Where have all your good skills gone?

In this episode, we explore old skills that we used intensively in the past - and consider how to re-use them now…

I’ve recently turned seventy years of age, and started to reflect a bit on what I’ve done with my life. Which turns out to be quite a lot.

And for each of those things, there’ve been new skills that I had to learn.

Astronomy, for example - I was deeply into that as a kid, and had hopes of making a career of that, until I had to accept that my maths skills just weren’t up to the job. Oh well.

But flying, though - well, I did a lot of that too. Compulsory cadets at boarding-school gave me an excuse to hide away at the local airfield, flying every weekend, learning new skills. Fifty hours up in the front seat, at age 14 to 15, doing take-offs, landings, even aerobatics, in a de Havilland Chipmunk, a lovely little two-seat trainer:

And yes, flying a real aircraft is very different from playing a software flight-simulator on a screen: if nothing else, the jarring thump from trying to land a real aircraft ten feet off the ground is not something to quickly forget….

I left that school just before age 16, and the airfield was too far away. Oh well. So I gave up flying, and learnt to ride motorcycles instead. And the skills to maintain them, too. Later, I rode a motorcycle across the US and back - a bit more than ten thousand miles, that trip. An accident in my late forties put an end to all that, though. Oh well.

My teachers at school told me I’d never be any good as a writer. They were wrong, though: I’d learnt the skills I needed for that, enough that I’ve actually made my living from that for many years. Probably at least a couple of dozen books by now:

(Yes, those in the photo above are just some of them, including translations into almost a dozen languages.)

Other teachers at that school said I’d never be any good as an artist either. But I also learnt the skills for that as well - enough that I’ve made part of my living from that too, in technical books and more:

…and sometimes just for the fun of it, like this sketch of a guy on the street:

For years I was committed to playing folk-music. More skills to learn, particularly on the bodhran Irish-drum and on my beloved big bass-flute, shown here behind a flute of more normal size:

More skills: I wrote documentation and databases and code and more for all manner of different projects, from a tiny operating-system for an early microcomputer, to a complete typesetting-system (a key predecessor for modern-day desktop-publishing), to heavy-engineering such as this aircraft-test:

And so many other things too; so many other skills. For example, these days you might know me for my work on enterprise-architectures and the like; but worldwide I’m probably still better-known as a teacher of water-diviners, even though I did my main work on that more than forty years ago.

So many things and tasks and types of work and places and more: in my case, the list is several pages long at least. And each of those called for their own skills: new languages to learn in each place, to give yet one more type of example.

Most of those things I don’t do now. Most of those places that I went to, I can’t go there any more. But the skills remain: just like it’s said that once we learn how to ride a bicycle, we never really forget - whatever skill we’ve learnt, we may get a bit rusty after a while away from that field, but we can always find that skill again. And we can also do ‘mix-and-match’, finding new skills by combining in new ways the ones we already have.

So the examples I’ve shown you here, they’re just the ones that I have. But you’ll have your own set of skills too, including many - so many! - that, like me, by now you’ve probably forgotten that you’d ever learnt them…

Yet what are those lost skills of yours? Which ones would you welcome back? And how might you find new skills by re-combining those with the ones you already have?

An interesting exercise to explore, perhaps? - and interesting new possibilities too…