What skills bring the greatest ROI? What skills are widely applicable to all persons, independent of one’s goals, circumstance, age, culture, and level of wealth? While practically no skill can guarantee the promise of success (whatever your definition may be), there are skills that can certainly minimize misfortune. For example, someone lacking the faculty of reason will have a terrible time navigating through the natural vicissitudes of life. They will misattribute behavior and reach false conclusions. Any event of coincidence can solidify wrong beliefs. Rationality, therefore, is a valuable skill to develop – useful in pretty much any situation imaginable.
Other skills that can aid intelligent decision-making are scientific rigor, intellectual humility, emotional intelligence, and good temperament. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I’ve listed enough to recognize a pattern. I’ll try to go more in-depth of each in a future post, but the way in which they relate is they are abstractions of literal processes. Abstract ideas have more breadth than literal ones. Scientific rigor, for example, is an ethos of the hard sciences. Its adoption in management theory, economics, the social and life sciences, and investments, intensified the rate of discovery and propagation of new ideas in those fields.
Skills with high ROI classify as those skills that are most useful most of the time. They have breadth. They most accurately (but maybe not perfectly) describe the way the world works. The skills that require success may not be the same the same skills that prevent you from failing. Likely, the skills you need to be successful are narrow (deep technical expertise). And the skills you need to keep from failing are broad (always considering facts, avoiding groupthink, hubris). I like the idea of keeping the goals of succeeding and not failing separate. “How can I be successful?” and “What will cause me to fail?” identify different parameters to address. Keeping both in mind may just be the way to stay in the game the longest.
