The Most Valuable Skill of the 21st Century
In his December 2024 story for The Atlantic, titled How the Ivy League Broke America, David Brooks examined the evolution and consequences of America’s meritocratic system in education, shaped largely by Ivy League institutions. In the 1930s, Harvard’s president James Conant decided to radically alter admissions by prioritizing cognitive ability—measured through academic performance and standardized testing—over lineage and family connections. His goal was to democratize access to elite education by rewarding intelligence instead of inherited status.
Brooks argues that Conant’s seemingly noble intentions had significant unintended consequences. The core issue is that Conant equated cognitive ability with competence and worth. In doing so, he replaced one narrow metric (lineage) with another (standardized test scores), assuming this new standard could adequately measure a person’s full potential.
A16z founder Marc Andreessen echoed Brooks’ conclusion in a series of podcast interviews. Andreessen adds that Conant’s changes inadvertently created an elite class that undervalues non-academic forms of talent and character. This elite class, he says, has grown increasingly disconnected from broader society, fostering widespread distrust and division—a phenomenon that helped fuel the rise of populism and culminated in the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump.
So, what do they suggest we do? Both Brooks and Andreessen propose redefining meritocracy to embrace a broader spectrum of human abilities, qualities, and virtues that align with the leadership society truly needs. They are critical of traditional educational institutions and advocate for alternative models, like project-based learning, that cultivate skills beyond rote memorization and test-taking.
When thinking about my own son's experience in the traditional public school system, one skill in particular stood out to me as foundational to his future. It stood out because of how lacking it is. It's not connected to his grades, it's not measured by standardized tests, and it isn't selected for by the elite making institutions. Yet to me, in a future that technology is upending again and again, where the jobs of the future are unclear, and large swathes of the population struggle to support themselves, I'd place it ahead of almost any other skill. It hit me during a conversation with a friend over dinner.
At dinner, my friend was telling me about a new business he started. He prefaced it by saying he was looking for a steady stream of relatively passive income to support his lifestyle, so he could focus his time on investments. Given this goal, he looked not for some grand idea that could scale or raise venture funding (or given his objective, that required a cofounder), but rather something he already knew that he could start quickly without much capital. He decided on a service business, focused on interior design. He started by running some online marketing experiments to gauge demand and figure out his customer acquisition costs. Understanding that, he started building a process, workflows, and sourcing and hiring affordable talent from the Philippines. He used low cost third party tools to stitch together a process for marketing, conversion, onboarding, performing the main function, invoicing, payments, and referrals. Within a few months, he landed a few large clients and was doing incredibly well. Needless to say I was impressed.
The matter of fact way that he stated that he just wanted to build a business to create passive income belied the difficulty of actually making it happen. My friend is a humble, hard working person, and he clearly knew he would have to experiment, and could fail a lot before finding some success. He was lucky to find something that generated traction so quickly. But his success wasn’t just about luck, it also stemmed from his focus, resolve, and ability to execute.
As we were talking about his business, I told him about another entrepreneurial friend of mine, who was looking for something new to do that also would generate relatively passive income. My friend ended up setting up self-service cold plunges and saunas on a per use fee model. After falling out with some gyms, he shifted to installing standalone units in national parks. Despite early setbacks, he secured his first location, set up a simple online booking system, and marketed the service to incoming travelers. The business steadily grew and by the fourth month, it took off.
I've been an entrepreneur most of my life, and I've had successes and failures, but I see something unique in these recent stories. Both friends demonstrated an exceptional resilience and initiative in marrying creativity, problem solving, and execution. They never got stuck, or discouraged, or gave up. They simply knew how to put one foot in front of the other. Laying out one task in front of another. Solving one problem after another. Stringing those together into a plan of execution, experimentation, and iteration, until finding something that works. Not being intimidated by a lack of knowledge, but learning through doing. Generally speaking, this could describe entrepreneurship more broadly. That is what we do. But they had the initiative and agency to do this on their own, with no cofounders, no mentors, no support, and little to no capital.
This ability to exercise agency and initiative—to act decisively and independently in the face of challenges—is, I believe, one of the most valuable skills of the 21st century. It’s not taught in most schools, nor can it be measured by standardized tests or rewarded by elite universities. But for my own children, I would prioritize this skill above everything else they'll learn in their education.