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I think that we are fast moving to new a paradigm in our economy:
you might say we are transitioning to the “idea economy” or “innovation economy”.
Many professionals will need to adapt to that new situation, meaning they (and myself) will need to learn new skills and attitudes to remain relevant.
This really sums it up for me:
The prospects of humanity are somewhere between glorious and dire, it is hard to be more precise...
Colin Tudge, the secret life of trees. Turned into my personal quote on Steemit.com .
My mission on Steemit.com :
The future is going to be unequal, for some it will be glorious, for some it will be dire.
I want to help as many people as possible to move their needle to the glorious side!
My mission is to learn and share ideas about how to adapt to this crazily changing world.
I don’t want to focus on the negatives, like the media, but focus on solutions and opportunities.
I don’t want to scaremonger, but create awareness of what is coming and already happening and focus on SOLUTIONS.
What is going on?
We were in the knowledge economy and in full transition to the innovation or idea economy.
In the knowledge economy, having knowledge and/or certain skills, obtained say from a university education, used to be a guarantee you became valuable and someone would pay decent money for them.
But that value is fast eroding.
See how many college graduates are serving you coffee at Starbucks? That is a consequence of the shift to what Tony Wagner calls an “innovation economy” :
Here Tony Wagner explains why he thinks we are at the end of the knowledge economy.
Although it is about education, bear with me please and watch it (it’s pretty short) and then the rest will make more sense.
Watched it? OK!
If you watched the video you will see that Tony Wagner is mainly talking about the education system.
Who do you think is going to help people who already left the education system 15-25 years ago? And those who are not willing or able to go back to formal education?
Though luck!!! It is going to be a very Darwinian world:
As a professional, to have a chance to compete in the idea/innovation economy, you will need to adapt and distinguish yourself from other generic professionals in your field.
Remember that Darwin uses the phrase "survival of the fittest" in chapter four of On the Origin of Species to describe the process of natural selection. Many people don’t understand that fittest does not mean strongest:
Here is a reinterpretation of what Darwin quote by Leon C. Megginson
“Yes, change is the basic law of nature.
But the changes wrought by the passage of time affects individuals and institutions in different ways.
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species,
it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives;
it is not the strongest that survives;
but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
Applying this theoretical concept to us as individuals, we can state that the civilization that is able to survive is the one that is able to adapt to the changing physical, social, political, moral, and spiritual environment in which it finds itself.”
Every professional will have to adapt to that shift from knowledge to idea economy ... or become obsolete.
Even individuals who are doing well right now, very soon might find themselves obsolete or their career path on a steep negative curve.
I saw this happening in the aviation industry. Previously high paying pilot jobs are becoming commodities and their income and quality of life are on an ever accelerating downward trend.
If you are a passenger on a commuter airline in the US, chances are that the pilots flying you are surviving on FOODSTAMPS.
Specialised knowledge and skills, are becoming either abundant (information and knowledge are becoming essentially free) or automated and outsourced.
Exponential technological and societal changes are undermining what most of us are generating our income with: information scarcity and specialized knowledge.
That advantage won't last forever. Bankers, lawyers, software programmers, pilots, engineers, website designers, teachers, professional drivers et cetera, can all be automated, outsourced or become increasingly irrelevant.
You can spot a trend here probably... Many of these professions are aspirational goals for many currently in college.
People look at the top of the pyramid and see that as an achievable goal.
They are willing to sacrifice a lot to get to the top of the pyramid. What most don’t realize is that these professions have turned into pyramid games, only the top levels make a decent living. They are eager to join the bottom because they think they have a shot.
By the time they reach the top, the whole pyramid might be gone or seriously smaller or the top might not be worth reaching anymore.
And while they are at bottom of the pyramid, they are exposed to most of these exponential factors.
The same with becoming a manager, a major aspiration for many workers.
They don’t realize that managers are a necessary evil, mostly to communicate and coordinate and in some cases surveil and supervise.
And most organisations much rather would not have any managers, mostly they are unproductive and add pure cost and complexity.
Many management functions can be replaced by outsourcing or information technology.
If they can replace managers, they will, so the corporate ladder as a concept is starting to look shaky itself.
Along the way, many graduates (you and me among them ) might have invested 4 years and God knows how much money and debt,
without learning the skills that will matter:
Here is another post by Tony Wagner which I think is outstanding and which I will pull apart and cover extensively on Steemit.com .
They are: (copied from http://www.tonywagner.com/7-survival-skills )
“ CRITICAL THINKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING
“The idea that a company’s senior leaders have all the answers and can solve problems by themselves has gone completely by the wayside…The person who’s close to the work has to have strong analytic skills. You have to be rigorous: test your assumptions, don’t take things at face value, don’t go in with preconceived ideas that you’re trying to prove.”
—Ellen Kumata, consultant to Fortune 200 companies
COLLABORATION ACROSS NETWORKS AND LEADING BY INFLUENCE
“The biggest problem we have in the company as a whole is finding people capable of exerting leadership across the board…Our mantra is that you lead by influence, rather than authority.”
—Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Cisco
AGILITY AND ADAPTABILITY
“I’ve been here four years, and we’ve done fundamental reorganization every year because of changes in the business…I can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability and learning skills are more important than technical skills.”
—Clay Parker, President of Chemical Management Division of BOC Edwards
INITIATIVE AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
“For our production and crafts staff, the hourly workers, we need self-directed people…who can find creative solutions to some very tough, challenging problems.”
—Mark Maddox, Human Resources Manager at Unilever Foods North America
EFFECTIVE ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
“The biggest skill people are missing is the ability to communicate: both written and oral presentations. It’s a huge problem for us.”
—Annmarie Neal, Vice President for Talent Management at Cisco Systems
ACCESSING AND ANALYZING INFORMATION
“There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren’t prepared to process the information effectively, it almost freezes them in their steps.”
—Mike Summers, Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell
CURIOSITY AND IMAGINATION
“Our old idea is that work is defined by employers and that employees have to do whatever the employer wants…but actually, you would like him to come up with an interpretation that you like—he’s adding something personal—a creative element.”
—Michael Jung, Senior Consultant at McKinsey and Company
“
Dan Pink is also superb at explaining this concept (thanks 
It really is a short and sweet explanation of what is going to matter most:
thanks to Youtube user Brianna Crowley for editing it, it makes it a more coherent argument than other clips I have seen so far!
Now, you see the need for building your platform on steemit.com? You can have the best ideas in the world, if nobody knows about them they don’t have value. It becomes about a much wider proposition than just selling products or influence.
To develop these skills, you need to develop your ideas and skills. Your ideas are probably going to suck at first.
Your ideas (and mine) need to be sharpened, exposed to critical thinking, and shared.
So you get great at creating new ideas or remix your ideas with other ideas to come up with truly outstanding ideas that have value.
The cool thing for me about Steemit.com is that it is a great laboratory to train myself and get better in almost ALL of these future survival skills.
As I described elsewhere, steemit.com is one of the first potentially viable platforms where you could potentially live off your ideas.
It can realize Kevin Kelly’s idea of 1000 true fans in a way that is much more practical for many people than before.
must read for any wannabe Steemian, Kevin Kelly’s idea of 1000 true fans
Before, in order to live from a 1000 true fans, you had to be almost a full-time artist, writer,...
Now you can start out as an amateur and find your 1000 true fans before escaping your knowledge economy career.
This goes way beyond just writing blog articles, I can see this platform being useful for inventors, programmers, designers, artists, photographers and professional people developing business ideas.
For people inventing new ways to adapt to this crazy world, on Steemit.com, their creative ideas get instant feedback and that feedback can provide capital for further experimentation.
The cool thing about steemit.com is that it will, at each stage of that process, generate valuable feedback.
Not only STEEM, but also in form of high quality comments and contributions.
That might decline over time, but I am hopeful to gather a following of like-minded professionals that are willing to put in mental effort to explore and criticize my ideas constructively, and combine them with their own. I´ll try to do likewise with professionals who are ready to have their ideas challenged.
If you follow me and comment, posting a really good counter argument or source that changes or finetunes my viewpoint WILL earn you my up vote, comment and SBD once I have some to give.
You have to keep in mind that for most of us knowledge economy professionals, we aren't used to be truly creative with ideas, it is a skill that we need to develop.
Knowledge economy professionals don’t deal well with uncertainty, they have to be certain of what they know.
But exponential progress is attacking every assumption and disrupting almost everything we “knew” for sure.
All us knowledge economy professionals have to learn how to be a newbie again.
And to do that you need to open yourself up to criticism and potentially ridicule, remember truly great ideas seem ridiculous at first glance.
You will have to have the fortitude and perseverance to accept that as feedback to sharpen your ideas and your communication skills to convince more and more people.
That's not easy to do, it is easy to get discouraged when you're trying something new and not are not very good at it. That is why it's so important to find a community like steemit.com .
The very nature of its incentive structure is biased towards constructive commenting.
Because of STEEM POWER, there is a strong negative incentive around hateful, unproductive or lame comments.
In essence, the comment system on Steemit.com itself is a Darwinian system, in a good way! The comment system is built on positive reinforcement.
To make a return on investment on your time to comment and upvotes you need to be constructive and add value, which will encourage positive behavior (I hope) and other quality comments in an ever more valuable positive feedback loop.
So I want to build my platform around sharing my ideas about adapting to the idea economy.
My ideas are obviously based on those of many wonderful books and thinkers.
I hope to show you these exciting ideas, remix them with my own and collaborate to execute them.
Along the way I hope to develop and practice my future survival skills and teach others about them.
I used the #introduceyourself tag the second time,I’m not trying to game the system, but I realised my first intro was about me and I still had more to say about my message.
This post is set to POWER UP 100% because I want STEEM POWER, to spread my ideas!
I will be needing it more than money to spread my message.
*If you see this and agree, please give me an upvote, or join the conversation in the comments.
*If this does not make sense to you, call me out and tell me, I probably did not explain it well!
*If you are not on Steemit.com : Why not? it should be obvious you really should be! You too, will need a place to experiment and practice the 7 future survival skills!