Learning velocity beats current knowledge.

The half-life of specific knowledge is getting shorter. Whatever you know now about your tools, your market, or your technology will be partly wrong in 3 years. The thing that compounds is how fast you can learn something new.

I have watched two kinds of people in the same role. The first knows the current stack deeply and is the person everyone asks when something breaks. The second knows the stack well enough but spends a few hours a week learning something adjacent.

Three years later, the first person is still the person everyone asks when something breaks. The second person has moved into a different role where they are setting direction.

The first person is not wrong. They are valuable. But their value is tied to the current state of things. The second person's value is tied to their ability to move.

The question I ask myself now is not "what do I know" but "how fast did I learn the last thing I did not know."

How do you deliberately practice learning speed, not just accumulating knowledge?