"It is soooooo necessary to get the basic skills, because by the time you graduate, undergraduate or graduate, that field would have totally changed from your first day of school"
About this Quote
The drawn-out “soooooo” does a lot of work: it’s not just emphasis, it’s a wink at how boring “basic skills” can sound in an era obsessed with hacks, disruptions, and shiny new tools. Leigh Steinberg, a super-agent turned businessman, is selling an unglamorous truth from inside a glamorous ecosystem: careers don’t reward the people who chase the newest playbook; they reward the people who can keep playing when the rules get rewritten mid-season.
The line’s real target is credential-worship. Steinberg isn’t anti-education; he’s anti-mistaking education for insurance. The subtext is that school creates a comforting illusion of stable expertise: pick a major, master a body of knowledge, graduate into a matching job. He punctures that fantasy by pointing to time itself as the disruptor. Even if your professors are current on day one, the market won’t stay put long enough for your syllabus to matter on day 1,400.
“Basic skills” here aren’t remedial; they’re portable: writing clearly, negotiating, reading incentives, learning fast, handling uncertainty, building relationships. That framing makes sense from someone whose entire business runs on human leverage and shifting conditions: athletes age, leagues renegotiate, media rights mutate, and the money moves. Steinberg’s quiet warning is that specialization without fundamentals becomes fragility. The payoff of basics isn’t mastery of one moment’s knowledge; it’s the ability to retool without panicking when the field you trained for stops existing in its old form.
The line’s real target is credential-worship. Steinberg isn’t anti-education; he’s anti-mistaking education for insurance. The subtext is that school creates a comforting illusion of stable expertise: pick a major, master a body of knowledge, graduate into a matching job. He punctures that fantasy by pointing to time itself as the disruptor. Even if your professors are current on day one, the market won’t stay put long enough for your syllabus to matter on day 1,400.
“Basic skills” here aren’t remedial; they’re portable: writing clearly, negotiating, reading incentives, learning fast, handling uncertainty, building relationships. That framing makes sense from someone whose entire business runs on human leverage and shifting conditions: athletes age, leagues renegotiate, media rights mutate, and the money moves. Steinberg’s quiet warning is that specialization without fundamentals becomes fragility. The payoff of basics isn’t mastery of one moment’s knowledge; it’s the ability to retool without panicking when the field you trained for stops existing in its old form.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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