Capability is one of the few possessions nobody can steal without changing you first.

Most of what you own can leave without your consent. Money moves, positions disappear, reputations get rewritten by people who were not there. What you can actually do is different, because it lives in you, and taking it away would require altering who you are. That is why capability tends to feel like the steadiest floor a person can stand on when everything else is shifting.

When you are deciding where to put a spare hour, notice which options survive a bad year and which do not. Choosing the thing that leaves you more able, rather than the thing that leaves you more decorated, is usually the answer. Over time this builds a floor you can stand on in circumstances you cannot yet predict.