HOW TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL AND CREATE A BETTER WORLD — The huge competitive advantage in both grasping yin and grasping yang!

What makes you a winner and what makes you a loser? Yes, some would say the same thing that makes a machine good or less good, i.e. to what extent you as a tool for yourself are good at achieving your goals or not. If we lift ourselves a little higher, then we might add the reflection on the value of these goals, and maybe not only to do wonders for yourself, but also for others? And what about not merely looking for the consequences right now, but later? To really know what the quick results of the quarterly report will have for the strategic competitiveness and, yes, maybe even what it will mean for our planet or for us as a species?

Being snobbish from both directions

Ever since I gave myself the gift of conducting scientific PhD studies at university, I have been awed by the complete dichotomy of people in the academic world. We have on one side all the practical engineers, economists, medical practitioners. We have on the other side the theoretical philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists etc. The former with very little of the latter, and the latter with almost snobbish aversion to the former.

If we then come to business life (where some of us academics actually end up, after all, even though most tend to get caught up in the academic grits), the snobbishness is often in the opposite direction — it is only “hard” stuff that is important, if the value of knowledge is even talked about at all.

Academic world as a luxury for the soul

This is, of course, above all the academy’s own fault. It has snowed in total and, in recent times, the exponential digital dynamics has often made it completely obsolete — with education programs being outdated even before completed.

At the same time, in the business world, we would be highly unprofessional if we would throw out the baby with the bath water, and totally turn our backs on more in-depth knowledge and analysis in favor for day trading and quarterly reports.

As a 19-year-old entrepreneur myself, I had already started my first business and managed to earn my first million, until I was told by my respected grandfather to get myself an education. I already knew I “was the best in the world” and would now only get paper on it.

Once I arrived at the university, I got nothing but a wallop. For what I found was a gigantic treasure trove of knowledge I had no idea about. I’m pretty sure my rather intense experience with early entrepreneurial life in more than twenty cities in four countries added some magic to the studies. I had, so to speak, “empiricism” to test the various theories on, and felt how I became a little, a little wiser for each day — and thus studied almost as much as I used to work (i.e. 16h / day). I got so passionate that I not only took double degrees but also started working as a research assistant and then initiated my PhD-studies.

Business life as the luxury to make a difference

Of course, I had too much for ADHD to stay in the — for the soul as inspiring as for the body under-stimulating — academic world. So after having done my thesis during half time (s.c. Fil. Lic.) I was eventually dragged into the digital world, once again as an entrepreneur …

… and the rest is, as you say, history ;-) My point is this. At the dawn of the millennium I came into the “creative” Internet world rudely wearing black Armani, armed with a data science for “changing perceptions” based on stone cold mathematical statistics and scientific methodology on one side and a vast array of behavioral science on the other.

In this Klondike of creativity and revolution I may not always have made myself terribly popular (for you who know me, you know brutal honesty is one of my 8 blessed virtues :D), and if I may get a little less humble and more “brutally honest”, in most situations I had an extreme competitive edge. And this was not anymore only because of my appreciation for the more generic “traits” earned since before (such as responsibility from my upbringing, stern discipline from my training as competition boxer, and not the even the extreme focus of action and team spirit from my early entrepreneurship), but, perhaps most importantly, that I since then had been lucky to arm both my right and left part of the brain so to speak.

Cause if you handle knowledge correctly, it’s extremely true as our ancestor of social psychology Kurt Lewin once expressed it:

“There is nothing as practical as theory”.

Not understanding where you come from

So, what do the world do with all this wealth of knowledge we have all around the world? Well with the academy merely qualifying in its function as Preparing for life(PfL), while with a huge amount of disciplines almost disqualifying themselves from Preparing for work (PfJ), the industry almost took over the leadership in knowledge development, turning things outside-and-in, prioritized skilling over knowledge, and — above all — prioritized hard skills over “soft skills”.

With one single expression, it is since the millennium called STEM (science, technology, technology, mathematics).

The fact that the business world, and its clumsy political vassals, are chopping off the branch on which they are sitting, and is single-mindedly taking away all the wealth on which modern society is built, is one thing. Perhaps they simply don’t understand better — especially if being built and led by precisely those economists and engineers who unilaterally refused to absorb the riches on the other side of the academic smorgasbord.

Still once again, this is the academy’s own fault, where the stars on the other side of the table were too “snobbish” to venture into business to complement all those one-dimensional sights with some multidimensional in-sights.

Using the shoehorn to get into business?

At the same time, it is probably even worse how the countermeasures formed by the “academicians” (so-called HASS) are so terribly toothless. In one breath it can be spelled with a single letter.

The letter A in the alphabet.

For years, the humanities has struggled to get STEM to become STEAM, and soften the cocktail by getting a little “Art” in all the hard skills — if you only put in a little design skills, people can be more creative and “innovate” all the hard stuff instead of “implementing” them.

Hallelujah.

Should I continue our spirit of “brutal honesty” I would say that the complementing of an A feels like a panic attempt from the humanities to add a little soft in all the hard with shoehorns. Mix some yang into all the yin so to speak, and we then stand with one foot in one ice bucket and the other in boiling water, and then everything gets lukewarm and lovely …

…not. It just becomes an even more confused arrangement with an even greater polarization between the “soft” and the hard :-/

The question of questions

For the one who makes the effort to think at least a few centimeters longer than the nose goes, it is quite clear that the more important question today (as always, though becoming so more critical 2020) is not just the differing between what is true and what is false (PfL, e.g. detection of all fake news etc.), but what is the effective and what is the ethical, i.e. what can be done and what should be done. As well as how to choose between the one or the other, or even better how to let one be the guideline for the other.

Simply how one question determines your goals and the other your means, one answers the question WHY you should do something and the other about WHAT to do in order to succeed in it.

This has now finally got a whole new and fresh format. I’m not going to go through it all (read with advantage here instead), but in short, it’s about exactly what I myself dreamed of (and my supervisors luckily handed me in large doses, which I would so love for everyone else to get in at least some minor doses) when I was in the academy a few hundred years ago:

“It will require the development of an entirely new curriculum that gives the next generation of technologists, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians the formal foundations — including shared vocabulary and intellectual frameworks — for considering the macro effects of their actions on society”

Going from soft skills to power skills

What we’re talking about is a platform. An intellectual platform (PfL), which makes you prepared for, in a right way, all the more useful, extremely practical, things in skilling that you will study after that (PfJ). This intellectual platform we will stop calling soft skillsand perhaps call them power skills, “because, without them, people’s technical skills aren’t running on all cylinders.”, or durable skills as “the average lifespan of a tech skill now is roughly 18 months, while durable skills like creativity, adaptability or time management, by contrast, never get obsolete”.

The crucial thing is that this “platform” does not have any intrinsic value for academic snobbery to drink red wine over, but something extremely valuable and practical, something that gives you a “leverage” in all other studies, and acts as a compass, where you not only get insights into how and what you will study, but also what to do with your knowledge once you have acquired it.

The solution to almost everything

And just to make it clear from the outset, in the same way that I am talking about reinventing global learning, I am also talking about the adoption of a global compass — as there are now scientific evidence that people all over the world not only biologically share 99,9% of their genes among each other, but that culturally share fundamental moral values that 99,9% of cultures confer to .

Without that compass, nowadays even more importantly a global one, anything can happen. And do you know what? That is exactly what it is doing right now. Ask Max Tegmark. Noah Harari. Nick Bostrom. Muzoon Almellehan.

And ask Greta.

Fortunately, there are some of us who have already been given that compass. Fortunately, we are rather many. But even more fortunate, I have set as my life’s calling to not only make sure that people all over the world — not just the rich and the well connected but each and every one of us — will get access to the skills they need to get a job and actively contribute to both themselves, their families and their communities. But adding to this, also being able to access exactly such a platform, a compass, that makes this “skilling” just as much a tool for doing good for the world as it does well for you, your family and employers.

And that I intend to continue with this right now! See you on the other side — cause the other side is and will be bright, we just have to work a little for it ;)