“You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills… Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.” ~Napoleon Dynamite

What are the most important skills for someone to have?

I think a very important skill is to be able to filter out important information from unimportant information. People seem to spend so much time thinking and worrying about things that are not very important. And if you’re trying to solve a problem, figuring out the important aspects of it is a key step to solving it.

Monika thought the most important skill is finding out what makes people feel important. Oddly, this is also what the pimp on the last episode of “The Shield” said.

I would be very interested to hear what everyone thinks the most important skills are, so feel free to post them.

According to science, we are basically just a random occurence. Somehow the correct ingredients got together, some electricity, etc, and life got started and eventually evolved into us. We are here for no reason or purpose, we just randomly happened to become who we are. Basically we live for some period of time and then we die and that’s all there is to it.

Knowing that life is random and purposeless, what do you want to do with your life? What is important?

• First, I think you have to enjoy yourself. If you didn’t even enjoy yourself while you were here, that seems like quite a waste.
• Secondly, I want to accomplish something, contribute something to society, improve our condition as a whole.
• Third, I’m curious about everything, I want to learn and understand as much as I can about everything there is.

I think the key thing to think about if you believe life is random and purposeless is to figure out what makes you happy. For me, its hanging out with friends, experiencing new things, and learning and discovering things.

Also, never forget that famous quote: “Life is meaningless until you see that it has no meaning.” ~Todd Hester

The amount of education required to enter the workforce is constantly increasing. We are continually replacing jobs at the bottom of the ladder with machines and robots and things and adding new jobs at the top of the ladder. For example, during the industrial revolution, lots of lower level jobs were replaced by machines, but new jobs were created for the designers and repairers of the machines. Or in the new Willy Wonka movie, the one guy has a job screwing on toothpaste caps, gets replaced by a machine, and then gets a job repairing the machine. But obviously reparing the machine takes more skill than just screwing on the tops. Another example is in research. Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” As more and more research is done, there are more and more things one must learn before becoming an “expert” in their area.

Anyway, this all means that it takes more education to be able to enter the workforce. This means two things: you have to study for more time, and you have to become more specialized in what you do. It’s not possible for people to reach this education level in a broad area, so people are becoming more and more specialized. But also the length of education is increasing. Unless education changes, people are going to be going to school longer and becoming even more specialized in the future.

One solution could be when we eventually have computers that can connect directly into the brain. Perhaps we will have the ability to simply download information to the brain and educate ourselves that way. Perhaps we’ll also have the extra computational ability to learn/remember/understand all the things required to become an expert in fields that have been researched for hundreds of years now.