The afternoons he gave to solar

An electrician in Zarqa has wired houses the same way for fifteen years. He is good at it, and he is busy.

Over a few months, he has given up most of his Saturday afternoons to learn how rooftop solar is installed. Videos, a borrowed manual, two days helping a man who already does it, questions he was too proud to ask a year ago.

None of those afternoons paid him anything. Several felt like time taken from work that would have.

But look at what he bought. Every house he quotes for from now on can be offered something it could not be offered before. The skill does not wear out or get used up on the first job. It sits there earning, quietly, for the next twenty years, while the hours it cost were spent only once.

Most of the ways we try to get more done are a kind of squeezing. Working later, replying faster, cutting the break short. They help a little, and the help disappears the moment the squeezing stops.

Learning works differently. It is one of very few efforts that keeps paying after you have stopped making it.

And it has rarely been easier to begin. Almost anything a person might want to know is explained somewhere by someone who knows it, much of it for nothing. What has gone is the gatekeeper. Nobody is going to enrol you. Nobody is going to call you in and suggest it.

Which leaves one thing deciding whether the next skill arrives: whether you go and fetch it.

The man who let him tag along for two days lost nothing by it, either.