Use it for lose it

The following was from a “Lunch with the FT” article with Armen Sarkissian, the President of Armenia, a former physicist. Both quotes respect their fact that expertise is time limited. One big downside of certification at a fixed time point is that it pretends otherwise.

On the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sarkissian was asked to become independent Armenia’s first ambassador to London, a post he filled again on two later occasions — a record, he believes, at the Court of St James’s. For good measure, he also opened embassies and missions in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the EU, Nato and the Vatican. “I dreamt that I could do both science and diplomacy. But being a research physicist is like being a concert pianist. Unless you practise every day, it is gone. It becomes a hobby,” he says, regretfully.

Those people who know how to listen are also people who learn,” he says. “The moment you stop learning, you die. Age is not the number of years that you have been living. Age is the condition of your soul.”

Armen Sarkissian: ‘The moment you stop learning, you die’ | Financial Times

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