According to an article I just read, knowing how to sew a bit could be considered a “useless skill” because, in the real world, people make their living sewing buttons and fixing ripped Joe Cool T-shirts. So, I don’t need to know how to do this. It’s useless, so they say. But I have to ask: is any skill ever useless?
I had this shirt as a kid, and I loved it. It was a blue T-shirt with an image of Snoopy as his Joe Cool character. Arms crossed, head back, dark sunglasses on. He leaned against a row of lockers and watched the world go by. When I wore it all summer, it made me feel like everything was okay and that I didn’t need to be doing, doing, doing all the time. I could sit and watch, sit and listen to people, the waves on the beach, the birds, the traffic, the distant sound of Portuguese relatives one street over fighting and then bursting into laughter. That shirt gave me a new perspective on life: one endless summer in the town of Marshfield.
One day, toward the end of summer, I came home from the beach, and my mother noticed the back of the T-shirt was torn. I must have caught it on some rocks while scavenging tide pools. Now I was in a bind; my mother hated the shirt, and we constantly fought whenever she demanded I hand it over to be washed. So when she said, “Give me the shirt,” I thought, “Well, she’s won. My days with Snoopy are over, and I will have to spend the rest of the summer sans Snoopy and wearing some plain T-shirt that made me feel nothing.” I was so sad when my mother took the shirt and disappeared into the house. I figured she’d return with some lighter fluid and she’d burn the shirt in the backyard. So long, Ol’ Pal; it was a great summer.
My mother returned, and to my surprise she didn’t have lighter fluid; instead, she had a needle and thread that matched the blue of the T-shirt exactly. She sat at the kitchen table, put the needle, thread, and shirt in front of me, and said, “Fix it.” I had no idea how to start. She sat with me, drinking a cup of tea, and walked me through the whole process. My unskilled kid’s fingers worked overtime to make the stitch and close that gap that threatened the comfort of the rest of my summer. After about an hour and a half and five hundred tons of my mother’s patience, the shirt was repaired. Granted, my little fingers didn’t have the skill of a surgeon; still, the fix wasn’t too bad, and I had my shirt for the rest of the summer.
I also had something else, two something-elses, actually. One, I had a new skill. I could mend a rip, and I had a desire born in me for more such skills. When I went off to college, my mom gave me a really nice sewing kit. Full of all the things an amateur seamstress would need in a pinch. That kit got me through college with ripped shorts and pants, lost buttons and snaps, and, as a theater practitioner, I also learned to iron clothes, dye clothes, and add a patch.
Useless Skills
According to an article I just read, knowing how to sew a bit could be considered a “useless skill” because, in the real world, people make their living sewing buttons and fixing ripped Joe Cool T-shirts. So, I don’t need to know how to do this. It’s useless, so they say. But I have to ask: is any skill ever useless?
I ask this especially in the age of AI. It’s so easy to farm out a job, a task to an AI agent. We don’t have time, or the task is too small or too mundane, and we think, ah, this is a job for AI, and we shuffle the work off on Claude. But this article seemed audacious, as it named some useless tasks. Tasks like building a fire, banking a fire for night sleep, knowing the difference between a sauté pan and a skillet, knowing how to darn a sock. Things that maybe we don’t do every day, but that doesn’t mean they are useless, or that we can forget them, does it?
My mother didn’t teach me how to mend a ripped shirt; she actually taught me that I could mend a ripped shirt. The skill gave me agency. Something I loved was damaged, and instead of throwing it away, handing it to someone else, or replacing it, I did something about it. I took needle and thread and, with good guidance, did something to preserve this thing I loved.
Honestly, I have no idea where that T-shirt is today, probably deep down in a trash heap, but that doesn’t matter. What mattered was that I did something about it, and I did it through learning a new skill. One that some deem useless today. But more than this skill, it gave me curiosity. What other skills could I learn or at least understand?
The Trouble With Useless
Useless has become one of those words we use, but we’ve stopped thinking about why. If we use a skill only once every five years, why carry that knowledge around with us? Surely we can use that space for something else. Something more immediate. If the task feels mundane, hand it off, bring AI in; it will do it faster and, let’s face it, better, and save time. That time I would have wasted learning this trivial skill that I’ll hardly ever use can be focused on something else.
That makes sense if a skill’s only value is the task it accomplishes. Sewing closes the hole. Building a fire produces heat. Cooking produces dinner. Once we decide that the result is the only thing that matters, the skill itself becomes expendable. We can buy the result, hire someone to produce it, or increasingly ask technology to take care of it for us. Problem solved. Except the problem may not be the whole point.
Learning how to do something changes your relationship with the thing you’re doing. You begin to understand how it works. You notice where it can go wrong. You develop judgment about what good looks like. You get frustrated, make mistakes, try again, and eventually arrive at that wonderfully satisfying moment when your hands or your brain suddenly understand something they didn’t understand yesterday. None of that shows up on an efficiency chart, but I have a hard time calling it useless.
Look, if we didn’t have these useless skills, then there wouldn’t be thousands of blogs about life hacks. Those hacks and workarounds come from knowing a skill inside out. Through trial and error, or because something was passed down and overlooked, and then someone looked at it again and decided maybe it isn’t so useless.
There are certainly skills we no longer need. I’m not suggesting we all learn how to shoe a horse on the off chance civilization collapses on Tuesday. Or learn how to churn butter because you’re afraid cows will go on strike or you’re about to embark on a relationship with an Amish boy. The world changes, technology changes with it, and some knowledge naturally becomes less relevant. That has always happened. But before we decide a skill is useless simply because there’s now an easier way to accomplish the task, maybe we should ask what else we’re discarding along with it.
Because sometimes the thing we learn while learning how to do something has very little to do with the thing itself.
What Leaves With the Work
This is where AI complicates things. Because I use AI, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t. It can take care of work that would otherwise eat up an afternoon, help me understand something I’m struggling with, or point me toward an answer much faster than I could find it on my own. There’s real value in that. I’m certainly not suggesting we abandon the technology and spend our evenings darning socks by candlelight just to keep civilization sharp. Although I could, and I could even make the candles, thank you, Plymouth Plantation.
But every time we hand off a task, we make a small trade. We get the result without necessarily getting the experience that produces it. Sometimes that’s exactly what we want. I don’t need to understand the internal workings of my refrigerator every time I reach in for the milk. The danger comes when we begin treating the experience of learning as an unnecessary obstacle between us and the answer.
Think about how we actually get good at something. We screw it up. We misunderstand something, try again, discover a shortcut, realize the shortcut was terrible, go back, and eventually develop a feel for what we’re doing. Somewhere along the way, the instructions stop being instructions and become knowledge. We start noticing things that someone encountering the task for the first time wouldn’t notice. That’s where judgment comes from, and judgment is difficult to develop when we’re only collecting finished answers.
It also connects back to those life hacks. You can’t find a clever way around something unless you understand what you’re going around. The person who discovers an easier way to repair something, cook something, build something, or solve a problem usually has enough experience with the original process to see where it can bend. Ingenuity needs something to push against. If all we ever encounter is the finished result, there isn’t much left to push.
That’s what worries me about calling certain skills useless. Once we decide the skill doesn’t matter, it becomes incredibly easy to decide the learning doesn’t matter either. Then efficiency becomes the only measure. How quickly did we get there? How little effort did it require? Could somebody or something else have done it for us? Those aren’t bad questions, but they shouldn’t be the only ones we ask.
My mother could have fixed that Snoopy shirt herself. She could have sent me back outside, threaded the needle, closed the rip, and been drinking her tea again in ten minutes. Instead, she spent an hour and a half watching me fumble around with a needle because she understood something I didn’t. The repaired shirt wasn’t the only result that mattered. If she had simply handed it back to me fixed, I would have gotten my shirt. Because she made me do the work, I got something else.
It’s the old give me a fish, I’ll eat for a day; teach me to fish, I’ll eat for a lifetime.
But I’m a vegetarian.
Shut up and put the hook through the worm. Get us some dinner.
Knowing How
The other thing I got from that afternoon wasn’t really a skill at all. It was the knowledge that not knowing how to do something wasn’t the same as not being able to do it. Until my mother put that needle in front of me, sewing belonged to that enormous category of things other people knew how to do. I didn’t. Then, ninety minutes later, I did. Badly, perhaps, but the hole was closed, and Joe Cool was back in business.
And I had some bragging rights. Someone would say, “Looks like your shirt got ripped,” and I could say, “That’s alright, I sewed it up myself.” The awe in their eyes, the chicks that lined up to meet me. Yes, yes, I was the talk of summer, seven-year-old me and my awe-inspiring tailoring skills.
That distinction has stayed with me. There’s something powerful about encountering a problem and believing you might be able to figure it out. You don’t have to become an expert. You don’t even have to become particularly good at it. Sometimes understanding the basics is enough to change your relationship with the problem. Instead of immediately looking for someone to take it away from you, you look at it for a minute. You poke around. You ask questions. Maybe you try something. Occasionally you make it worse, which is also an education.
I think that’s part of what gets lost when we talk about skills only in terms of usefulness. We imagine the skill sitting by itself, waiting for the rare moment when we need it. I learned to sew; therefore, I can fix a button. Fine. But learning to sew also taught me that things could be understood. Clothes weren’t simply intact until they weren’t. There was construction involved. Seams and stitches held the whole thing together, and if one failed, you could look closely enough to understand what had happened and maybe do something about it.
That curiosity travels. Once you’ve figured out one thing you weren’t supposed to know how to do, you become a little more willing to try the next thing. I’m not going to rebuild a transmission this afternoon because I once repaired Snoopy, but I’m also less inclined to believe that everything outside my particular area of expertise belongs to somebody else. After all, I do still have an impressive sewing kit.
This is where I think AI presents us with a much more interesting choice than whether we use it or don’t. Of course we’re going to use it. The question is what we use it for. We can use AI to remove the things we don’t know how to do from our lives, or we can use it to help us understand them. The same machine that will happily do something for us can also walk us through doing it ourselves. It can be the person who hands us the repaired shirt, or it can sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and help us thread the needle.
Those are two very different relationships with technology.
One makes our world easier. The other might make our world bigger.
Brands Have Useless Skills Too
Brands have useless skills too. Or at least things they’ve decided are useless. Every company has processes that seem inefficient, outdated, or unnecessarily dependent on humans doing actual work. So we look at them and wonder why we’re still bothering. Surely there’s a faster way. Surely we can automate this, outsource that, or find software that will handle the whole thing while we get on with more important work.
And sometimes we should. Nobody gets a prize for maintaining an inefficient process simply because it’s been around since everyone smoked at their desks. Businesses have to change. Technology gives us better ways to do things, and refusing to use them because the old way had character isn’t wisdom. It’s stubbornness with a nice story attached.
The problem comes when we eliminate the work before we understand what the work has been doing for us.
Maybe there’s someone in your company who has talked directly with customers for twenty years. Over that time, she has developed an instinct for when a customer is confused, irritated, ready to leave, or simply needs someone to listen for another thirty seconds. You can automate much of that interaction, and the numbers may tell you that you should. But before you do, it might be worth figuring out what she knows. Not what her job description says she knows, but what twenty years of doing the work has taught her.
That kind of knowledge can be difficult to see because it doesn’t always live in a document. It lives in judgment. It’s the tiny adjustment someone makes because experience tells them something isn’t quite right. It’s knowing when the official process works and when following it would be spectacularly stupid. You don’t necessarily notice any of this while the person is there doing the job. You notice it six months after the job has been automated and everyone is wondering why something feels different.
Brands are built out of more than logos, websites, messaging, and the things we deliberately put in front of customers. They’re also built out of accumulated knowledge. Much of that knowledge comes from people doing things over and over until they understand them well enough to notice what the rest of us miss. Those supposedly mundane tasks create contact with the business itself, and sometimes that contact is exactly where a company learns who it is.
That doesn’t mean we keep every old process alive. It means we should understand what we’re throwing away before we throw it away. If AI can take a tedious job off someone’s plate, terrific. But perhaps the first question shouldn’t be, “Can AI do this?” Maybe the first question should be, “What have we learned by doing this ourselves?”
Because once you know that, you can make a choice. You can automate the task while preserving the knowledge it created. You can use AI to make someone better at the work instead of simply removing them from it. You might even discover that the thing you were about to eliminate was quietly teaching you something about your customers, your company, or your brand.
My mother could have fixed my shirt in ten minutes. She chose not to.
Sometimes inefficiency is just inefficiency.
And sometimes it’s where the learning happens.
What We Choose to Know
I don’t think we need to protect every skill from extinction. Some things disappear because we found a better way, and I’m perfectly happy to wave goodbye. I don’t feel an aching need to learn how to operate a telegraph or make my own swords. The point isn’t to preserve knowledge simply because it’s old. The point is to be a little more careful about deciding what knowledge is worth keeping.
AI makes that decision more immediate because suddenly so much can be done for us. We can hand over something we don’t understand and get back a perfectly usable result. That’s remarkable, and there are plenty of times when it’s exactly what we need. But there’s a difference between using a tool because we understand the work and want some help doing it, and using a tool because we’ve decided understanding the work is no longer necessary.
Understanding is always necessary. The more we understand the work, the world, and the people around us, the more likely we are to learn something new. And sometimes learning something new means letting go of something old, an assumption we’ve carried, a belief we’ve never questioned, even a prejudice we didn’t realize was there. Understanding doesn’t just give us more to know. Sometimes it gives us something we no longer need to believe.
Maybe that’s where the word useless starts causing trouble. It closes the case too quickly. Once we call something useless, there’s no reason to remain curious about it. We don’t ask how it works, where it came from, or what knowing it might allow us to see. We certainly don’t spend ninety minutes fighting with a needle and thread when somebody else could finish the job before their tea gets cold.
But curiosity has never been particularly efficient. Neither has learning. Both require us to spend time on things without knowing exactly what we’ll get in return. You follow something because it interests you. You learn how it works because you want to know. Then, years later, some bit of knowledge you picked up along the way connects with something else, and suddenly you can see a solution that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.
That matters for people, and it matters for brands. The more we understand about the work we do, the people we serve, and the strange little skills accumulated along the way, the more we have to draw from when something changes. We’re not simply waiting for an answer. We have somewhere to begin.
So use the tools. Let AI save you time. Hand off the work that truly doesn’t need you. But every now and then, when you’re about to decide that something isn’t worth knowing because something else can do it for you, maybe give it another look.
Useless is a pretty big word for something you haven’t needed yet.
The Takeaway
I don’t remember what happened to that Joe Cool T-shirt. I’d like to tell you I still have it tucked away somewhere, complete with my crooked little stitches across the back, but I don’t. It disappeared somewhere between childhood and everything that came after it. The shirt is gone. The skill stayed.
More importantly, so did the lesson. My mother could have fixed that shirt for me, and I would have been perfectly happy. Joe Cool would have returned to his place against those lockers, I would have pulled the shirt back over my head, and summer would have continued. Instead, she handed me a needle and made the problem mine. She was there to help, but my fingers had to do the work.
We think about that now, at ThoughtLab because we have extraordinary tools capable of doing so much of the work for us. We should use them. I certainly will. But convenience and capability aren’t the same thing, and gaining one shouldn’t automatically mean surrendering the other. Sometimes the value of doing something yourself has very little to do with the thing you produce. It’s what you notice while doing it, what you understand afterward, and what you become curious enough to try next.
The same is true for brands. Efficiency matters. Technology matters. AI matters. But understanding what you do and why you do it matters too. Before you automate something away, know what lives inside it. Before you label a skill obsolete, understand what it taught you. And before you call something useless, make sure you aren’t confusing “I don’t need this right now” with “there’s nothing here worth knowing.”
Somewhere around age seven, sitting at a kitchen table with my mother, I learned how to push a needle through a piece of blue cotton without stabbing myself too many times. I still sew; in fact, I returned a stray button to its rightful place before I started writing this blog. More importantly, I learned that when I don’t know how to do something, I can sit down, pay attention, and figure some of it out.
That seems like a pretty useful skill to me.
And Joe Cool got the rest of his summer.
