Become a specialized generalist

This is why you want to expand your knowledge and skill repertoire so that you can gain some competitive advantage.

My solution is quite simple: combining a handful of skills that are rarely linked to each other, rarely blended together.

Quick examples:

If you are combining the above skills altogether, then you will have a natural but non-aggressive competitive advantage over your peers.

And you can think about the current state of your hobbies.

View yourself as an Experimenter

You are not trying to master and combine 50 different random skills and juggle an overwhelming amount of snowballs that can ultimately melt in your hands.

And you are not a dilettante, don’t label yourself that way, as it can swiftly change your perception and your thought processes.

You are simply spreading your wings just a little bit more, a well thought spread I might say. Flying across the world of various skills and playgrounds that can be rarely found in the same mix. > “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” - Albert Einstein

The above word combination is a rusty saying hunting the realms of the internet for decades, but I really believe that being able to quickly convey information swiftly and accurately gives you a megalithic lever you can often pull in times of great needs.

Meaning that if you are not able to translate your thought processes’ outputs into meaningful, actionable advice one can learn and build on is a huge loss for the future of humanity.

A UI designer might be a skillful wizard with his craft, but making your project understandable for a non-designer, fighting for appreciation and then building on its true value, that’s a huge leap in our communication infrastructure.

In today’s world, if your phone is not in your pocket, it feels like you have the missing limb syndrome.

Whether we like it or not, we are already on our way to becoming a cyborg, on a real path to morph into an AI symbiote.

Our current processing power is still too low

An optimistic view of somewhere around 100 bits per second is something we can indeed cherish, but it is still way lower when looking at a computer. And I am being generous.

When a machine is able to communicate at a hundred terabytes per second, you as a human being are just boring. You bring nothing else to the table.

And one might argue that if you want to go with a full Artificial Intelligence symbiosis, bringing human creativity and a blend of skill sets to the table is the winning card in our back pockets.

That’s the top skill on our resume when being interviewed by an Artificial Intelligence entity.

Your brain spends a lot of effort trying to convey a complex idea into words. There’s a lot of noise in between. Clarity of thought is compromised.

Imagine trying to explain the concept of living in a simulation to your grandmother who was born during the war and never heard of Sims. Information loss occurs right from the first word.

Reading, skimming, scanning, analyzing, interpreting, summarizing: these are some rudimentary skills we can start practicing. Just pick a book, read 10 pages and try summarizing everything in a few lines, try encapsulating the data and deliver that to someone else.

Engaging in the Public Speaking sphere is yet another handy practice one should think about.

It not only forces you to think logically, critically, and also strategically, but it can act as a stepping stone for your future live endeavors. This skill has extended real-life applications.

Having and engaging in difficult conversations will stretch out your mental apparatus, making you more organized and prepared for what’s yet to come.

Then you use the power of writing to create yet another point you can leverage. Being able to convey content and tone without losing velocity is one step forward to improving the human language.

Culture is not about aesthetics

You have your skills, then the multipliers. A metaphorical spider’s web. You touch a string which affects the entire network. You can change it in a blink.

Taking care of the basics we have at hand is what we should do right now. It’s about processing speed, but also about physical speed.

One small example which comes to mind is increasing your typing speed, both on the computer and on the smartphone or tablet.

And you can do this right away. It is about increasing and gradually adjusting your words per minute (WPM), and, ultimately, your actions per minute (AMP), i.e. how fast you are using your this new limb of yours, this new extension of yourself to navigate through the intricate webs of Big Data.

If you manage to develop a skill set of working fast and with huge accuracy, you will then be able to learn new skills with great ease, as you already worked on building the infrastructure of your learning path.

It will become your default.

One can also start thinking about how to encapsulate the skill of reverse engineering into this new variety of hard-to-combine-hard-to-find skillset repertoire.

Transferable skills will catapult you forward

Picking distilled projects that you can leverage is a skill itself.

Achievable outcomes from which you can learn and develop particular competencies so that you can later translate those into evergreen bits of knowledge blocks you can play around with and share with the world for infinite expansion.

It is like planting a seed with a 100x return rate.

Start planting your seed now.