“If the question is whether we can stop this pandemic with this vaccine, then my answer is: Yes.“ - Ugur Sahin

On the 9th of November came the bombastic announcement. There is a vaccine against Covid-19 that is 90% effective. The big company in the headlines is Pfizer. Donald Trump of course quickly claimed that it was him who was behind the vaccine, and accused the company of delaying the announcement in order to hurt his bid for the presidency.

However much of the research and development of the vaccine was done by a small German company called BioNTech. This medical start-up was created in 2008 by Ugur Sahin, Ozlem Tureci, and their colleague Christoph Huber.

Sahin and Tureci are a husband and wife team from Germany, but of Turkish immigrant origin. Sahin was born in Turkey and moved to Germany as a small child. Tureci was already born in Germany, but her father had emigrated to the country from Istanbul.

You could term the trio as a group of reluctant entrepreneurs. The founders of the company always thought of themselves as medical researchers first. They only created their company in order for the wider world to benefit from their research. In the process, they got really, but really rich.

For Sahin and Tureci, BioNTech was not their first company. In 2001, they founded Ganymed Pharmaceutical, which was a company that focused on cancer immunotherapies. In 2016, they sold it Astellas Pharma, a Japanese company. This deal made them instant billionaires.

However, their main baby is BioNTech, a spin-off that they created in 2008 in order to focus on more innovative treatments of cancer. They grew the company quite rapidly, and their leadership put it in a position to develop a vaccine that could stop the current global pandemic. The treatments that the company is planning to roll out could revolutionize the world of medicine.

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Create a core competence and use analogical thinking

The reason why BioNTech was able to produce a Covid-19 vaccine so quickly is because it had profound expertise in a unique technology. This technology allows it not only to create new ways of treating cancer, which is the field it was originally specialized in, but also to apply it for other medical problems. One of these other applications is the creation of vaccines.

The technology is inspired by the body itself. Through millions of years of evolution, the human body had developed unique capabilities to solve problems. DNA functions as the instruction manual to create messenger RNA molecules (mRNA). These are then used to create various types of proteins, the building blocks of life. This process serves as the basis of the human immune system’s ability to fight off viruses and other dangerous pathogens.

Long ago, some researchers had realized that if this process were to be replicated synthetically, you could turn the body into its own drug factory. The idea is simple. If you have the ability to create your own mRNA, then you can create any type of protein you want. These can be different types of enzymes, or antibodies for all kinds of viruses.

However, the problem was that in all the different early trials that were held to test this insight, the body rejected these synthetic mRNA molecules. Most scientists turned their back on the idea, and the few that were still working on it had a hard time getting funded. The breakthrough came when researchers Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman replaced one of mRNA’s nucleosides with a tweaked version. With this change, the body no longer put up a barrier to these synthetic mRNAs.
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Step 1: Create a core competence

The paper describing this process came out in 2005. In the meanwhile, Sahin and Tureci were working in their first company, Ganymed. There, they focused on various types of more traditional treatments for cancer, but were quite interested in the promise that synthetic mRNA could bring. While the 2005 paper went mostly unnoticed in the wider scientific world, Sahin was one of the first to see its significance.

He realized that with its findings, he could finally fulfill his secret dreams. The couple decided to sell off their first firm to a Japanese company, and focus on the promise of this new technology in the treatment of cancer. When they founded BioNTech in 2008, the mRNA platform was to be what they based their research and products around.

BioNTech is an immunology company which has the synthetic mRNA platform as its core competence. A core competence is something that a company is really good at, and that gives it an advantage in the marketplace. In a cult article from 1990, business researchers C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel described how cultivating a core competence is crucial for success.

One example that they give is that of 3M, a company that was able to leverage their competence with sticky tape into a wide variety of products:

“Consider 3M’s competence with sticky tape. In dreaming up businesses as diverse as Post-it notes, magnetic tape, photographic film, pressure-sensitive tapes, and coated abrasives, the company has brought to bear widely shared competencies in substrates, coatings, and adhesives and devised various ways to combine them.”

BioNTech’s expertise in the mRNA platform gives it unique insights that it can utilize in the marketplace to roll out new types of treatments in different areas.

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Step 2: Use analogical thinking

The key to be able to use your core competence in a variety of contexts is analogical thinking. This was at the root of why Sahin was able to leverage his mRNA work to create a vaccine for Covid-19. The professor realized that his company’s mRNA platform could be adapted for a variety of fields. The work that BioNTech did to create anti-cancer mRNA drugs could be modified to create anti-viral vaccines with only a few tweaks.

The ability to use analogical thinking is what is behind the success of innovators such as Steve Jobs. The founder of Apple could see a toaster and use that as inspiration to create his computers. Larry Page and Sergey Brin used an analogy from their academic work (citations) to create the search engine that became Google. Every entrepreneur that wants to successfully grow their business needs to be able to master this type of thinking.

In an analogy you usually have two things that you are comparing: two systems. One that you know well, the source system. And another one where you want to apply this knowledge, the target system. The 3 things that you need to do is: map, apply, and learn. You take what you know in your source system and apply it in your target system.

Ugur Sahin had a good knowledge of using the mRNA platform for cancer. This was his source system. He noticed that something similar could be done for viral vaccines, the target system. What happened next was the mapping and application.

This wider application of a core technology then leads to a more generalized learning, which strengthens the core competence of the company. BioNTech is slowly acquiring the ability to rapidly apply its mRNA platform in different contexts, allowing it to develop a variety of different types of treatments for all kinds of diseases and other medical problems.

The creation of the Covid-19 vaccine serves as a successful proof of concept, which could mean an explosion of mRNA technologies appearing in disparate scenarios. According to Frank Rosa, who is the chief technology officer at another medical startup, the upside is huge:

“The potential for mRNA therapies is simply huge.“

BioNTech, with all its knowledge and experience is well placed to take advantage of these developments. All this due to the fact that it is learning to apply its core competence in different areas.

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Constant learning gives you a comparative advantage

In January 2020, Ugur was reading a scientific journal, when he came across an article that described the outbreak of some sort of an unknown disease in China. Scanning the news, he immediately knew what it meant. A global pandemic was coming. In the evening he told his wife, and they decided to re-orient the work of the company towards producing a vaccine.

This is the relative strength of Sahin. He loves reading, and he is constantly doing it. During his free time, his head is buried in scientific journals. However, he is not only reading, but always thinking about how he can apply what he reads to his work.

Many years before, coming across the findings of Katalin Kariko helped him improve his mRNA platform. He later even hired her for his company. Reading a medical study on the events in China early into the outbreak, allowed him to act fast. As they say, luck favors the prepared mind.

This constant quest for knowledge, and ability to see the applications of what he learns, give Ugur Sahin a visionary view for his company. This vision is what allowed him to grow his company so fast, even despite the fact that it was not making any money.

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Find a problem you want to solve

What makes it all easy for Sahin and his wife is that they found a problem that they want to solve, and they dedicated their life to it. Their company is just a by-product of this passion. It gives them a purpose, which creates their personal drive.

Sahin revealed in an interview that work for them is fun.

“We are thoroughbred scientists. We love our work, and we love talking about it. Work is never stress for us, something we try to catch a break from.”

This primary drive to create medical breakthroughs that would benefit humanity also gives Sahin and Tureci a different mindset. One that proved to be at the right place at the right time.

The thing about Sahin is that he isn’t really interested in the money. He does it for the research. As a young guy, he dedicated himself to solving the problem of cancer. The traditional therapies weren’t always working, and he set out on finding new, more effective ones.

Unfortunately, often the research that could be beneficial to the wider world, doesn’t make it out of the university laboratory. The bigger companies don’t pick it up. There is a disconnect between research and commercialization. Sahin knew that if he wanted to make a real difference, he would need to apply his research for real. That’s why he started his two companies.

Sahin saw a hole on the market. Based on the short-sighted strategies of the large players, he smelled that the time was right to bring in a new way of looking at things. The big pharma firms usually only focus on research that is guaranteed to rake in the big bucks.

When old incumbents become too focused on guarding their acquired rights, and not enough on innovating and going with the times, time is ripe for what business researcher Clayton Christensen called “disruptive innovations”. This is when a small, new market player comes in with a new way of doing things. This is exactly the case of BioNTech.

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Create the ability to test multiple ideas at the same time

In an interview with a German online magazine, Ozlem Tureci stated that you should always actively seek out situations where you fail. According to her:

“The search for innovation is an ongoing process of trial and error. We don’t just accept that as something that happens and from which we learn: We actively seek these situations. Basically, I believe that such an approach helps you in many areas not only to overcome setbacks, but to turn them into something positive.”

Only through failure will you learn what works and what doesn’t. This is the philosophy that Sahin and Tureci implemented at their company, and one that many wise philosophers have preached throughout the millennia.

The pandemic period really showed the strengths of the couple’s vision. In order to create the vaccine, Sahin created a project he dubbed “Lightspeed”. The goal was to develop a vaccine to the virus as soon as possible. They started off with 20 potential candidates, and narrowed it down to 5. These five they then tested more closely.

Their competitors usually proceed by selecting one candidate and working on it. By having a wider pool of potential candidates, Sahin’s company increased its chances of hitting one that works. This reflects on a fundamental way their company functions.

Early on into their entrepreneurial career, Sahin and Tureci realized that if you want to succeed, you need to hedge your bets. That’s how BioNTech is run. They deliberately built up the company’s ability to do that. This is also the strategy that they used in order to develop the vaccine.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but instead you should have several tracks running. This creates the ability to test multiple ideas at the same time. This is a strategy that is implemented in different ways in various sectors. For example, website developers like to use A/B testing, where they test multiple versions of the website at the same time. They then pick the one that engages the visitors the most.

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Personalization leads to better solutions for customers (patients)

According to a report from the consulting firm McKinsey, the prime driver of success in marketing in the next five years will be personalization. The company Salesforce defines personalization as:

“Personalization is the act of tailoring an experience or communication based on information a company has learned about an individual.”

The trend for tailoring solutions to individuals is becoming stronger and stronger. At the beginning of the 21st century, when the internet was taking off, all the ads that you would come across were static. Everyone saw the same ads. However, marketers were starting to work on creating the advertiser “nirvana”, a world where everyone sees personalized ads, ones that are based on their own needs and preferences.

We live in such a world now. Many companies are working on customizing and personalizing experiences. While this trend has its positives and negatives for the internet, in medicine this is all positive. Sahin and Turekci founded BioNTech in order to offer personalized solutions to each patient.

They saw that each patient suffers differently from cancer. The normal treatments are all standardized, which means that they don’t always work effectively for all patients. However, if these treatments were personalized according to patient needs, then the success of recovery from diseases could drastically improve.

While most big pharma companies are concentrating on standard one-size-fits-all solutions, the married couple wanted to roll out personalized solutions. This was the unique vision that started their company. If this vision is achieved, it could lead to better treatments for patients.

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Find stable partners you trust

One important lesson that you can spot when looking at how Sahin and Tureci run their business is that they value trust. As a husband and wife, they have found the ideal situation to steer their company. However, this type of pattern can be found all throughout their business.

When they started their first company, Ganymed, their chief investors were a pair of brothers, the Strungmanns. When they founded their second company, it was once again the brothers that they turned to. This is a key lesson. Find stable partners that you trust.

They also created a strategic partnership with the giant pharmaceutical Pfizer. The idea is to combine the core competences of the two companies in a mutually beneficial partnership. BioNTech has the research and the technology, while Pfizer brings in the money, manufacturing ability, and legislative know-how.

This partnership with Pfizer was key for the rapid development of the vaccine. The cooperation between the two companies was set up really quickly, because they already have a long-standing relationship. One project that they had been cooperating on is the development of an influenza vaccine. While in most cases partnership agreements take a long time to negotiate, it took only one call from Sahin to his friend at Pfizer to set up the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

It’s all about being consistent and persistent. You need to understand who the right people are, and then stick to them. This helps you to build structures much faster and without hiccups. These stable partnerships based on trust are a key pillar of BioNTech’s success.

These types of partnerships also buy you time. For Sahin, time is something that is more valuable than money.

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Keep in mind what you can and cannot control

Ancient wisdom is often the best wisdom, because it’s time tested. That’s why ancient philosophers like Epictetus still inspire people even two millennia after their death. The Stoic philosopher’s biggest lesson was to focus on what you can control, and don’t worry about the rest.

In her interview, Tureci echoed the ancient philosopher’s thoughts:

“A principle that repeatedly proves to be timeless for me here is to identify which things we really cannot change and to accept them. In return, however, the determination and the courage to concentrate on the things that are in our sphere of influence - it is often bigger than you first think.”

Keep in mind what you can and cannot control. The take-away is to focus on things that you can change. According to Tureci, this is often bigger than you first think. In another interview, Sahin elaborated a similar insight, and talked about a technique that he uses when trying to define the risks, and to convince investors.

“Show that this is what you know, and define the unknowns.”

Whether he is aware of it or not, Sahin applies the so-called Rumsfeld Matrix in his work. This tool comes from a famous remark that the then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld uttered during the US invasion of Iraq in the early 2000’s. It has proven quite useful in project management. You define the known knowns, the known unknowns, and keep in mind that there are also the unknown unknowns. The last part is always the most dangerous.

Not knowing things is a standard part of any entrepreneurial journey. Sahin always reminds everyone that visionary products take time.

“In my first conversations with BioNTech investors, I told them this is not the usual type of company to invest in, because we will probably not have measurable results, at least in the sense of something that’s really great, within 10 years.”

For Sahin, it is crucial to be honest about the risks. Not only to the investors, but also to yourself. As another visionary, the legendary physicist Richard Feynman said, it is important not to fool yourself. You are usually the easiest person to fool. Always keep that in mind.

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How to apply

While there are some specificities that apply only in the pharma, biomedical, and life sciences sectors, many of the lessons from Sahin and Tureci can be used in the wider business world.

Here are some of the top business lessons from the entrepreneurial journey of the husband and wife team. Their work could stop the current pandemic, and maybe help revolutionize medical treatment in the future. All the while making the couple billions of dollars in the process.

Find a problem you want to solve.

Create a core competence and use analogical thinking.

Constant learning gives you a comparative advantage.

Create the ability to test multiple ideas at the same time.

Personalization leads to better solutions for customers.

Find stable partners you trust.

Keep in mind what you can and cannot control.

A shorter version of this article originally published on “Medium” here. The version above is longer and covers more points.

Credit: 1;

Laszlo Polgar is an unassuming man. In his old age, his white beard and round face make him look like a green-eyed Fidel Castro, but otherwise if you crossed him on the street, you would probably not take a second look.

What distinguishes Laszlo from other people is his methodological drive. As a young man, he had read the biographies of 400 extra-ordinary people in order to find out what made them special.

His conclusion was that the secret ingredient was starting very young and studying hard.

“When I looked at the life stories of geniuses, I found the same thing. They all started at a very young age and studied intensively.”
— Laszlo Polgar

He had identified a common theme among all these stories of supposedly “gifted” people, an early specialization and intensive training in one particular subject.

He became a big proponent of nurture over nature as the way to create a genius.

“A genius is not born, but is educated and trained. When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius.”
— Laszlo Polgar

Being the methodological man that he is, Polgar decided to put his theory to the test.

After he married his wife Klara, and his first daughter was born, Laszlo started his experiment.

His daughter Susan was going to become a chess champion. Her parents made up a plan and dedicated their life towards this goal.

Susan’s life, and later also the lives of her two sisters, Sofia and Judit, were spent studying, practicing, and playing chess. Their entire day was organized around this one activity.

It turns out, Laszlo was right. All three of his daughters became chess champions, with Judit and Susan being the top two ranked female chess players in the world for many years running.

It is all about the 10 thousand hour rule

 
In the book “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson on the nature of expertise.

In his research, Ericsson found that there was a pattern among the various world-class people in different disciplines.

They had all engaged in long hours of deliberate practice, meaning very focused practice beyond one’s comfort zone.

On average, the amount of deliberate practice needed to get to the top of a discipline was 10 thousand hours, hence the 10 thousand hour rule.

This required hard work, and a very structured program intended to make progress.

“So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.”
— Anders Ericsson

In order for this to get results, the quality of the practice counts as much if not more as the quantity of the practice. This means a good plan, and dedication are required if you want to be world-class in your discipline.

What if you are too late to apply the 10 thousand hour rule?

 
The problem is that the results of the social experiment of Laszlo Polgar, or the findings of Anders Ericsson, are a bit too late for most people reading this article.

Unless you have been specializing in your discipline for a long time now, you have probably already missed your window for deliberate practice as the road to the top.

What should you do now?

Here, we can apply some of the insights that the great primatologist Jane Goodall found a few years into her study of chimpanzees in Africa.

When Goodall arrived in Gombe to study the local chimpanzee community, the alpha, or leader of the troop was Goliath.

He was a huge ape, who had probably spent his entire life working on his strength, and ruled his community because of this specialization.

At the edge of the community lived another chimp who was named Mike by the researchers. He was lowly in status, smaller than most of the other males, and looked quite scared at times.

However, at one point he found several empty canisters left over by humans. By playing with them, he discovered that they made noise and could be used to frighten other chimps.

He used this to his advantage, and within 4 months, he had displaced Goliath at the top of the hierarchy.

What made Mike have the ability to overcome his initial bad position?

The reason, according to Martin Jones in his book “Feast”, was a combination of skills and traits that he had.

“He seems to have risen through the ranks from a quite lowly position by a combination of guts, intelligence, and threatening use of the empty kerosene cans he found.”

While Goliath was actually decent at making tools, and despite the name no dumb brute, Mike’s ability to bring together several things won out the day.

Mike’s competence at combining different skills was able to overcome his rival’s initial advantage in size and strength.

While other chimps from time to time played with the cans, it was Mike who figured out how to use them just a bit more effectively.

This got him to the top.

However, even after the researchers took away his canisters, Mike was able to maintain his leadership position.

Subsequent research across different chimpanzee communities found that while large males specializing in strength rose to the top position much more easily, the individuals who could combine different skills stayed at the alpha position for a longer time.

What separated Mike from the rest was his ability to stack his different skills.

He didn’t have to apply the 10 000 hour rule, but instead used a different strategy. Because of a combination of skills, he was able to overcome his initial disadvantage.

Apply skills stacking

 
While humans in modern times live in a much more complex society, where the hierarchy is not always so clear cut, and where we are members of several different groups at the same time, similar dynamics apply as in the jungle.

Just like chimps who have the ability to combine different skills in order to overcome their initial disadvantage in size can become leaders, humans too can rise up in status through their ability to mix and match expertise from different domains.

The advantage of this type of approach is that you don’t have to be a world-class expert in any of the domains, but just being better than average in several of them can be a huge asset.

Scott Adams, the man behind the “Dilbert” cartoon explained how he applied this to get to where he is now:

“Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.”
— Scott Adams

He stated how he could draw better than most people, but would hardly qualify as an artist. He would never make it as a stand-up comedian, but he is funnier than most people.

For him, it was the combination of these different skills that made him so rare.

“The magic is that few people can draw well, and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.“
— Scott Adams

Just by being in the top 25% in these various disciplines, Adams was able to create a unique niche for himself, and become a world champion in that niche.

The great thing about this is that with this type of approach you can rise to the top quite easily, because you are the one creating your niche, which automatically makes you the champion of that niche!

Skills stacking has allowed me to quadruple my salary

 
Skills stacking has been my strategy to the top. I am not the best in the world in anything, but I am in the top few percentiles in a lot of things.

This has often served to my advantage.

Straight out of university, I was stuck at a lowly job, but I decided to work on developing skills in some areas that I was weak at.

While I had studied humanities and economics at university, I started programming and developed a deeper knowledge of IT.

While, I am not the world’s greatest economist, or the most efficient project manager, and my programming skills are quite mediocre, the ability to combine these skills, as well as some others (semantics and data models anyone?), has allowed me to form my own niche.

In that niche, I am world-class.

This has helped me to basically create my own position and at one point to get a job which instantaneously quadrupled my salary.

The expert generalist is your path to the top

 
While yes being a world-class specialist can get you a lot of recognition, it also requires a lot of hard work and lots of time.

For most people, this route is already out of bounds.

However, by stacking your skills and becoming a Renaissance Man, you can have an advantage over your peers.

The way to get there is to determine what skills you already have that are above average, and figure out which skills you still need to complete the package.

Once you have picked the skills that you want to work on, you should come up with a plan of self-improvement. The great thing is that it doesn’t take that much effort to become above average in any one discipline.

Sure, you will never become world-class in any specialization, but by stacking the different skills that you have, you can create your own discipline.

There, you will be world-class… automatically!
 

 
Read More:
Return of the Renaissance Man: The future belongs to expert generalists.

This story was originally published on “Medium” here.

Credit: 1

No matter the reason, there are many people out there that after years of working in one type of career want to change and switch career paths completely.

Recently, I was helping out a friend to totally reorient her life career paths. She was a flight attendant who was sick of her job. She started this job thinking it was going to be a jet-setting life style (after previously working customer-facing jobs in banks), but it turned out not to be what she expected.

Her goal is to get into project management, a completely different job role, and one unfortunately that she doesn’t have experience for.

Me to the rescue! I spent long hours trying to figure what she should do.

One of the reasons I was spending so much time helping her is because I really liked her. I spent long hours talking to her and I thought she was amazing.

To cut the story short, she left me heart-broken. I am always amazed at the type of men women choose, but I guess I can’t do much about it. It is beyond my control.

I did not get much appreciation for all my effort, however I am a generous person and thought that all this stuff should not go to waste and many other people looking for a career change could benefit from this.

If you want to change your career, these tips will hopefully help you to get a good start on the entire process.

General Mindset

1) The first thing that you need to do is to examine your situation and think of the worst case scenario. If you think about it, the worst case scenario usually isn’t that bad.

When trying to switch careers, you might be agitated about the entire process. You must have been fed up with your initial situation and decided that you need to try something else. The process will be hard and at times frustrating. It might even get depressing and you might feel really bad at times.

However the key here is to always look at the bright side. What is the worst case scenario here? You will just be unemployed for a little longer. You won’t die of hunger. You will also be supported by people who love you, so you won’t end up on the street. That’s actually not that bad.

2) Examine the situation and determine which factors are under your control and which aren’t. You can control the effort you put in, but you cannot control the result. That is why you need to focus on the effort and don’t let the result bother you too much.

The key to having a positive mindset in this entire process is to keep in mind what is under your control and what isn’t. What is under your control is the effort you put in. If you work hard on improving your skills, reading, learning, and also looking for jobs and applying for them, then you have done your job.

The effort you put in is under your control, the result often isn’t. So don’t let an initial lack of good results put you down. Just keep on working hard and things will figure themselves out eventually. You need to keep a positive mindset and keep working hard throughout.

Skills Improvement

3) What do you want to do? What can you realistically do now (as in jobs)?

You need to think long and hard about what you want to do. What are the things that you didn’t like about your previous experiences and what are the things that you like to do? Let’s say you want to do project management, however with your experience it will be hard to get into it straight away. You will need to get relevant work experience (and probably some certifications) before you get into any type of job like that.

So you also need to think about what types of jobs you can realistically do right now. They might not be your ideal jobs, but they can teach you skills and give you relevant experience. These jobs can then serve as stepping stones towards what you want to do.

For example you might want to be a PM in the future, but you might need to start as an administrative assistant for projects or an executive first in order to get relevant experience.

For my friend, I came up with a ladder of jobs that could potentially lead to her dream job and the level of difficulty of getting them right now at her current levels of experience and skills. When you create such a ladder, it doesn’t mean that you have to go through all the job types in order to land the job you want, but that the jobs on the lower level are easier to get, but are also further from your goal. However, sometimes luck strikes and you might land a higher-ranking job right away.

This is what a ladder looks like with someone of her career experience:

Level 1: Administrative Assistant

Level 1: Project Assistant Intern

Level 2: Project Administrative Assistant

Level 2: Executive Assistant

Level 3: Junior Project Manager

Level 4: Associate Project Manager

Level 4: Resource Manager

Level 5: Account Manager

Level 5: Business Analyst

Level 5: Management Consultant

Level Far Future: Project Manager

Level Far Future: Manager (Customer Experience)

The different levels are my subjective reading and only serve as an indication. The key is to keep in mind what type of experience and skills each of the different job types will bring you on your journey towards your dream job.

You can create such a ladder for yourself too. You might even simplify it and have just three categories: the jobs you can realistically get, ones you can get with a bit of effort, and ones you probably can’t get at the moment, but maybe can try for anyways (and might get in the future after some experience).

In my personal experience, I also started off with a set of relatively dead-end jobs and managed to spin them into what most people would consider a dream job. What I did was to try to leverage as many skills as I could from whatever I was doing. I even managed to change the things I was doing at the dead-end job itself (by thinking of improvements) and at the end that job was much more exciting than initially.

Read about my experience here:
How to quadruple your salary and get the job you want.

4) What are your skills and strengths? What type of experience do you have up to know?

What types of skills and strengths do you have now? Think about that. Write them down and then think of examples that can illustrate that (for any potential interview). What types of experiences have you had until now? From the CV of my friend, her jobs were all customer facing roles. However she did not want a job like that any more. How can you spin this?

For example, you can use this type of work experience as a way to work on projects that improve customer experience. You have worked with customers directly and you know how they function. You would not be working with customers directly, but instead on teams that set up processes in order to improve customer experience (or other stuff to do with customers).

To realistically be able to get such a job though, you will still need to improve your skills.

This will not require just your standard PM skills, but also a deep knowledge of psychology and other things to do with human behavior. For my friend, I even suggested some reading material to get familiar with. A big trend now is behavioral psychology and nudging. All these things can serve as building blocks for a skill-set.

5) What are your weaknesses?

You also need to be aware of your weaknesses and work on them. What do you need to improve? There are usually many things that you need to work on, however try to prioritize and start off improving the weaknesses that are most pressing.

6) What you need to do now is to be able to leverage your strengths and work on your weaknesses. You should examine your skills, strengths and experiences and see how you can spin them (for the interview, but also for your future job).

Have a look at your CV and think about how you can format it in order to seem more interesting to the people who will be picking you for a job. Let’s say that your ideal role would be working on internal process improvement teams (in various types of companies) or on consultancies doing work for external clients. To be able to get such a role, you will need to show on your CV how you improved processes as part of your previous jobs (and always be able to back up your claims with particular examples).

Also can you come up with concrete examples of your leadership experience? As a PM, you will have to lead groups of people. To use the example of my friend, this is what she needs to think about: Did you lead teams of stewardesses at your airline? Or can you at least spin things to show that you have leadership experience?

7) Have a look at the O*Net description of the skills needed for the job you want to do. Which things are you good at and which are you missing?

For whatever type of job you want to do, there are sites which list the skills that you need. One of these is O*Net, which lists the skills for particular profiles. Employers will be looking for these skills when they interview you. Since you want to be a project manager in the future, here are the skills for an IT Project Manager (most projects will be about IT):
IT Project Manager Skills.

8) Situate all this in the future trends that are coming up. How can you align your skills and background with the future trends?

You also need to be aware of the fact that the world of work is changing. A lot of things are being automated. This will not only be important for proposing solutions for processes in any future job you do (automating things is always a good process improvement), but it will also have an impact on the skills that you need to cultivate. Read the below report in order to find out what types of skills are important: NESTA study on future skills

Planning and Doing

9) Now you need to come up with a plan on how to enhance your strengths and improve your weaknesses.

You can make a project of this and practice your PM skills. You can run this in an agile way. The framework on agile self-improvement that I came up with is quite useful for this.

10) This will go in parallel with your job search. For the job search part, define three categories of jobs: ones you can realistically get, ones you can get with a bit of effort, and ones you probably can’t get at the moment, but maybe can try for anyways (and might get in the future after some experience). Also define some jobs that might not be totally what you are looking for, but which might be useful to do now in order to learn the skills (and get the experience) that you need in order to get the jobs you want.

Let’s use the example of my friend again:

I have come up with different levels of jobs based on my reading of her CV. Levels 1 and 2 are ones that she could easily get based on the experience that she had until that point. Unfortunately, her experience is mostly in customer service and client-facing roles, so it will be harder to get away from that.

However, this doesn’t mean that she can’t get jobs up to what I define as Level 5, however with each level, her chances get slimmer. It doesn’t hurt to try though. She can try to leverage her experience in customer service as having deep knowledge on how to work with customers, which means that she can improve processes there and work on customer experience improvement projects.

This is how I would approach a career change. Although, keep in mind that you probably won’t be able to get the more sophisticated jobs right away and might have to use the less exciting jobs as stepping stones.

11) Execute on your plan (in an agile way). Set some KPIs on what you need to do during the week (both in learning, but also in sending out CVs).

You seriously need to make this a priority and not get distracted by other things. The key to success is to be doing things systematically.

—
Read More:

The expert-generalist is making a comeback.

How to robot-proof your career.

In a world where artificial intelligence and robots will be able to carry out many of the tasks currently done by humans, a special set of skills will allow a certain set of people to thrive.

Yeah you guessed it. These skills are Renaissance Man skills. The time of the expert-generalist has come.

The importance of being able to take in lots of information from various sources and then apply it in different ways will only rise. The people who are able to do this effectively will be rewarded.

With the world changing at the speed of light and becoming more and more unpredictable, the ability to work in a multi-disciplinary and agile way will make a person anti-fragile. Their value will skyrocket.

The key will be to make sense of things quickly, and then embark on a course of action. You will have to take in information, determine what it means, and then make a decision based on this information.

What skills and abilities are necessary for this?

Take in information stage: curiosity, know how to deal with information (especially in an era of information overload and fake news).

Determine what it means stage: creativity, abstract thinking skills, critical thinking, logical reasoning.

Make a decision: problem solving skills, emotional intelligence (not fall for biases).

Joseph Aoun, educator and author of the book “Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” believes that the way to be able to do all this is to change the way you learn.

He proposed a new curriculum which is based on life-long learning and called it “humanics”. This involves an integration of technical and non-technical skills. A set of technical literacies (like working with data, and other technical skills), should be complemented with a set of human literacies (like creativity and psychology).

“When I talk to business leaders, they tell me that they are seeking people with strong technical skills. But most of them quickly add that they also would give their right arm for more systems thinkers—“quarterbacks” who can lead diverse teams by seeing across disciplines to analyze them in an integrated way. And every student should be culturally agile, able to communicate across boundaries, and think ethically.”

The way you will get ahead is if you construct a learning curriculum for yourself, which will combine different skills, abilities and knowledge areas.

All these things are very relevant for each other. Knowledge is a set of facts and theories that serve as the fundamental inputs for skills.

If you want to apply skills in order to do a certain activity, then you need to have a certain amount of knowledge in order to do that.

Skills can be subdivided into generic cross-functional skills, and technical skills.

Generic skills consist of two types: cognitive (to do with information-processing and problem-solving), and non-cognitive skills (social skills like giving presentations and behavioral skills like perseverance). These can be easily transferred from one job to another.

Technical skills on the other hand, usually consist of job-specific skills and cannot be transferred so easily.

Abilities are the capabilities (physical or mental) that are needed in order to perform a job.

Which knowledge areas, skills and abilities do you need for future work and how do you get them? We will use the O*NET groupings of skills (and their definitions) in order to examine this further.

The first thing that you need is to know how to learn. This came up as a highly important skill among the various surveys, but is also fundamental if you want to be able to improve your skills and knowledge.

Special category (Learning): learning strategies, instructing, active learning, education and training.

• Active learning: Understand the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making.

• Learning strategies: Selecting and using training/instructional methods and procedures appropriate for the situation when learning or teaching new things.

• Education and training: Knowledge of principles and methods for curriculum and training design, teaching and instruction for individuals and groups, and the measurement of training effects.

• Instructing: Teaching others how to do something.

How do you get these skills? Learning is a complex process. First you will need to identify what things you need to learn and then come up with a strategy to learn them. In this blog, I will try to start focusing a bit more on different learning strategies and methods.

A good place to start is by reading about the strategies that a former chess master and champion martial artist used in order to learn his skills:

Josh Waitzkin and his art of learning.

Then you can follow that up by reading about the most effective learning strategies:

10 Learning Techniques Rated According To A Scientific Study.

Skills: systems evaluation, systems analysis, complex problem solving, critical thinking, judgement and decision-making, coordination, monitoring.

• Critical thinking: Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.

• Complex problem solving: Identifying complex problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions.

• Judgement and decision-making: considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one

• Coordination: Adjusting actions in relation to others actions.

• Monitoring: Monitoring/assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or organizations to make improvements or take corrective action.

• Systems evaluation: Identifying measures or indicators of system performance and the actions needed to improve or correct performance, relative to the goals of the system.

• Systems analysis: Determining how a system should work and how changes in conditions, operations, and the environment will affect outcomes.

To learn more about critical thinking and problem solving, start by reading these articles:

How to be a critical thinker and develop your mental powers.

Bayesian thinking and thinking in probabilities.

A short lesson on first-principles thinking.

Abilities: originality, fluency of ideas, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning.

• Fluency of ideas: The ability to come up with a number of ideas about a topic (the number of ideas is important, not their quality, correctness, or creativity).

• Originality: The ability to come up with unusual or clever ideas about a given topic or situation, or to develop creative ways to solve a problem.

• Deductive reasoning: The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.

• Inductive reasoning: The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).

• Problem sensitivity: The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.

• Information ordering: The ability to arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (ex. Patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations).

The ability to combine information is the key to some of the skills on critical thinking that are outlined above. It is also incredibly important for being able to analyze systems.

Read these articles to get you started:

Combinatorial knowledge is the key to many innovations – find out how to apply it.

How to combine building blocks of knowledge and come up with great ideas.

Knowledge: psychology, sociology and anthropology.

There are many knowledge areas that you will need to master, but there are some areas that are becoming more and more essential. Robots will be able to do all the routine stuff, but one thing that they will not know how to do well is to understand humans.

That’s where a human will still have added value. By learning about things like psychology, sociology and anthropology you will be able to better understand why humans do the things they do and how societies function and thereby give direction to the activities carried out by robots or other humans.

One very important finding coming out of cutting-edge psychology research is the fact that humans fall for cognitive biases. This makes them susceptible to make bad decisions and fall for things like fake news. Taking this into account can help to improve your decision making, and also be able to choose the right information among the myriad of garbage that the world is flooded with now.

In order to find out more on cognitive biases, you can read:

A short summary of my cognitive biases framework.

When making a decision, you can use this checklist in order not to check whether you are falling for cognitive biases or not:

The checklist to help you avoid cognitive biases and make better decisions.

Putting it all together

The future is unpredictable. You never know what will happen. That’s why you need to be prepared for anything.

The skills, abilities and knowledge areas that I outlined above will help you become anti-fragile in whatever happens next. By working hard on yourself, you can beat ahead of all the rest of the people that are procrastinating. In an era of robots, you can be the boss.

—-
Read More:
The expert-generalist is making a comeback.

How to robot-proof your career.

According to a report recently published by the McKinsey Consulting Group, about half of all the activities done at work could potentially be automated with current levels of technology. And the trend is accelerating.

Robots are becoming more mainstream, machine learning is creating more and more powerful algorithms, and cars are starting to drive themselves. It will still take some time before these technologies mature, but the trend has been set.

This means that you will have to adapt.

The jobs that are at risk are not just lowly menial jobs, but also more high-level jobs like lawyers, bankers, or even journalists.

There are bots that are scanning documents and drafting contracts, algorithms that trade stocks, and even articles in newspapers generated by computer programs.

People don’t really agree on what this trend will mean for the world of work. Some are predicting massive unemployment due to technology, while others are saying that the jobs will just be shifted into other types of jobs and new ways of working will be required to get ahead.

However one thing stays constant. Since the world of work will change, you will need to adapt to it. What do you need to do in order to thrive in this brave new world?

The answer is quite simple. You just have to look back in history in order to get it.

Different skills will be needed to tackle the challenges arising from a world where artificial intelligence and robots will take over many of the things that are done by humans today. The skills and attributes that humans need for this type of world are exactly the same ones that the Renaissance Men of ancient times had.

The expert-generalist is making a comeback. There will still be a place for specialists (and some of them will be quite key), however many specialist jobs will disappear to be replaced by automation. Machines are much better at crunching big data, and doing it fast. They are also much better at routine, repetitive tasks.

People holding these types of jobs will need to look elsewhere.

What do you need to do?

In order to analyze what you need to do, let’s try to use your higher level thinking skills and one technique (going back to first principles) that you have in your mental toolset.

Going back to first principles implies starting from basic assumptions and then reasoning up from there.

One basic assumption that is made about the world of the future is that change will be rapid, new trends and ways of doing things will come and go. What does this imply?

It will no longer suffice to learn one thing and then rely on it for the rest of your life. In order to thrive in this type of world, you will need to be adaptable and constantly be learning new things.

Technology will change and that one skill could become obsolete. This will require you to be constantly educating yourself and updating your skills and knowledge.

Another basic assumption being made is that the menial, repetitive work will be automated. Many of the specialist positions will disappear. What does this imply?

This means that the type of skills that you should have are ones that add value and are inter-disciplinary.

What will rise in importance is adaptability, higher level thinking skills, making connections between disparate fields, and human skills. Systems thinkers will thrive in this type of environment.

These conclusions can be backed up by many studies that have been made on the subject. These have tried to take a peek into the future and determine which skills will be important.

The Nesta “Future of Skills” report looks at which skills are becoming more important and what types of jobs people will have in 2030.

The study concludes that:

“The future workforce will need broad-based knowledge in addition to the more specialized features that will be needed for specific occupations.”

The study team focused their study on the US and the UK and came up with a list of skills, abilities, and knowledge areas that will be very important in future jobs.

Their list for the US was topped by learning strategies and psychology.

While their UK list had judgement and decision making at the top, and in second place came the fluency of ideas.

The results of this study showed the importance of systems thinking and the ability to recognize interconnections for future jobs:

“The results point to a particularly strong relationship between higher-order cognitive skills and future occupational demand. Skills related to system thinking — the ability to recognize, understand and act on interconnections and feedback loops in sociotechnical systems — such as judgement and decision making, systems analysis and systems evaluation also feature prominently.”

The findings are in line with the conclusions of all the other studies that were done on this same subject.

The World Economic Forum study on the “Future of Jobs” states that the need for complex problem-solving skills in most jobs will grow:

“With regard to the overall scale of demand for various skills in 2020, more than one third (36%) of all jobs across all industries are expected by our respondents to require complex problem-solving as one of their core skills.”

Furthermore:

“Overall, social skills—such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching others—will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills, such as programming or equipment operation and control. Content skills (which include ICT literacy and active learning), cognitive abilities (such as creativity and mathematical reasoning) and process skills (such as active listening and critical thinking) will be a growing part of the core skills requirements for many industries.”

These skills are not something that will just be needed for the future, but increasingly many companies are starting to experiences shortages in these skills right now.

According to the OECD “Getting Skills Right” report the biggest shortages are found in occupations that work across multiple knowledge domains:

“The strongest shortages are found in occupations that use several different skills simultaneously, with high intensity, and across multiple knowledge areas. This evidence seems to support the hypothesis that workers with high-skills intersecting different knowledge areas are scarce in the labor market but, generally in high demand.”

Why these trends towards multi-disciplinary skills? According to a report on future challenges in the UK job market, the boundaries between disciplines are becoming increasingly blurred:

“The boundaries between disciplines, such as natural sciences and informatics, are becoming increasingly blurred. As disciplines converge, so do the technologies. For instance, an industrial robot is an example of a mechatronics system in which principles of mechanics, electronics and computing are combined. The convergence of technologies can disrupt existing business models, but also creates completely new markets and novel application fields.”

These different findings can be summarized by one sentence: In the future, multi-disciplinary skills, systems thinking, active learning, and people skills will be the primary skills needed in order to succeed in the types of jobs that will predominate in the era of automation and robots.

Workers of the future will need to be systems-thinkers, have abstract thinking skills, creativity, emotional intelligence, curiosity, adaptability, and critical thinking.

The ability to evaluate entire systems and not just their parts will keep on growing in importance. Inter-disciplinary expertise will gain prominence, as you will need to be able to recognize interconnections.

Critical thinking and problem solving skills will be necessary for most types of jobs. However, this type of problem solving will need to bring added value to whatever the machines will be doing.

One interesting fact is that with machine learning, even machines fall for cognitive biases. This means that an ability to recognize cognitive biases and lessen their impacts on decisions will be incredibly valuable. That’s why you will need to understand cognitive sciences and be able to apply them in your processes.

This also links to people skills and emotional intelligence. Machines will take care of much of the IQ type stuff, but they won’t know much about humans and what makes them tick. That’s why there will be an added emphasis on inter-personal skills (this can come from knowing about things like psychology and anthropology).

Curiosity will be an incredible asset, as it will drive people to learn continuously. Agility and adaptability to new and unforeseen situations in an ever-changing world will also be necessary.

These trends mean that the traditional ways of getting ahead will no longer suffice. For most people, the time of learning one single skill and relying on it for the rest of their life is over.

An article in Forbes on the death of the single skill quotes Dr. David Deming and his work on documenting this:

“This death of the single skill set has been documented by David Deming, associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University. Dr. Deming argues that many jobs requiring only mathematical skills have been automated, but roles which combine mathematical and interpersonal skills (such as economists, health technicians, and management analysts) will be in demand.”

This doesn’t mean that specializing in something won’t have its benefits. You will need to have deeper knowledge in some fields, but these should be complemented by a wide variety of other types of knowledge and skills.

There is often talk of a T-shaped man, one who has a wide variety of knowledge in many disciplines, and a deep knowledge in one. This is a good start, but the future might require not just deep knowledge in one discipline, but in several.

Now it seems you should be more of a comb-shaped man. One who has a wide variety of knowledge in many disciplines, but also deep knowledge in several of them.

As the Vice-President of Infosys put it in an article on the World Economic Forum website:

“As a culture, we must welcome, appreciate and reward the expert-generalist so that they begin to populate our workforce in greater numbers. These are people who study widely in many fields and then apply it to multiple expertise areas. They are highly trainable, volunteer for challenging and diverse project assignments, find connections between seemingly unrelated concepts and are curious and open to new experiences and uncharted territory. From having depth of expertise in one area, and a broad breath of knowledge – the T-shaped profile – our workforce must in future be led by these expert-generalists, who have a more comb-shaped profile – a broad interest base along with multiple expertise areas.”

This is basically a description of a Renaissance Man of long ago. Being a Renaissance Man means being anti-fragile for the future. With every change, your value will only rise.

For you this has huge implications. Luckily, you can prepare for these changes. Let’s try to explore what you need to do.

Read More:
The expert-generalist is making a comeback.

If you want to learn more, also go back to checking the studies themselves. The McKinsey studies are available here and here. A PWC report is available here. The Nesta study is here. The World Economic Forum studies are here and here. While the OECD studies are here and here. The Pew Research Center study is here. The UK government report is here. A report from CEPS is here.

If you also want to know more about the world of work and skills, the US has a O*NET classification, while the EU has the ESCO classification. More information on O*NET is here and on ESCO is here. An interesting project by the EU is a future observatory on skill demands that will be based on analysis of big data from job portals. More information on this project is here. Also check out the descriptions of the methodologies that EU countries use to anticipate future skills.

No, I am not talking about the Terminator, although with the recent advances in AI and robotics, he could be here as well. I am talking about the almost forgotten, and nowdays often maligned, jack of all trades, the polymath, the Renaissance Man.

Now he is referred to as an expert-generalist. Just like the 20th century belonged to the specialist, the 21st century seems to belong to the person who can pull on different strands of knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines.

Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Charlie Munger, all of these guys have one thing in common: their strength comes not in being good at one thing, but in knowing a lot of different things. They are the expert-generalists, the modern Renaissance Men who have gone on to become the icons of our modern age.

The advantage of expert-generalists is that they can bring in new perspectives from a variety of fields, unhindered by the often narrow viewpoint of a specialist.

A specialist can get bogged down in the little nitty-gritty details of their field, forgetting to see the whole picture. A great danger, one that they often fall for, is functional fixedness.

This is because they were taught to do something in a certain way and over the years they have become great at doing things that way. On the negative side this can put blinders on them and result in tunnel vision.

They are great at innovating within their paradigm, but this can also make them a bit stiff when it comes to paradigm change. All kinds of little cognitive biases can prevent them from seeing the forest for the trees.

If you look at the great innovators of our age, most of them were able to combine the knowledge of different fields and come up with something new. They have the ability to not only think in analogies, but also to be great first principles thinkers.

Henry Ford was able to go back to first principles and change the way that cars were manufactured by applying an analogy of conveyor belts from a different discipline.

Tomas Bata was able to revolutionize the way shoes were made and make his company one of the first true global companies, not only because he had a good understanding of making shoes, but also because he had a deep knowledge of other things, such as the psychology of people.

If you go back to Charlie Munger and his investment strategy, you will see that the secret of his success is the fact that he has a wide variety of mental models from different fields that he can call upon when needed.

The idea of an expert-generalist is as old as humanity, but the term itself was coined by Orit Ganiesh, who is the CEO of Bain Consulting. Her definition of it is:

“Someone who has the ability and curiosity to master and collect expertise in many different disciplines, industries, skills, capabilities, countries, and topics. He or she can then, without necessarily even realizing it, but often by design: Draw on that palette of diverse knowledge to recognize patterns and connect the dots across multiple areas. Drill deep to focus and perfect the thinking.“

The role of an expert-generalist is not in the trenches, doing the routine work, but instead high on top, doing the strategic thinking and making crucial decisions. This is where their expertise is needed.

Now that I have convinced you of the value of expert-generalists, one question arises: What you need to do to become one?

Well, that’s the whole point of this blog, to give you the tools that you need in order to become an expert-generalist and be able to smash through any obstacle in your way.

1) Learn the meta-skills

The 80/20 rule (or the Pareto Principle) states that 80% of the effects come from only 20% of the causes. This means that you can get 80% of the things in this world done just by learning a small toolset.

There are certain what I call meta-skills that will give you the ability to work across disciplines. If you learn these, your journey towards becoming a successful expert-generalist is more than halfway there.

The two critical meta-skills that you need to master are: learn how to learn, and learn how to think.

Of course there are not the only two meta-skills that you need to learn. These are key for you in order to come up with ideas and then be able to combine them and use them at the right moment, but you also need a variety of soft skills in order to push your ideas.

One of the greatest polymath thinkers of all time, James Hutton, came up with the concept of deep time (the Earth is millions of years old) and the basic principles of geology. The problem was that he was not able to sell his idea. His ideas only gained traction after his death through the work of some of his friends, who were much better persuaders and marketers than him.

Often, a good idea never makes it through, not because it is not the best idea out there, but because it was not sold in the right way. Being able to persuade people and market your idea is very important. Persuasion is one of the key meta-skills that you need to master.

“If you just communicate you can get by. But if you communicate skillfully, you can work miracles.” Jim Rohn

2) Learn how to learn

A great example of someone who mastered the art of learning is Josh Waitzkin. He started off as a chess prodigy, a mental discipline, but then also managed to become a Tai Chi Push Hands World Champion, as well as a high level Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner, both physical disciplines.

Here are some of his key principles:
Josh Waitzkin and his Art of Learning.

One way to learn about a certain subject quickly is to try to understand the main concepts of each discipline. You pick a subject, break it down into smaller parts (chunking), and then try to see which parts are the most important to learn.

Once again, you will find that by learning 20% of the most important parts, you can cover like 80% of the subject. Once you have mastered this base, you can go on to either explore the different parts of that subject in a deeper way or maybe you can start learning an entirely new subject.

The key to learning effectively and efficiently is to know which techniques work the best for different situations. Read this article to find out which are the best learning techniques rated according to a scientific study:
10 learning techniques rated according to a scientific study.

3) Learn how to think

Thinking is about taking information as inputs and then coming up with a decision. This entire process is dependent upon the initial assumptions that you are making.

A very important prerequisite for an expert-generalist is to be open-minded. You need to be aware of the assumptions you are making and why you are making them.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind is the fact that as humans we are all prone to falling for cognitive biases. You should take into account that fallibility is inherent in all humans and you won’t stop making them.

Once you have recognized this fact, you should strive to lessen their impact. This can be done through different frameworks, checklists, or ways of thinking. For example, in a world of many possibilities, Bayesian thinking can be quite helpful.

4) Learn to see connections

The greatest advantage of an expert-generalist, is that he can see connections where others can’t. He develops sort of a sixth-sense and an ability to apply different mental models in a variety of situations.

The way to develop this ability to see connections is by reading a lot of books. What many successful innovators have in common is that they read a lot. Reading allows them to get access to new ideas and knowledge, which they can then use later. For example, Elon Musk reads up to two books a day!

Another way is just to have broad life experiences. To quote Steve Jobs:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.“

An expert-generalist is often referred to as a T-shaped man. He has a broad knowledge of a lot of disciplines, but also a deep knowledge of a selected few. This allows him to take knowledge from different sources and apply it in new and unique ways.

5) Apply

An expert-generalist is a person who can take knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines and then apply it in order to solve a particular problem.

Always ask yourself questions: can this be done better, faster, more efficiently?

This is something that I did when I was working at my first, not very exciting job after finishing university. I saw things weren’t being done in the most efficient manner and I brought in my knowledge and willingness to learn in order to improve the entire process.

You might not be the smartest person in the room or the most knowledgeable on a certain subject, but the ability to combine different things could give you a distinct advantage.

As Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert”, says:

“Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.“

As an expert-generalist, you have this ability to combine different strands of knowledge and skills, which can then result in something unique. Being an expert in a particular subject requires long hours of deliberate practice, but as an expert-generalist, your knowledge of several different subject can give you an advantage in certain things.

An expert-generalist is someone who can make connections, who is better at judging causes and effects. They can take things from one discipline and apply them in another. They can also apply different mental models when a specific situation requires it.

Expert-generalist skills are very useful in a world where systems-thinking is gaining prominence. It is very important to see something as a whole than just a sum of its parts. Often systems behave differently than the individual things that make them up.

These types of skills are becoming more valuable as the world grows more connected, and more complex. Today’s world requires a different type of thinking. That’s why the same types of skills that made Renaissance Men successful in centuries long past are making a comeback and can be a competitive advantage in today’s society.

Besides, as Charlie Munger says, it’s fun to outthink people who might be smarter than you:

“It’s kind of fun to sit there and outthink people who are way smarter than you are because you’ve trained yourself to be more objective and more multidisciplinary. Furthermore, there is a lot of money in it, as I can testify from my own personal experience.“

Read More:
What makes a Renaissance Man

How to be a critical thinker

My Cognitive Biases Framework

How to quadruple your salary and get the job you want

———–

I remember sitting in my chair at work one day, looking around and noticing all the sour faces sitting at their desks. It was an open office type of set-up which has become very trendy for big multinational conglomerates, but also increasingly started appearing in the smaller firms as well. Everyone was sitting, staring at their screens, clicking away.

I thought to myself: I don’t want to do this. I didn’t want to work at this type of job for the rest of my life. Freshly out of university, I ended up getting hired to do what was essentially a dead-end job.

Most of the talk at the office revolved around people looking for other jobs or getting a mortgage in order to buy a house. People were tired of doing things that even a trained monkey could probably do. They didn’t like taking home paychecks that ended up barely covering the necessities. They had studied long and hard in college and suddenly once they entered the real world, it didn’t turn out the way they expected.

When you are young, you have these big dreams about the world and your place in it. You dream about making a difference, doing something you love and making a lot of money. However once school ends and it’s time to get a real job, reality hits. The world isn’t all that it is cracked up to be.

Most people adjust to this reality, ending up just going through the motions. The reason for them conforming is usually internal. They cannot overcome the mental barriers that they have, whether it is a lack of vision, not having the right priorities, being afraid of risks, or just plain laziness.

For me, it was different. That day I decided that I am not going to get stuck in this endless cycle leading nowhere. I resolved to do everything necessary in order to pull myself out. I had bigger plans for myself and they did not involve resigning to my fate. If I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting.

In order to chart out a course of action, you need to sit down and analyze the situation first. You need to know where you are and where you want to be and then do a gap analysis. It’s OK, if you don’t know precisely where you want to be, but it is important to plan a course of action that leads somewhere. Pick a direction and go for it. You can always change mid-course.

I took a cold, hard look at what was going to bring me to my preferred destination. Doing the actual work that was supposed to be my main task was not going to do it. It was essentially doing what we jokingly referred to as “copy+paste”. People who would blindly just execute the tasks were going to get stuck doing the same thing 30 years later. In order to rise up, you need to do things differently.

In any start-up, you have essentially 3 main roles:

the visionary
the project manager
the coder

The visionary comes out with the ideas and plans out what is going to get done. The project manager follows the work daily and oversees the tasks and makes sure that the plan gets done. The coder is the guy who does the actual work.

This type of framework does not apply only to start-ups, but also in other jobs, including in the corporate world. You usually have the guys who set the direction and strategy, the ones who come up with the ideas, then you have the guys who oversee that these ideas are carried out and then you have the guys doing the actual day to day work.

I wanted to be the visionary.

There was only one problem. How was I going to go from being a lowly clicking monkey in a dead-end job to a person who makes the decisions and has others execute them? And how was I going to do it fast?

I was starting from the bottom. I had graduated with a degree in economics and after a long period of searching for a job, I ended up getting hired for a big multinational in order to work in sales support and finance. The work consisted essentially of updating databases, getting data from databases and creating reports in excel, and when I changed positions, applying some formulas to come up with prices that salesmen could then use to bid for certain contracts.

It was very boring. My brain hurt every time I did it, but not from being challenged at work, but instead because of the incredible dullness of the work I was doing.

However I noticed that people were stuck in their own little routines while doing the work, but that they were not efficient. Things could be done differently.

For example, people were spending close to two hours every day coming up with a report in Excel. Essentially they were getting some numbers from databases, rearranging them, making some rows and columns, combining…etc. There had to be a better way of doing this.

KEY TAKEAWAY #1: Always try to come up with better and more efficient ways of doing things.

Whatever you are doing right now, there is probably a better way of doing it. You just need to find out how. Once you do, then you need to change up the current process and improve it, so that you are always coming up with new, better ways of doing things: continuous improvement.

The Japanese are especially good at doing this and call their process kaizen. In Japanese, the word is made up of two characters and simply means “change for the better”.

I started applying this philosophy to my life and my job. At work, there were a lot of processes that seemed dull and inefficient, like the reports in Excel that I mentioned above. How can this process be improved?

Then it hit me: Why do the work, when you don’t have to do it? Most things that you do at your job are a series of routines based on a sequence of steps. The beauty of this and the opportunity that you have here is that many of these steps can be automated (or eliminated altogether). So you work a bit harder the first time to streamline the process and then you can coast all the other times thereafter. This is the principle that I used to try to simplify some of the processes at work.

I went back to examining how the process of doing reports in Excel at my work could be improved. People were spending hours doing things that could be done in seconds. Excel has this handy module called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). If you have ever done macros, then you know what I am talking about. With this module you can automate the entire process. So with one click of the button, the report gets done by itself, as if by magic.

There was only one problem. In order to automate that process, you needed to be able to program in VBA. Doing simple recording macros won’t do. You needed to do some hard coding.

KEY TAKEAWAY #2: Always be looking for new skills you can acquire and always be learning.

There was nobody in my department who had the VBA skills necessary to do the job. So I decided to learn how to do it myself. I talked to some people in other departments who did have the necessary skills, got some initial tips and got to it.

I had very little previous experience with coding. I did take one class on Qbasic in high school, but had really very basic knowledge in this area.

However we are lucky that we live in an era of constant access to information. There are plenty of courses, books and videos available just at the tip of your fingertips. The internet is a wonderful resource.

I got some books and started learning. First I went through the books and worked through the exercises in the books and in parallel, I started experimenting a little with automating the reports. I succeeded in doing some very basic things. The key to learning a new skill is to do the theoretical part together with the practical part. Don’t get stuck just in the learning mode, but also try to apply what you learn in practice from very early on.

I continued on learning and experimenting and kept on getting better and better. What you have to keep in mind is that most of the time you are not solving new problems, but instead problems that most likely someone else has solved before. On the internet, you can not only find courses on how to learn to code, but also snippets of code that will do the exact things that you want to do. Why spend hours playing around with code, when you can reuse?

KEY TAKEAWAY #3: Refocus your current job in a way, so that you only do the bare minimum of the dead-end work, and spend more time on learning and doing tasks that will advance you personally and professionally.

When you are at work, you seriously need to reflect on which tasks that you are doing will help you advance in your personal and professional life. Which tasks have added value for you?

Most employers won’t be happy with the advice I will give here, but if you want to advance personally, this is crucial. Do the bare minimum of the tasks that are just simple monkey stuff, as little as you can do in order not to get fired and focus on learning, improving yourself and tasks that will teach you skills that you can use later.

When I told my manager about how we can improve our processes and what I needed to do and especially after I showed some practical examples and successes, I ended up basically creating a job for myself. I would spend hours doing practical added-value things and also got more flexibility with my time. The end result was that I taught myself how to program in Visual Basic. This led me to getting interested in other IT topics.

I would then spend a lot of time reading up on different topics dealing with economics and IT, in order to advance my skills. I took over my own learning. While other people were browsing Facebook or going for coffee breaks, I spent that time reading up on new things.

After a period of time, I acquired a proven track record of improving things, technical skills and also an ever-growing theoretical knowledge of different IT areas.

Then one day, I got an offer from another organization: work in their IT strategy unit at quadruple the salary I was making then. I was 28.

At 32, I am now the visionary. I drive the direction of IT in our organization and instead of doing the actual work myself, I just set the direction and have other people execute. I earn a decent living and have an interesting, challenging job.

All this, because I chose to apply myself. I managed to reinvent myself and succeed in a field which I did not study at university and which is quite challenging: IT. If I did it, you can too. The key is to set out a vision for yourself and do everything possible in order to achieve that vision.

However this is not the end, but merely the beginning. There are new horizons that I plan to tackle.

Read More: How To Create A Vision For Yourself
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