On skills

A lot of people suffer professionally simply because lack sufficient hard skills. Nobody tells them.

“Hey Todd… You’re not good enough, bruh. You kinda suck, actually. Get better at your job and your problems will go away”

In my opinion, this is the kind thing to say as long as you do it in a nice therapeutic voice on a sunny April afternoon where it’s too nice to be inside and nobody is working anyway.

Soft skills matter only when there’s a marginal difference with our competition. If we did 5 times the work in half the time, nobody would care about the rough edges in our personalities. It’s hard to build that level of skill, but it’s easier than constant suffering for an entire career.

At some point, we all decide that we’re done learning hard skills and we should only pickup skills here and there on the job. We also decide to turn a blind eye on each other’s deficiencies in some sort of perpetual, unspoken quid-pro-quo.

That’s a lie.

Your self-doubt is not imposter syndrome. You are actually a blatant imposter who should get like 3 times better to reach 0.

This doesn’t apply to this writer and this reader. We’re exemplary in every which way possible, obviously.