How Generalists Win In The Information Age

in one of my last videos I made the case that we are on the verge of a second Renaissance the digital Renaissance with many parallels to the last Renaissance from Double Entry bookkeeping to Triple entry bookkeeping from the printing press to digital media and the internet from mechanics to robotics from wealthy artists to wealthy artists and maybe from the Americas to Mars so in my eyes it naturally backs the question how do you deal with that time how do you deal with the digital Renaissance and how do you personally crush it like DaVinci Michelangelo Copernicus Galilei the medicis and others did back then how do you have an impact on the world while of course living a great life for yourself that's what this video is about creating the modern day or digital renaissance man there are many different synonyms for the Renaissance men like homo universalis or polymath what makes such a person all of these terms or phrases describe at least to some degree someone who has a wide breadth of knowledge or skills but who also has deep expertise and a number of disparate areas who is open to Broad experiences can be a Divergent thinker and can solve problems in creative ways as a result polymaths who have a wide breadth of experiences across Fields yet still have depth in multiple areas are uniquely situated to integrate that is to combine apply or synthesize information from different domains in order to help develop novel and useful Solutions this is the superpower of the polymath because they have more Tools in their toolkit they are able to address problems more holistically and creatively this is the best and most precise definition I've heard of the term thus far and it already foreshadows what an immense faucet can be in the digital age you are absolutely deadly it also somewhat dismantles the phrase jack of all trades master of none where surely there are people like that certainly but the Renaissance men go beyond this the future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways let's look at some of the characteristics or maybe habits a Modern Renaissance person should have before diving into a skill set to become such a person you need to have high energy levels because as a generalist you have lots of different interests and you can only pursue them with energy most of the well-known Renaissance men like DaVinci for example actually had great physique it's like my favorite James Clear quote once again entrepreneurs mind athlete's body artist Soul hell yeah exercise allows for a clear mind to explore new subjects while making you a high energy human being the California Department of Education has consistently shown that students with higher Fitness scores have higher test scores exercise actually primes the brain to learn faster a 2007 study showed that subjects who did high intensity exercise beforehand could learn vocabulary words 20 faster the reason exercise is a key trigger for all kinds of positive effects in the brain particularly in learning is because movement signals to the brain that something important is happening I guess it wasn't hyperbole when Dr Mark tarnopolski said that if exercise we're a drug it would be the most valuable one ever developed focus is of the essence as well as Robert Greene wrote in Mastery in the future the great division will be between those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn I'm definitely a big believer or even Chaser of Flow State where you do something for hours on end and it doesn't even feel like you do anything it just feels like play it just feels like you can go forever and time just flies sometimes I get into the state when writing sometimes when video editing and a lot of times when coding I can also become really obsessive if there is something new I am really interested in there were like 8 weeks or something in early 2018 where I fell deeply into the Bitcoin rabbit hole and soaked up new information in a way I never did before so being open-minded in finding subjects and skills you might be curious about and then developing a passion for them gives you a clear heads up compared to other people because as Naval Ravi Khan says it feels like play to you and work to others and you really don't want to compete against someone who is playing all day doing what he loves when it feels like work for you next up is self-education if you need someone to tell you what to learn and how it works I think you are at a severe disadvantage in the digital age and I'll come back to that now what are the skills that you should actually learn to find success in the digital age to me the answer is everything that allows for permissionless leverage that is where you don't need other people or money or resources to use the skill in a way that provides value to other people essentially any form of media or applications you can create on a computer and distribute through the web this is still somewhat Broad and I will give you more context why I don't really like when someone says something like you have to become a programmer or you have to become a digital marketer you have to become whatever because there are so many things that you can become and most of them don't even exist yet you can literally create a job instead of applying for one think 20 years back podcaster twitch IRL streamer Esports Caster these were certainly not serious professional occupations the most interesting and the most important form of Leverage is this idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication it got started with the printing press it accelerated broadcast media and now it's really blown up with the internet and with code so now you can multiply your efforts without having to involve other humans and without needing money from other humans so this newest form of Leverage is where all the new fortunes are made so all the new billionaires the last generation fortunes were made by Capital that was the Warren buffets of the world but the new generation and fortunes Are All Made through code or media Joe Rogan making 50 to 100 million bucks a year from his podcasts PewDiePie I don't know how much money he's rolling in but he's bigger than the news right the fortnite players of course Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that is all code based leverage probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about the new forms of Leverage is they are permissionless they don't require somebody else's permission for you to use them or succeed for labor leverage somebody has to decide to follow you for Capital leverage somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product but coding writing books recording podcasts tweeting youtubing these kinds of things these are permissionless you don't need anyone's permission to do them I recently had a discussion with a friend about what is the one skill that most people regardless of profession should improve on so again it needs to be something broad I would call this kind of skill a metal skill my friend expected me to say coding because he knows it's something I am learning for years now and I'm very passionate about and it's obviously one of the best skills you can have but I said writing and the longer I thought about it the more I realized that my answer probably would have been different just a few weeks ago or months ago or years ago and it probably already is different today when I think about it I chose writing because writing is clear thinking a good writer can explain his arguments and understand them himself if you never write things down and just keep everything in your head there is a good chance that there are logical gaps it's this feeling of believing you know how something works and then someone asks you a question about it and you realize you can't explain it that usually means you don't understand it yourself I've learned so much while making YouTube videos and some of that is just plain research and diving into new topics but a lot of it comes from just writing things down coherently I really believe that's the more impactful part I've watched the following clip of Jordan Peterson about four years ago and it really stuck with me I instantly remember it when I thought about this topic the best way the best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write and one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something it's like well you have to do this assignment well why are you writing well you need the grade it's like no you need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world thinking makes you win the battles you Undertake and those could be battles for good things if you can think and speak and write you are absolutely deadly nothing can get in your way so that's why you learn to write it's like and I can't believe that people aren't just told that it's it's it's like it's the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with and I mean I know lots of people who've been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life I mean those people you don't want to have an argument with them they'll just slash you into pieces and not in a malevolent way it's like if you're gonna make your point and they're going to make their point you better have your points organized because otherwise you are going to look like and be an absolute idiot you are not going to get anywhere and if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation if you can speak to people if you can lay out a proposal God people give you money they give you opportunities you have influence that's what you're at University for some time ago I would have chosen reading instead of writing but now I realize that while you can make a case that reading is a skill like comprehending things quicker knowing what to read Etc I would put it more into the category of best possible habits one should have next to regular physical exercise reading is great because it exposes you to new ideas but reading is not really acting while writing is today however I would choose a different meta skill reading and writing make up literacy which is pretty much the craziest skill you could have just a few hundred years ago today there is a similar skill like that I would call it digital literacy digital literacy is the skill that everyone can profit from digital literacy does not mean coding it can contain coding but what I really mean is the not so very precise definition of being good with computers if you're good with computers you know how to search things effectively in a search engine you know how to find run and learn new software quickly you have a feel for different tools and their existence the that alone is an insane multiplier I remember reading an article when I was about 12 years old I think it might have been Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth how many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B and the Condor one came in at the top of the list uh surpassed everything else and humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation and uh but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor all the way off the top of the list and it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool Builders and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes and so for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the Mind something that that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities and uh I think we're just at the early stages of this tool very early stages and we've come only a very short distance and it's still in its formation but already we've seen enormous changes I think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years saying the computer is a bicycle for the mind is probably the understatement of the century it's more like the computer is the light speed space shuttle for the mind if you're good with computers you learn other skills much quicker and cheaper because of the Endless great resources the web provides you can pretty much create anything you want this is a generalist stream imagine Leonardo da Vinci with a Macbook and internet access that would have been wild and if you're good already with some tools say Photoshop PowerPoint and maybe a final cut for video editing you're 100 able to learn another new tool like blender for 3D modeling and animations faster than someone who is not comfortable with computer programs it's like the circle of accelerated adaptation a model I thought of myself and talked about in my second video a wide set of skills gives you more analogies and learning methods that you picked up by learning the skills which makes you learn new skills faster which ultimately gives you a wider skill set that's the path of the Renaissance Man this of course makes you much more flexible and of course you can do with that whatever you want you can create your own things but it also makes career changes much more easy and feasible it enables you to go for whatever you think is interesting and monetize that skill set for me it was gaming at first then it was Bitcoin and I don't know what else it will be in the future if I would be really into AI for example I would just learn stable diffusion see what else there is learn about how these things work and I guarantee you I would be able to make money with that skill in a few months and this is nothing special in my eyes if you are good with computers if you are digitally literate you can 100 do the same by the way the thumbnail of this video was mostly AI generated with some photoshop tuning so there you have it again I'm open-minded I'm curious to new tools I try them out and make them work for me that's how you get comfortable with new things quickly again the future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways if you haven't seen my video on the second Renaissance I encourage you to watch it I think it's easily one of my best videos thus far and gives you more context for this video if you did watch it then hop into my generalist where the specialist video where I go way deeper into what makes each of them great thank you for watching and see you next time

Channel: Till Musshoff

Views: 348,103

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Id: 29oyOLh6PNE

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022