The Importance of Hardcore Skills

Hardcore skill development is necessary to do big things, it's one of the greatest social mobility hacks, and it gives you the ability/confidence to take risks knowing that you'll be okay.

Developing hardcore skills is probably the biggest bottleneck to improving one’s life and society in general. Doesn’t which of those things (yourself vs society in general) you’re more focused on – hardcore skills is always the answer.

So many people want to have high impact and improve the world (and their own lives) in a big way, but desire is not enough, you typically can’t do anything big unless you have big skills.

I say “typically” because sure, some people get really lucky being born into the right family in the right place at the right time and enjoy an outsized impact despite not having built up their skills as much… but you know, even for those people, the difference between a relatively large impact (relative to other people) vs an absolutely large impact (“put a dent in the universe”) still comes down to skill-building.

Hardcore skill development is also one of the greatest social mobility hacks. Even if your family is not well-connected, you can make up for it by developing real skills.

Sure, you have to develop more skills than well-connected people to reach the same level of opportunity, and you’re going to have less guidance developing those skills and finding your way to the arena – but once you’re in the arena, those extra skills pay big dividends.

Personally, learning advanced math at a young age completely changed my life trajectory. I definitely had a more fortunate/advantaged childhood than the average person, but at the same time, there is not a single person in my family who is mathematical, technical, scientific, or academic.

High-impact career guidance was completely absent. (For instance, the sole contribution of my HS counselor to my college apps was misspelling the word “Calculus” as “Calculas” on my transcript.) If I hadn’t skilled up on math & quantitative coding in a hardcore way, there’s no way I would have landed anywhere near the stuff I’m working on now.

Another crucial thing that hardcore skills did for me personally was give me the ability/confidence to take more risks knowing that I’d be okay. I leveraged those skills into getting a data science job in college that paid enough for me to build a little financial safety net by the time I graduated, and that safety net allowed me to move out to a big city and take on scattered work in my area of passion, looking for the right opportunity while spinning my wheels in a state of cashflow neutral.

There’s no way I would have found a great career fit without that period of exploration, there’s no way I would have had that period of exploration without the safety net & confidence that I could get a decent job if I depleted it, and the root cause responsible for all that was hardcore math / quantitative coding skills.