The Most Important Skill in Life

Knowledge quickly becomes outdated, professions change, and artificial intelligence takes on more and more tasks. What, then, should adults learn, and what should they teach their children? Which skills will matter in the age of artificial intelligence, what is genuine human development, and what matters more — knowledge, practical skills or life experience?

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at why knowledge and experience alone do not guarantee sound decisions or an understanding of life. What criteria do we use to choose an education, a profession and a child’s future? Who determines what a successful, right and happy life is? And which skill remains fundamental regardless of advances in artificial intelligence, profession, income or where you live?

Knowledge, skills or experience: what matters more

We live in a world where a person can study for ten years, get a profession, gain experience and at some point discover that everything they were preparing for has already changed. And this concerns not only you, but also what you are teaching your children today and what kind of life you are trying to prepare them for. What really remains important when knowledge becomes outdated, experience does not guarantee results and the future cannot be calculated? How do you understand what a person should really learn?

– What is your view on this? Which skills will become more important than knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence, with everything developing the way it is? Or, on the contrary, will skills not matter, while certain knowledge will? What should a person focus on in this rapidly developing and changing world?

– The thing is, the word “skills” is very strongly socialized. You yourself have separated skills from knowledge, and in doing so you are using the paradigm of today’s society. And this discussion will never end; it has been going on for decades: what matters is not knowledge but, say, experience or skill. I don’t think the question here is whether skill matters or knowledge matters. What comes first after all — knowledge or skill? When is knowledge alone not enough, and when is knowledge enough?

Imagine a snake, for example. For it not to bite you, all you need is to know that you shouldn’t approach snakes, or to know the species of these snakes. Rattlesnakes crawl around near our house from time to time. I know what they look like. And there is the California kingsnake, which can bite but isn’t dangerous or venomous. So what does that mean? That I’ll approach a California kingsnake but not a rattlesnake? Not at all. It’s just that when you see a rattlesnake, you are a little more afraid than when you see a California kingsnake. In fact, you are equally afraid, but you don’t approach either of them.

Do I need the skill of dealing with these snakes? To be bitten several times by a rattlesnake, then by a California kingsnake, to gain experience, learn to grab a snake by the head, practice a grip at the moment it strikes so that it can’t bite me? I don’t need that skill at all. I just need the knowledge that you shouldn’t approach a snake. A small child of about two doesn’t have this knowledge, doesn’t have this understanding. Or there are people who, even at forty, will say: “It’s fine, I can walk right up close to a snake, it won’t do anything.” Don’t approach the snake, and everything will be fine. Knowledge is enough for me here.

That is why this endless modern discussion about how you need, for example, to keep learning endlessly or must gain experience somewhere is demagoguery. And we see a huge number of false ideas: people go off to gain experience, thinking that if they completed an internship at university or took some job, that experience will help them in life — to work, to sell tomatoes at a market, to launch some startup.

That experience may either help and have a positive effect, or introduce a distorted perception of life. But do people really ask for experience before having children? They say: “Let’s have five now, get some experience, and with the sixth, seventh and eighth everything will be super.” It doesn’t work that way. What’s more, there is no pattern there at all. I have four children, and there is no pattern. All four are incredibly different, even though they have the same dad and mom and are seemingly raised in the same environment. It’s not just that their physical bodies are incredibly different. Take the girls: they are different both in appearance and in everything else — in how they make decisions, in their approaches, in how they act. They are different inside. It’s not simply “boys picked up a stick and are chasing each other” — there are girls who pick up a stick and chase each other too. Of course, there is a definite difference between boys and girls.

But when we talk about what matters more in today’s world, we arrive at a very specific question: what does “more important” even mean? What are you relying on, and why do you want to gain experience, skills or knowledge?

What for? That is the fundamental question. What do you want to achieve by finding out for yourself whether skills matter more and which skills matter more these days?

Everyone talks about which skills matter more. But why do you want to know? That is exactly what matters most today.

The role of experience in human development

Otherwise we fall into exactly the same trap of broken cause-and-effect relationships that we fell into when we said that raising children requires experience. I know a huge number of people who have many children and are absolutely unfit parents. They consider themselves unfit, and that is what they are — unfit from the point of view of social space.

Who is better: a dad who spends a lot of time with his children but drinks every day, or a dad who never sees his children and doesn’t drink? So who is better? Who is better: a mom who spends all her time with her children and lives in a state of endless selfishness and power over other people, or a mom who doesn’t seem to spend as much time with them, but when she interacts with her children or is nearby, lives entirely from the notion of love? She works, say, three jobs and gives her children little time, but she treats everyone with love, sees every person as a person and relates to them with love.

Which parent is better in terms of upbringing? When we say “better,” by what criteria do we judge? Is a good dad the one who has earned a lot of money, or the one who has spent many hours with his child? Who is better and who is worse? What kind of judgment are we even making? Which mom is better: the one who recovered quickly after giving birth, went back to work and managed to fulfill herself professionally, or the one who spends a lot of time with her child? The one who says she suffers spending time with her child, or the one who says she doesn’t? By the way, who is better — the one who suffers or the one who doesn’t? That, of course, is a big question, a separate and very large subject for analysis and study. Which person is better here at all?

So when we approach the subject of skills for the modern world at all, there is a number-one question we must ask. The most important thing is to decide at the start, at least for yourself. How do people decide what their children should do? I see a huge number of parents whose children have only just been born, and they are already raising them for a future profession — so that the children find fulfillment and take their proper place in society.

Imagine, Olya, that a child is born into a family and, by their karma, is to die at sixteen. All right, let’s say not at sixteen but at twenty-five or thirty — let’s push the date back a little. He is to die at thirty. And imagine that the parents know this. They know it not because he is ill — he isn’t ill — but because they understand the causes and effects at work in people’s lives. Knowing this, would their decision-making change: how to raise the child, how to communicate with him, how to live together, what to do, which university to send him to, which teachers, which school, which textbooks to buy him, which clubs to sign him up for, how to dress him, what to teach him? Should they teach him to use a knife and fork or not? If he will die at sixteen, twenty or twenty-five — should they teach him or not? Should they tell him how life works or not?

The most important question: would this change in your life or not, if you found out?

If you had a hundred days left

Adults are often asked: if you were going to die in a hundred days, what would you do? What you are doing now, or something else? I don’t mean things like giving your wife or husband the passcode to your phone, your credit card or your bank account, transferring some asset, or drawing up a power of attorney. Let’s set that social question aside. In general, what would you be doing with your life now? Would you spend each of your days exactly the same way, or differently? And you, Olya, what would you do if you knew you were going to die in a hundred days? Would you keep filming my videos or not?

– Yes, I would just change the location.

– Do you think you would keep working the same way?

– Yes. With you — yes. But I would need time to accept that I was going to die in a hundred days. Though I don’t know, I think it would be easier for me.

– Why do I have doubts when I ask whether you would continue or not? I can imagine a self-interested motive: at that moment you would realize that it is now important to prepare for the transition, and you would start discussing it with me. I might be the only instrument you trust to learn about this and prepare yourself properly in those hundred days. But that is a slightly different task from simply coming to work and making videos, writing briefs, thinking about whether a Reel will take off or not, making some Short. It is still somewhat different work. You would continue the interaction, but you would not continue your current job. That is why it gave me a little pause: would you really go on doing the very same thing?

A person’s central task in life

Notice what I singled out in this question: the fundamental task of a person who knows they will die in a hundred years. I mean, in a hundred days. But in fact it is the fundamental task of a person even when they will die in a hundred years. That’s incredible. It was no accident that I made a slip and said “a hundred years” instead of “a hundred days.”

Why such emphasis on understanding what will happen in a hundred days? A person gets the opportunity to concentrate. Honestly, in terms of developing their spiritual system, it won’t help them much anymore. But the opportunity is there. Although if a person asks themselves such a question, they are probably ready for these energies — if they can engage in something, do something, look at something, live through something.

But the fundamental task is to relate to it calmly. What difference does it make whether it happens in a hundred days or in a hundred years? When I tell you “in a hundred days,” you go: “Right, let’s concentrate. What do we do now?” And you immediately remove a huge number of things that seem to be problems in your current life. You remove all of them.

You remove one of the biggest problems of our time: first, you know exactly when you will die. Then you remove, for example, worry about money in old age or ten years from now. Removed, thrown out. You immediately said: “I would change where I live.” Bam-bam-bam! Someone else would say: “I would go to the ocean, to the forest, somewhere else.” So what is happening now, then? What is happening in your current sense of life if you need to change your place and location in life?

By the way, it seems that the solution to this question is to change location. Someone would say: “Then change your location now” — and give you that task at a training. But the thing is, changing location doesn’t help solve your question. The only solution is to understand the current location you are in and to relate to it exactly as you would to another one, while understanding that you may like the other one more.

Do you really think I wouldn’t prefer a location with a very beautiful view, a beautiful interior, where everything is really great, to one where the street, I don’t know, stinks? Of course I will like a more pleasant location. Right, we’re human. Would I like a location where missiles fly in and buildings explode? Obviously, I’ll like a location where missiles don’t fly in. No one is taking that away from you. But that’s not the question.

The question is how, in a location where missiles fly in, in a location where something smells bad, to feel it simply as part of your life.

– I got curious. When you asked about dying in a hundred days, I said I would change location, and you started reasoning in the direction that people usually want to change location — to go and sit by the sea, so to speak, as usually happens in movies. But for me, the location I would change to is not a location where I would want to be right now. I mean, it’s not exactly a pleasant place for me. Is that the same thing or not? Is it the same energy as when a person wants to change their location to a better one by some external criteria?

– Essentially, it is the same thing. You are reasoning from the idea that it matters: location is important to you, it is something necessary, naturally important. Of course, we can look individually at what is meant here: a country, a room, an entryway or a city, the language people speak, the people you are actually with, or the air. And what emotions you have about it.

For example, you considered going to your parents. You do understand that a huge number of people wouldn’t consider going to their parents. If you suggested I do this, it probably wouldn’t occur to me to go to my parents right away. The question is: why did it come up for you? What is this feeling, and how much are you missing in your interaction with your parents now? In fact, you are under the illusion that you can live it all through in your last hundred days. To do that, you would have to go there, tell them about the hundred days — and they would get caught up in their fears.

In fact, they would be caught up not in you but in their own fears, their own worries, and only a little bit, here and there, in you. And you would be stuck in that mess. Do you really need that mess? In your interaction with your parents, you have to understand that the only thing you are capable of is living with them now and building that interaction now. You don’t need to go to them for that. You don’t need special occasions for that. Special occasions won’t help at all.

That is why many people fall ill, why many arrive at completely different destinies — in order to find themselves in this, live through it and see that a special occasion isn’t needed. Many people earn money because of this or, on the contrary, don’t earn much money, start interacting with their parents and see that the situation doesn’t get fixed. Or, on the contrary, life helps a person live through it — for example, through money to experience meetings with their parents. But it could have been done without money too. There is a very powerful element in this. It is exactly the kind of story where you can see a huge number of places where you are in a state of fear and delusion.

These fears and delusions sit inside you. And then the desire arises for very abrupt, complicated constructions. Recently I told someone that if he were dying in three months, he wouldn’t even call his employer — he would simply disappear. The person replied: “Probably, yes.” But it is hard for him to believe it. He thinks this is so super important, so necessary for him. So is it super important and necessary or not? This isn’t about starting to work less, but about realizing the truth, understanding the truth.

That is why I asked you whether you were sure you would continue doing this. Or would you just want to take advantage of certain opportunities? And the sense of life is when you feel it simply as an ordinary, normal, natural life, when your day doesn’t change.

Essentially, happiness is when your day doesn’t change.

Of course, there may be some circumstances: a place you would like to go and see, or a person you would like to see. Some circumstances may shift slightly, but these may be tiny things. And even then the question is: do you allow that you will live calmly without them? After all, what matters is being able to be without it and live without it. Because you don’t have control over it: you could die tomorrow, you could go to prison tomorrow, flights could be shut down for you tomorrow, you could fall ill tomorrow. Anything can happen to another person tomorrow. They may stop wanting to see you tomorrow.

And so you decide to go to your parents, and your parents say: “We don’t want you to come.” And that’s it. What then? How will a person feel at that moment?

If your parents say that, it’s also a normal state: they may have gone out of their minds, or they may simply be busy with their other affairs. You have the right to meet or not meet, to call or not call. So why don’t they have that right? Why are they obliged to always be open to you and ready to receive you or see you at any moment? Who said they owe you this, when you yourself often don’t do it? That is a very important, powerful answer.

What really matters in life

Recently I came across a good description — either in Krishnamurti or in Rudolf Steiner: there are people who, even if you placed them in the world of angels or archangels, would start finding stains on those angels’ clothing and paying attention to the stains rather than to where they are. In our case, a missile is exactly that stain on the clothing.

That is exactly why we see a huge number of unhappy people in what seem to be the most heavenly places, and a huge number of happy people in the opposite ones.

What’s more, all the world’s happiness rankings are false. By what criteria were they made, by what parameters, on the basis of how many people? What was actually studied, how many questions were asked, over what periods of time? How did you really, truly evaluate it? What was the range of your research? Maybe people deceived you when they answered? They simply deceived you, that’s all. Could it be that your entire sample completely deceived you? How will you check that? And it didn’t mean to deceive — that’s just how it turned out. At that particular moment, for some reason, a person deceived, for some reason couldn’t say it differently.

And how many such people have we noticed in the world! I have conversations like this every day. I ask a person a question, and they answer: “A.” I start clarifying — they answer: “Z.” I clarify further — they answer: “Orange.” I clarify again — they answer: “Minus six.” I ask: “Wait, what does that have to do with it?” What’s more, I start pointing out patterns to them: “A,” “minus six,” “orange” and “Z” are unstructured things, they don’t come together into a single system, they aren’t connected to one another at all, they are all false in relation to one another. And the person looks at me with wide eyes and says: “What are you talking about?” I say: “You just said that you both love and hate your children at the same time.”

That’s the whole point — to relate to it normally and to understand normally that you happen to both love and hate at the same time. And to tell yourself: “Listen, there simply lives in me a state that expressed itself one way here, another way here, another way here, and another way here. And I understand that in the world there are situations in which this skill helps, in another situation another one, and in a third, a third.” Then we look at why. We ask: “Why do you want to know which skill will help?” And the person says: “I have a child.”

I, for example, have a daughter; she is fifteen and a half, and in two years she is supposed to go to some college — that’s the norm. Recently I said to my mom: “Listen, in two years my eldest daughter will leave home, and space will free up.” My daughter has two rooms, with simply no doors between them, and even her own exit to the outside. I say: “And the three remaining children will have a slightly different space.” Mom replies: “God willing.”

My mom did a cool thing: she seemed to throw this story away, put it aside, so as not to even think about it or look at it. But this story isn’t about planning; it is about her existing life. She doesn’t even want to get involved in it, to be with it.

Could it be that my daughter won’t leave and will live with me her whole life? Easily. Maybe I’ll fall ill and she’ll look after me, or she’ll fall ill, or something else will happen. Or she’ll decide not to move out at all and will live with us for ten years. Or she’ll decide not to enroll anywhere, or she’ll enroll in a community college here. There is a college in Los Altos Hills: she’ll enroll there and study. You can get a perfectly good education there — quite a decent one by global standards. It won’t be Stanford, Yale or MIT, but it will be a perfectly good education. But in general there is a system in which children leave home, and so you make a certain forecast and say that there is such a probability, but things could turn out any way at all.

The central skill of genuine development

So, if we talk about which skill is needed — what are we preparing for? This is where we arrive at the question: when you ask it, what are you preparing for? When you ask me this question, you must understand what I am preparing for and how I perceive it.

I perceive the question of what knowledge or what skill a person should acquire from only one position: how a person should live in this life, how their life is arranged. And then we begin to consider that their life is arranged according to the laws of the Universe. How to relate to other people. What matters is not how much money a person earns, where they work, what their profession is, who their husband or wife is, whether they are divorced or married, whether it’s their fifteenth marriage or not, whether they have sixteen children or their first child, whether they cannot have children or have had one. Whether they live in the USA, in Belarus, in Italy or somewhere on a small island. Whether they became a monk or a president. It makes no difference at all.

What matters is simply how they treat people. What matters is how they come to know life, how well they hear life, understand it and perceive it in terms of causes and effects. How much they want to learn about and understand this life, how they understand and observe their own life, how they understand the lives of other people. How much they strive to know their own life. Then you and I move away from skills, experience and all the rest.

“But, Alexander, that doesn’t mean you decide that your daughter doesn’t need to take exams in math or some language, or to choose a profession?” Of course not, no question about it.

Not in order to make money. Although, believe me, it helps a great deal with making it — that’s obvious. If you can listen to people and understand causes and effects, you will make far more money. You won’t have that problem.

In your own life, you will earn it where it can be earned. At the very least, you won’t be moving along the lowest range because of a lack of knowledge, and you won’t fall into traps where it really could have been foreseen — as in the case of the snake. You will know certain things in advance. When dealing with a person, you will understand whether you can deal with them at all, and you will try to hear what matters most to that person.

You come to a restaurant and ask: “What dish would you recommend?” What kind of question is that to ask a waiter? Do you know what state he is in? Maybe he is in a state of wanting you to die altogether, get food poisoning or leave dissatisfied. Or in a state of wanting to earn as much in tips as possible and make your bill as big as possible. Or he is in the state of a bonus system, or they have instructions from management. Or he wants to set up the restaurant or set you up. Or he is simply in a bad mood, or in a very good one. That matters. So you won’t ask such a question of a person who is irritated or in a bad mood, who isn’t thinking clearly right now or is busy with his own concerns rather than with you, and who has not been able to recognize you and see you.

For this you only need to look at the person: is what they are saying now a template, or are they truly present with you, in your own perception? How do they communicate with you, how do they talk, what are they doing it for? You can look this way at any video on YouTube, any video at all, any teacher at a university or school, any parent you are talking with, your own parents when you are talking with them, your own children. What goals does the person you are talking to have at this moment? What goals are they pursuing? What goals is my conversation partner pursuing? When you know this, when you can determine it, things become easier for you.

Yesterday we had a funny scene. We were walking in a pedestrian area with lots of shops, and we were sitting there with my wife and daughter. I say: “Listen, I’m about to go on a trip, and I’m missing one suitcase — an expensive one, from an expensive collection.” And at that moment she began thinking not about what I meant or why I had brought it up.

After all, when I say something like that, ideally the person should think about what I mean, ask: “Why do you think so?” Think, help the person resolve the question. And just before that we had gone into a shop together, she had tried on a pair of glasses there, and I saw those glasses appear on her head right in the middle of her thought. Of course, we turned it into a joke. I tell her: “Why did glasses just appear on your head, and not my suitcases?” She laughed: “It’s as if you read my mind.” I say: “Well, I did read it.”

And then you calmly carry on being in it. You understand that there’s no need to discuss this question further with your wife, because my question doesn’t interest her. In that situation she was interested in her glasses, and she had every right to be. Right? But then I don’t need to discuss the question with her, otherwise I’ll arrive at a false conclusion, a false picture and a false decision.

It’s the same with a teacher at school. You ask: “Marya Ivanovna, what profession should I go and study for?” Or you ask your dad: “Dad, what profession should I study for?” Or at a training you ask the trainer: “Which course should I take?” Or you watch some video. You have to understand: does the person on the other side hear you at all or not? Are they saying this for you or for themselves? What is their advice based on? Are they giving advice to bring a certain program into your life, to prove to everyone around how life works, to prove that it can only be this way — or to really help you and give a solution that is right for you?

Because if you see in front of you a person who will die in ten years, you will give them different advice. So what matters more, then? What is better to learn, then? What is it more right to do? Can you imagine how the picture changes in recommendations and in actions? And we are living people. Every life matters.

This is not an A/B test for fun: you made a mistake — “oops, sorry, I made a mistake.” That’s what doctors and teachers in the world do, dictating the same information to everyone en masse: “Oops, sorry, Masha, we made a mistake.” Or: “You just acted differently.” Well, of course I acted differently, because I am a different person. I could act differently, and you didn’t foresee that. You didn’t say that it can be this way too. You said it can only be this way and no other.

You must always run this kind of reasoning when you think not just about your own future, your own skills or knowledge, but about the skills and knowledge of any other people, when giving people advice. This is the only salvation of your life.

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