What is the most important skill in marketing and in life?

Curiosity. That is the one skill I would put above everything else, and not only in marketing. In life. If you are not curious and passionate about what you do, you keep working towards a goal and telling yourself you will be happy when you get there. With curiosity, you enjoy the work right now. It is also the one thing I cannot teach.

The question came at the end of an intro call with someone who works in web marketing for a small e-commerce business. We had spent most of the call on AI and automation. Then came a last question in two parts. What is the one skill that is absolutely essential today? And what is a skill people keep working on that is already useless?

The first answer came straight away. Curiosity. I said it twice, because I meant it.

Why is curiosity the most important skill?

If you don't have curiosity in your heart, if you are not passionate about what you are doing, no matter what you are doing, you will not be successful.

Here is why. Without curiosity, you are working towards a goal. You tell yourself, "When I have this, I will be happy." The work becomes something you push through to reach a finish line somewhere in the future.

With curiosity, it flips. You are enjoying it right now. When you are making the product, when you are creating something, you enjoy it so much that the future becomes secondary. You stop counting down to the result because the doing itself is what you care about.

So when I say the most important skill is curiosity, I mean curiosity and the passion that curiosity brings. The two come together. One feeds the other.

Why do I hire for curiosity and not for knowledge?

This is the one thing I always look for in people who join my team.

I don't ask what you know. I can teach you everything. Really, everything. Knowledge is something I can give you.

What I cannot teach you is fire. That feeling of "I want to do this." That enthusiasm. I cannot bring it to you. It has to already be there.

So when I meet someone, I am not checking how much they know. What they know, I can teach. The fire is the one thing I can't put in.

Is any skill actually obsolete?

The second half of the question was harder. I took a moment, because it is difficult to name a skill that has become useless. And honestly, I don't think you can really say that about anything you are learning.

Take translation. Someone could easily say that learning translation is pointless now. I don't agree. If you know how translation works, you will be the one person who can see where the AI makes a mistake. The skill hasn't gone away. It has become the thing that lets you check the machine.

Or take something that seems to have nothing to do with marketing at all, like knitting or stitching. It has no relation with marketing, right? But trust me, one day you will be doing marketing and you will notice a pattern. You will think, this is very similar to stitching. When I do this, I feel this. When I do that, I feel that.

That is why I can't point at a skill and call it useless. In some way, it is all related. There is no skill that is fully obsolete. If you spend time learning something, someday, somehow, in your life, you will use it.

How do the two answers fit together?

When I look at both answers side by side, they point the same way. Curiosity is what makes you want to learn things in the first place, even the ones that don't seem useful today. And because nothing you learn is truly wasted, that curiosity keeps paying you back in ways you can't plan for.

So if you are deciding where to put your energy, I would not spend too long worrying about which skills are dead. I would worry more about whether you still have the fire. What you know can be taught. Wanting to know it cannot.

“What I cannot teach you is fire.”

Said on the call, 6 May 2026