The sound isn’t the loud, chaotic casino floor you see in movies. It’s a low hum. The real sound is the soft riffle of 3 decks being washed, the almost silent slide of cards across fresh felt, and the specific, dense click of clay composite chips. It’s a language. And Evan, bless his heart, was shouting in a library.
He came from a high-end retail background where his brand of effusive charm was a major asset. He could remember a customer’s dog’s name, ask about their trip to Maui, and sell them a $3,733 watch with a smile that felt like sunshine. He was, by all accounts, a ‘people person.’ His resume screamed it. It said ‘Excellent Communication Skills.’ It said ‘Customer-Centric.’ It said ‘Relationship Builder.’
At the poker table, the ‘customers’ didn’t want a relationship. They wanted a ghost. An efficient, invisible functionary who dealt cards with precision, managed the pot with unimpeachable accuracy, and kept their mouth shut. Evan’s sunny, “Alright folks, who’s feeling lucky today?” was met with the kind of silence that has a physical weight. His attempts at small talk were parried by stony glares. He was trying to build a rapport where the established rapport was a mutual agreement to ignore one another. He lasted 13 shifts.
Competence is not a Liquid
We love the idea of transferable skills. It’s a comforting belief that our efforts in one area of life will be rewarded in another. It makes career changes seem less like a terrifying leap and more like a simple sideways step. We boil down years of nuanced, context-specific experience into two-word bullets on a resume. People Skills. Leadership. Problem-Solving. But this is a dangerous oversimplification. Competence is not a liquid that can be poured from one container to another.
I’ll admit, I believe competence is fluid and adaptable. But this belief is wrong. I once made a similar, disastrous mistake myself. In a past life, I did a lot of public speaking and debate. I was good at it. I could structure an argument, manage a room’s emotional temperature, and land a point with force and clarity. I thought I had ‘Communication Skills.’ So when a close friend’s father passed away, and his family asked me to say a few words at the funeral, I said yes. I thought my skill was transferable.
I stood up there and I performed. I structured a narrative. I landed my emotional beats. I projected my voice. I did everything that had worked for me on a stage in front of 333 strangers. And it was a catastrophe. My friend told me later, with brutal, necessary honesty, that it felt like I was trying to win his father’s eulogy. The context didn’t call for a performer; it called for a grieving friend.
True competence isn’t about having a generic tool. It’s about having the right tool and knowing, instinctively, when and how to use it. Evan’s retail charm was a finely-honed instrument for creating a warm, low-stakes buying environment. At a poker table, where the emotional landscape is a minefield of tension, superstition, and concealed aggression, that same instrument just made noise. What he needed wasn’t a generic skill but a highly specific one: the ability to read a room and reflect its required energy, which in this case, was near zero. This isn’t something you pick up selling designer shoes; it’s something you learn through focused, context-specific training at a casino dealer school.
True competence isn’t about having a generic tool. It’s about having the right tool and knowing, instinctively, when and how to use it.
This is why I get so frustrated when people talk about skills in the abstract. It’s the root of so many bad hires, failed projects, and personal disappointments. We are setting people up to fail by telling them their toolbox is universally applicable. It’s not.
True skill is a dialect, not a universal language.
Think about my friend, Logan D. His job title is ‘Emoji Localization Specialist.’ On paper, you might lump his skills under ‘Communication’ or ‘Marketing.’ But that would be an insult to the sheer specificity of his craft. Logan’s job is to understand how an emoji will be interpreted across different cultures, age groups, and social contexts. He knows that the ‘slightly smiling face’ emoji can come across as passive-aggressive to people under 23 in North America. He knows which hand gesture emoji is a benign ‘okay’ in one country and a profound insult in another. He once spent 3 weeks in meetings arguing that a proposed cartoon octopus for a marketing campaign had to have the correct number of arms because an incorrect depiction would signal carelessness to marine biologists, a key demographic for this particular client.
His expertise is a deep, almost fanatical understanding of context. He can tell you that a 43-year-old father in Germany will interpret a thumbs-up as simple agreement, while a 23-year-old in Greece might see it as confrontational. His skill isn’t transferable to, say, writing a novel. The deep vertical of his knowledge is what makes him valuable, not its horizontal reach.
We cling to the myth of transferable skills because it’s egalitarian. It suggests a flattened world where anyone can do anything if they just have the core competencies. But the world isn’t flat. It’s mountainous, and expertise is found at the peaks. True mastery is, by its nature, exclusionary. It requires thousands of hours of focus in one specific domain. The poker dealer’s hands move with an economy of motion that comes from dealing 3 million hands, not from a general sense of ‘dexterity.’ The surgeon makes an incision based on a deep knowledge of anatomy, not a generic ability for ‘problem-solving.’
This isn’t to say that nothing carries over. Of course, patterns of thinking, discipline, and the ability to learn can be applied broadly. But these are meta-skills, the skills of acquiring skills. The actual application-the performance of the task-is almost always context-dependent. The confidence you have in a boardroom might evaporate on a casino floor. The empathy that makes you a great therapist might make you a poor soldier. The quick thinking of a day trader is a different species from the slow, deliberate thinking of a historian.
We keep telling people to just jump in, assuring them they already know how to move their arms. We need to stop. Instead, we need to respect the water.