Lessons Learned, Lessons Forgotten

What are some lessons you learned/skills you gained that you haven't applied in a long time, have become rusty at or completely forgotten but that you'd find good use for in your current job?

For me it's speaking Italian(basic conversational level) and some entry level coding in Python. Of course I wouldn't be a translator or a developer but breaking the ice with Italian clients or finding common ground with developers would be easier.

This came to mind when reading Daniel Kahneman's theories from his book "Thinking Fast and Slow". A very basic description would be: you have a subconscious that is fast and catches outside stimuli and dictates how you feel about them, and a rational mind that is slower and that tries to make sense of things but ends up working to justify the inputs from the subconscious. This theory revolutionized behavioral economics because it was quite simply based on reality so it worked. But what I couldn't shake off was the feeling that we knew that already from Freud. Sure, he wrote about it in a different context and to serve a different purpose, but the knowledge was there almost 100 years earlier. Now, what’s really shocking is that if you “translate” a theological language into a post-enlightenment scientific one, you can find the same theory in Augustine of Hippo’s “Confessions”. And if you look at the work of other thinkers from around the same time, you wouldn’t just find a similar theory in a different thinker, but you’d find it more developed by Gregory of Nyssa who, using different concepts and terminology showed how the relation between the subconscious and the conscious is not a 1 way street but rather a 2 way one and that focused reason and will can influence our impulses as well, not just the other way around. Let’s try a quick application of St. Gregory’s work in behavioral economics: A salesperson uses a trick like “buy before you lose” and your impulse kicks in and you make the buy. The product isn’t what you were expecting. Daniel and Sigmund would say that your impulse will always be the same and that you might learn not to act on it but you wouldn’t be able to change it. Gregory on the other hand is saying that if you make quality a principle and you focus on what you did wrong and how you got fooled, in time you can change your impulse into something different and instinctively not fall for the same trick(perhaps I’m being biased but I for one like the idea of not being stuck in an animalistic state).?

Now, why is all this shocking? Well because Augustine and Gregory lived between the 4th and 5th centuries AD. So we just went back over 1.5 milenia and found out that the basic principles of a revolutionary theory on economics from the 20th century were already there. To top all that off, 15 years ago I wasn’t very interested in economic theories but what I was interested in was Plato. And you can probably guess it by now… I found the same ideas in his work. Explained with different concepts (Plato’s Republic - “Warped minds, warped societies” and “The decline and fall of the Ideal City-Soul”) and serving a different purpose, but the same ideas nonetheless. Sure, they are presented in a much more implicit way and we would be far from a more explicit theory and its application in real life, but that’s still almost 2.5 milenia sooner.

What else have we looked at and missed its importance? What else has been forgotten and how could we have used all those hard learned lessons and skills? … I’ll go read something in Italian now. Ciao.?