“I know how to make myself do the thing I planned to do.”
“Contract management”, I think it’s called.
You hire the services of one factory or laboratory to do your manufacture and packaging, another company for distribution and marketing, another for accounting, etc. You can build a good-sized company with one employee: You, the owner.
The problem is luck plays an enormous role in whether or not a company fails or makes bank. This is how we end up with idiots who become hundred-millionaires or billionaires. Though being savvy helps improve your chances.
If you’re good at playing the dailies, you will inevitably go bust, possibly while owning a bunch of rotting commodities that didn’t sell in time, but once you have a reputation friends will lend you money to get back on your feet (which you pay back with interest.)
“I know how to understand and speak every language with the proper accent. Wöáh.”
Polyglotism. Being able to speak every language would be practically a superpower.
This is a neat idea until you’re in a situation where you remember 38 different words for a thing, just not the one in the language you need
I only speak one language fluently and one language extremely poorly.
The number of times I’ve been able to come up with the word I want in my second language and completely blanked on it in my native language baffles my mind.
If I could ‘cheat’ and say ‘I know every language in the world’, and that included programming languages and things like scientific notation as a language, I’d take that in a heartbeat. If not, I’d take programming, as at least then I can create things and make money.
If speaking every language included dead and forgotten languages too though, then it would be a very tough choice.
This is probably super pedantic (bloody programmers right?) but I really feel like it would depend on what is meant by “know every programming language”. Like being able to remember every syntax and construct is sort of useful but not all that practical. Understanding how to implement the language in a useful way is the valuable part, not just knowing the keywords.
I guess I would kind of compare it to the difference between being able to read Shakespeare and being able to write Shakespeare,
Correct. Learning a programming language is trivial. Far easier than a foreign language.
If we think of it in terms of learning a language, what matters is the grammar and ability to use it to struct prose to create a coherent story.
There’s also a lot of reuse which requires knowing what’s available. The closest analogy there is how music sampling is used.
If we’re being pedantic, in The Matrix, Neo says ‘I know kung fu’ to explain that he both knows what all the moves are, and how to use them. As that was the topic of the post, I used the same sentence structure to mean the same thing about all languages, including programming 😉
If it was just one language and writing system as a choice, I might say Japanese.
There are so many different characters in their writing as symbols instead of phonetic sounds, that bookstores in Japan are divided into sections, in which one has books that use… say 500 characters, then another section with books that use 1200 characters, or 5000, or 10,000, or more!
To read Japanese or Chinese with a mastery of over 10,000 symbols might be my choice. The richness and depth of those writings must be something incredible.
My second choice, for shits ‘n’ giggles, might be something like Sumerian or Akkadian, in the original Cuneiform!
Psychotherapy
“he’s been going all night, he’s a machine!”
“…I know healthy emotion regulation”
“…show me”
