A skill has a half-life: the time before half of what it let you do is obsolete. For a medieval craftsman it was a lifetime. For a software engineer in 2010 it was maybe five years. Today, for a lot of specific technical skills, it’s measured in months. The tools you mastered last year are being automated this year.
The instinct is to run faster — learn the new tool, then the next one. But if the half-life keeps shrinking, that’s a treadmill you can’t win. The better move is to invest in the thing whose half-life isn’t shrinking at all: judgment.
What decays and what doesn’t
What decays: the specific, the procedural, the “how to operate this particular tool.” What doesn’t: knowing which problem is worth solving, sensing when an answer is wrong, deciding under uncertainty, reading a situation. Those compound over a career instead of expiring.
Skills expire. Judgment compounds. Bet on the asset that doesn’t depreciate.
Why this favors experience, not against it
There’s a fear that fast-moving tools make experience worthless — the veteran’s skills are obsolete, the newcomer learns the new tool just as fast. But that gets it backwards. When the procedural layer is automated, what’s left is exactly the layer experience builds: judgment. The machine handles the skill that expired; the human supplies the judgment that didn’t.
That’s why an expert’s 20 minutes is becoming more valuable, not less. You’re not paying for a skill that any tool can now do. You’re paying for the judgment that no tool has — and that the years only sharpened.