151.
So, facts have a half-life that is actually way more than the actual half-life of elements
and nature.
Number three.
Getting along with people who you disagree with.
Equally smart and equally informed people can come to very different conclusions in life.
Larry Summers, the former Secretary of Treasury, he once said quote, there are idiots look
around.
That's all you need to do.
Some of these people can be avoided, of course.
Many of them cannot.
So you have to deal with them diplomatically.
People who view every disagreement as a battle that has to be won before moving on, they
end up stuck and they end up bitter.
One thing that's so important here is realizing that a lot of times when people are arguing
with each other.
They're not actually disagreeing with each other.
They're people who have different views, different life experiences, different risk
tolerances, different time horizons, talking over each other.
And it's not that they disagree about the data or the facts of the formulas, they're just
playing different games.
And recognizing that what is right for you might be wrong for me and vice versa, once
you understand that, it makes it actually much easier to get along with people who you
disagree with.
Number four.
The shortest one in this list.
Getting to the point.
Everybody is busy.
Make your point and get out of their way, be done with it.
Number five.
Respecting luck as much as you respect risk.
You should acknowledge that the definition of risk is when something happens outside of
your control that influences outcomes.
And you realize that it could happen again.
Luck is almost the exact same thing.
It's the same definition.
Luck is when something happens outside of your control that influences outcomes.
And you realize it might not ever happen again.
It's virtually the same thing.
Luck and risk are virtually the same things.
So be very careful when you are looking at your own success or other people's lack of
success and thinking that it can be attributed to hard work or decisions that they made.
Now very often it might be.
Maybe the vast majority of it might be.
People love to talk about and think about risk.
And they almost always love to ignore luck when it happens to them.
Alright next is staying out of the way as much as you offer help.
You can add as much value by getting out of people's way and minimizing your burden
to them as you can by actively going out of your way to help them.
There's a saying that nothing destroys love like being needy.
I think the same is true in most people's careers.
This skill is especially important for two groups.
New employees who are eager to get involved and senior managers who are eager to get involved.
Alright next, accepting a certain degree of hassle and nonsense when reality demands
it from you.
The ability to be comfortable, being miserable is a really important skill in life.
Frances Perkins who was Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor.
She said the most remarkable thing about the president's paralysis was how little it
seemed to bother him.
And she has this quote from FDR.
He allegedly told her one time.
He said quote, if you can't use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange
juice.
You learn to say that's alright, that's fine, and just drink it.
That's a very useful and permanent skill in a world that is constantly breaking and evolving.
Alright last one.
The ability to distinguish temporarily out of favor from wrong.
One other way to think about this, the difference between patience and stubbornness.
Endurance is key in most fields because every industry is cyclical.
The putting up with his dark days is one of the only ways to ensure that you can be part
of the good days that are eventually going to come.
Gracefully exiting when you realize that whatever fuel past success doesn't work anymore
is also key.
That's actually really important too.
Warren Buffett says that his favorite holding period is forever.
But what did he do back in 2020 in the early days of COVID?
He dumped $7 billion worth of airline stocks based off of a few weeks worth of news and
data.
He packed up and moved on when the facts change.
That might look like a contradiction, but it's likely an example of always being patient,
but never being stubborn.
Those skills I think have never been old and they will never get old.
Alright, that's all I got for this week.
Thanks again for listening.
We'll see you next time.
