002: Skills
Functional or technical skills are getting all the attention these days. Maybe with good reasons.
After all, the apps need to be designed and the algorithms built, and the data analyzed.
But again, all of this is done by people, for people. Maybe not directly, but ultimately.
So why is this mother of skills not getting the attention it deserves?
Why is nobody teaching listening and patience and openness and feedback?
Why do we think that being professional means being impersonal (if not inhuman)? And we wear it about almost like a badge of honor.
Maybe we’ve decided that the people we do it with don’t count. They don’t deserve our empathy and kindness. Or the people we do it for exist only in abstraction, so in a distant sense, they do not really matter.
Might this be why some people feel hollowed out by “work”? Why it has become a place we go to and not necessarily what we do? Why it is something we’re paid to do and not something we love?
What skills are you bringing to bear? How are you serving those around you?
