More Prime Human Skills.
When I first started writing about the Prime Human Skills, I spotlighted four of them. Resilience, innovation, improvisation, and imagination. These are the ones that helped us crawl out of caves, survive winters, outsmart predators, and build everything from pyramids to potato chips. They’re still working hard for us today, whether we notice them or not. You don’t have to put them on a vision board or chant their names in the mirror every morning. They’re already in motion, shaping your day whether you know it or not.
But those aren’t the only skills that kept us going. There are at least two more, hiding in plain sight, grinning at us like the obvious relatives at the family reunion we somehow forgot to mention. They were standing right there by the potato salad the whole time, waiting for us to finally recognize them.
The first is language. Try getting through a day without it. Even if you decide to stay quiet, you’re talking to yourself in your head, narrating everything from “don’t trip over that step” to “I really should’ve remembered to buy coffee.” Language is the human superpower that makes all the other Prime Skills portable. It’s the Wi-Fi connection that lets resilience, imagination, and improvisation spread around instead of staying locked inside one person’s skull.
We don’t just speak to communicate, we speak to invent reality. And built right into language is storytelling—because humans don’t just blurt things out, we arrange them into beginnings, middles, and ends. “You won’t believe what happened to me today” is practically our species motto. That same impulse that made your ancestor tell a fire-circle yarn about a near miss with a mammoth is the same one that fuels your uncle’s long-winded vacation recap. Story is how we survive time. It’s how we remember, how we pass on what works, and how we laugh off what didn’t.
The second is cooperation. Other animals cooperate, sure. Ants do it, wolves do it, dolphins do it. But humans make it an art form, and a chaotic one at that. We form tribes, teams, companies, unions, political parties, volunteer fire departments, bowling leagues, group chats, and online gaming squads that yell at each other in real time across three continents. Even the lone wolf has to buy groceries from somebody. Cooperation is what makes all the other skills scale up. It’s why an idea doesn’t die with the dreamer and why no single person has to reinvent the wheel every Monday morning. It’s also why we end up with family road trips, office birthday parties, and neighborhood associations that argue endlessly about mailbox paint. Cooperation isn’t clean, but it’s universal. We are born into it, we practice it badly or brilliantly, and we depend on it for everything from our first breath to our last.
So, if we line them all up, we get six Prime Human Skills: resilience, innovation, improvisation, imagination, language, and cooperation. Each one is universal. Each one is personal. Every human alive is using them daily, even if badly. We’re all resilient to some degree, even if just getting out of bed. We all innovate, even if it’s just figuring out how to stretch leftovers into dinner. We all improvise, sometimes gracefully, sometimes like a toddler with a kazoo. We all imagine, sometimes grandly, sometimes just to picture what dessert we want. We all speak, narrate, and tell stories, often with questionable accuracy. And we all cooperate, even if we complain about the people we’re cooperating with.
The list is probably still not finished. Maybe there are several more. Humans are gloriously messy that way. We develop a myriad of ways of being human. That’s the fun of being us. We don’t have to shut the book. We just keep adding chapters as we live them. But these six? They’re still the best thing we’ve got going for us in this world of Constant Becoming.