How do you prepare your child for the scary future?
When you ask your child, “Darling, what do you want to be when you grow up?”. We hear quite exciting things from them such as “Ballerina, Scientist, Taxi Driver, Fashion Designer, Criminal Lawyer, etc” We can clearly see that there are many additional things to the general “Engineer, Doctor, Lawyer” answers that we got in the earlier generation. Ask the same question in 5 or 10 years & you will be getting completely different answers. The world is changing. Fast. We have no idea what is in for us in the future, specially when it comes to the array of available jobs.
So how do make our kids to face the scary future. Well there are two ways of doing this. The first way is to predict the future. Hmm. The way things change so very fast, this is not at all possible. Due to many different things like changing politics, changing environments, changing people values, we have no idea how the future will look like. Well we are certainly not astrologers, therefore predicting is out of the picture. The best way to face the future is to Prepare for it.
When you do prepare for the future there are two main characteristics that you need to work on. First characteristic is the Learnability and the other is Creativity.
Learnability
What exactly is Learnability. Well let me put it this way. We are all familiar with the concept of Knowledge. In the past, the traditional education system focused on building walking encyclopedias. Although knowledge at any point is important, it is not as important as it was in the past. The main problems when it comes to knowledge are:
Knowledge is perishable — What is true today maybe false tomorrow, Knowledge changes so fast in the rapidly changing present
Knowledge has now become to be a commodity — Pretty much any person with a smartphone and access to Google has access to the knowledge in the whole planet!
Learnability on the other hand is much more important. Learnability is your ability to grasp new things, and being open to learn new things. This is a very good trait to have within yourself to prepare yourself to the future. Your speed of catching up & learning new things is going to be vital for your future!
Creativity
Next comes creativity. You see that in the current modern world, there is a massive amount of automation that takes place. You can see that most industries like manufacturing, healthcare, etc have now grasped automation in a massive scale. Most of the jobs done by humans 10 or 20 years ago are now done by robots. This is a problem that is hiding in plain sight. The only good jobs that will be available in the future are the ones that will require peoples personal touch of creativity! Every single repetitive kind of jobs will be taken over by automated systems!
Therefore you can see that it is of utmost importance that you make Creativity a trait to personally develop within yourself.
Hmmm. Now you do know the two secret traits that you need to develop within yourself if you are to be successful in the future, but heres the big question. How do you develop Learnability & Creativity within you?
Here are two ways that you could do this:
1. Constantly challenging yourself
Success is the enemy of Innovation & Improvement. A huge mistake done by people is that soon as you are successful on something, you stop innovating. You stop improving & you stop thriving forward. This is a killer! On the other hand Failure is what Innovators should crave for. Failure teaches you much much more than success does.
You should never be scared to fail. Take failure as your friend and use it to help & motivate you to keep thriving forwards. Furthermore there is nothing called being correct. The problem is that with our traditional systems. we have always been taught that THIS is correct and THIS is wrong. If you do THIS you will succeed but if you do THAT you will fail. When in school our traditional education system teaches us all the “Correct” things to write in an Exam.
Let me ask you this question. If you are always encouraged to learn what is “Correct”, then how in the world will you ever Innovate? If you are to develop yourself to prepare for the future, you should always constantly challenge yourself. Push your boundaries.
As the CEO of a Technology company, I never sit down and celebrate our success. I do not tell you that this is a good personal trait of mine. You should always reward and motivate your co-workers & employees. But, I firmly believe that I should never be joyous about the state of my startup. I should constantly challenge my job and push forward on and on and on. This personal trait of mine, and honestly most of our employees is what makes our Startup Innovate successfully!
2. Exposing yourself to multiple technical disciplines
This is all about reaching out of your comfort zone. Let me put it this way. Think about a machine which makes…. hmm…. let’s say chocolates? 30 years ago if you look at a machine that makes chocolate, what you would find is a purely mechanical machine, with so many moving parts and components that makes the beautiful & tasty chocos that we all love. Fast forward 10–20 years and lets look at the same chocolate machine. What are the parts on this now? Do you find only mechanical parts? Dig deep down and you will be able to see that it contains many other different components. From computers to circuits you will find that this new machine is made up with more than just mechanical components. Yes! This machine now contains Mechanical components, Mechanical components & even Computer components.
This is very common in modern day machinery. You will be able to see that almost all of modern day machinery is built using combination of multiple technologies. Therefore if you are to prepare yourself to be a SUCCESSFUL future engineer, then it is adamant that you make yourself comfortable with multiple technical disciplines. Keep the engineer job career path aside now. What if you want to be an Innovator? In this case of course you will definitely need this flexibility across multiple disciplines because you certainly need this knowledge when you create your product innovation.
ALRIGHT!……… Now you know how to develop your Learnability & Creativity. But there is a problem here. What if you develop your learnability towards something that is not very important? And what if you develop something creative that nobody wants? This is problematic isn’t it? To solve this we need one more trait which is a MUST to develop within you. This trait is called EMPATHY! Hmmm what is this? Have you heard about this before? Empathy is putting yourself in another persons shoes and experiencing their life. Empathy differs from Sympathy. Imagine you walking down the street & you see a beggar. You think “It’s so sad. Look at this person. Without any job or food or shelter”. This is Sympathy. A doctor was doing a study about the lifestyle of homeless people. He first tried to observe them and study them by being sympathetic. Next what he did was he got into the lifestyle of a beggar. He dressed like one, talked like one, ate like one & slept like one. What do you think worked? First method or the second? From which method do you think he was able to get a good & accurate idea of a homeless persons lifestyle. Yes that's right! The second way! In the second way he was showing Empathy.
Empathy is all about studying the environment by getting yourself into other peoples position & thinking like them. This way you will be able to identify the pain points faced by them. With this clear analysis of a persons pain point, you can now develop a solution to solve this problem. By understanding the pain point you can now direct your learnability towards gaining knowledge in the domain required to solve the problem. Then you can use your creativity to come up with an innovative solution to solve the particular persons pain point. Do you now see the power of Empathy? You have now gained knowledge in an important area, and you have created something that is useful to someone.
