Mediterranean Currency and Skills

A talent is a variable unit of weight and money used in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle East. Since I don’t have any currency from these areas, I guess I’m completely untalented.

Talent is also a natural endowment or ability of superior quality, or a marked ability you are born with. Now this is bad, I’m pretty sure the only abilities I was born with were crying and diaper-dirtying. People may be considered talented because of special abilities like kazoo playing or burping the alphabet, but these are acquired skills, not talents.

Skills are much more important than talents. A lot of research has shown that talent isn’t as important as people used to think. Enron was a company that hired the smartest people available, and it was driven to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, companies that focused on teamwork, people skills, and other learned skills, have been extremely successful.

Studies have also shown that traditionally sought-after talents, such as a high I.Q., have little relation to how someone performs on the job. Tacit skill, or the ability to see the implications of choices, is much more relevant to success. This helps people to make decisions based on long-term consequences instead of immediate results.

This brings the question: why are we going to school, when implicit foresight and the other more important skills are developed by trial and error on the job? We should just do a couple of years of co-op to get our diplomas. Book knowledge won’t do us any good unless we learn how to apply it to real life.

Besides, wouldn’t we learn better if we were getting paid to learn?