I cannot believe how fast time flies. Five years have passed since I started writing this blog. Over these years, I have changed the focus of the blog several times, but keep pumping out content which I hope is ground-breaking in several ways.

The main aim now is to create a framework for people who want to become Renaissance Men, versed in many disciplines, able to cross-pollinate ideas across different domains and bring in fresh new perspectives whenever needed.

The world is changing and what has worked in the past few decades seems no longer to work for most people. This means that you will have to adapt to these new circumstances. In the future, many of the menial tasks that people perform today will be fully automated, and in order to be able to thrive in such a world, you will have to bring added value.

The way to become anti-fragile for the future is through adopting the skills of an expert-generalist, the modern term for a Renaissance Man.

One thing that I have started focusing on in the past year is trying to address some of the basic problems that people have. If you cannot keep a tranquil mind and an optimistic mindset overall, you will falter on your way through all the different challenges that you face in your life.

That’s why it is important to address this first and foremost. I have found that some of the Ancients provided very good answers to these problems, ones that are very pertinent even today.

I have spent a lot of time going through some of the most powerful pieces of ancient writing and distilling the main ideas. If you apply it in your life, you can overcome some of the greatest obstacles that life throws at you.

There are different approaches that you can adopt, based on your internal preferences. Or you can always mix and choose different ideas from different perspectives.

One big school of thought in the ancient world were the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius was an Emperor, but also a practicing Stoic and his ideas on how to go through the day are quite powerful. You can create a system based on them to help you get through the day:

Marcus Aurelius: How to gather the strength to survive in adversity.

Then go into my series on describing the Three Stoic Disciplines:

All the articles in this mini-series:
The Introduction.
The Discipline of Desire.
The Discipline of Action.
The Discipline of Assent.

Then read the application of this in practice:
A day in the life of someone applying the system of Marcus Aurelius.

You should also read about the thoughts of the man who Marcus learned from, Epictetus, the former slave turned philosopher (as written down by his student Arrian):

The wisdom of Epictetus.

The Epicurean philosophy can also be a good fit for people who want to live a simple life and avoid all the BS:

The thoughts of Diogenes of Oinoanda on pleasure, pain and living a life of happiness.

Plutarch was a Middle Platonist, famous for writing the inspirational biographies of many famous Greeks and Romans, but he also wrote some practical advice on several subjects. His advice on keeping a tranquil mind in a turbulent world can be quite helpful for people living through the chaos of the modern world:

Plutarch and keeping a tranquil mind in a turbulent world.

Finally, Boethius was a philosopher and statesman who lived at the time when the Roman Empire in the West had collapsed. He was a Neo-Platonist (and a Christian), and composed his greatest work when he was sitting in jail, accused of a crime he did not commit. He penned his thoughts on why it seems that the bad guys always win and the good guys lose, and how to deal with the apparent unfairness of the world:

Boethius: how a man about to die found happiness.

I have tried to introduce people to these different thinkers, so that based on their ideas, they can start forming their own daily framework.

The time of the expert-generalist has come

The world is changing, and in the future, the skills of expert-generalists, people who know a variety of things will be much more valuable.

This is the main focus of my blog, helping people get these types of skills. I summarize my arguments for this here:

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

Why is this? One of the reasons is that artificial intelligence will help automate many of the tasks that are being done today by humans. If people want to have a good job in the future, they will need to bring added value.

Robot-proof your career: How to thrive at your job in an era ruled by robots.

So which skills do you need? There are several studies that have looked into this and I summarize the findings here:

Get the skills for a robot-proof career in the workplace of the future.

One of the most important skills that you will need is the ability to learn new things. This means that you will have to learn how to learn. This is something that I will try to explore much more in the future.

 

 

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