#74: soft skills for a hard world
2 event recaps, 2 must-read books, 1 question about the future
Good afternoon,
I’m back from a few days in Southern California, where I had the chance to bask in some much needed conversation about… the future.
One thing I’ve learned about time is that when the present needs you to take a second, but you’re hungry for words and perspective and action, looking to a farther future is helpful.
If I had to assign a single question to the “far” future, both as a parent and a professional, it would be: what do I want to protect, refine and invest in?
Put another way: what skills and values do I want to ground my life with and offer as a foundation for my children’s lives?
Event 1: AI & the Future of Work/Education
Fortunately, I got to spend a good part of a day with some very smart folks on these very questions. In our conversation on AI and the future of work/education, Casey Newton (of Platformer), Kevin Roose (of NYT) and Hilary Mason (of Hidden Door), offered a lot of prescient perspective on how to live in an information world that’s rapidly advancing.
Part of our discussion covered what we might consider “soft skills” or “human skills” that will likely never be automated—skills that make you a good leader, that help you have good relationships, that allow you to exercise good judgment and hone good taste.
The conversation took place at my alma mater, a small liberal arts school founded on Buddhist values, and truthfully, in my 15 years in the workforce, I have occasionally wondered about my decision to get a liberal arts degree that didn’t necessarily offer me the hard skills required to make good money in today’s job market.
I do believe that a liberal arts degree, especially one that’s values-driven, is the best foundation for any career because it teaches you how to think, write and communicate, even if continued skill-building will be required after graduation.
But today, I feel that is 100x more true.
In his book, Futureproof: 9 rules for Surviving in the Age of AI, Kevin writes:
Whether you think AI and automation will be great or terrible for humanity, it’s important to remember that none of this is predetermined. Executives, not algorithms, decide whether to replace human workers. Regulators, not robots, decide what limits to place on emerging technologies like facial recognition and targeted digital advertising. The engineers building new forms of AI have a say in how those tools are designed, and users can decide whether these tools are morally acceptable or not. This is the truth about the AI revolution. There is no looming machine takeover, no army of malevolent robots plotting to rise up and enslave us. It’s just people, deciding what kind of society we want.
He also curates a set of uniquely human things we should be training people to do better in order to maximize our capabilities over machines, which he defines as “Machine-Age Humanities.”
Paraphrased here:
Attention Guarding: the ability to direct one’s own attention.
Room Reading: the ability to maneuver social situations in an emotionally intelligent way.
Resting: the ability to rest and recharge instead of overworking.
Digital Discernment: the ability to navigate our way through a hazy, muddled, online information ecosystem.
Analog Ethics: the ability to treat other people well and behave in prosocial ways.
Consequentialism: the ability to analyze products and anticipate harms in order to mitigate them, both on the design and user sides of tech.
I had never seen soft skills like this laid out so clearly, and I realized that the combination of a humanities and journalism education has actually equipped me pretty well to navigate (i.e.: make decisions in) this world.
My educational path taught me things that serve both my career and life well. Things like:
how to ask good questions
how to practice empathy and curiosity
how to be myself instead of who I think people will like
how to read and write well
how to keep an open mind, even when its hard
I see these as skills that not only protect our value and capability, but also enable us to be thoughtful designers, policymakers and users of powerful technology of any kind.
And of course, to be good leaders.
I want to see a world in which there are many paths to leadership and good, kind, thoughtful, brilliant and creative people aren’t afraid to take those paths.
I want to see a world in which the pursuit of power isn’t a reaction to insecurity but an option of abundance, an option for well-resourced*, grounded* people to give more than they take.
One path toward this is to increase the number of people in the world who feel healthy* and capable*.
*well-resourced: having strong emotional, financial and creative support systems
*grounded: having a strong sense of self and a strong desire to help others
*healthy: feeling well in body, mind, and spirit and socially confident, grounded in a sense of belonging
*capable: able to take risks, learn independently, work respectfully and collaboratively, admit mistakes and generate and execute original ideas
Event 2: Imaginative Empathy & Storytelling
I also had the chance to do a workshop with students and staff on how to practice empathy. One of Soka University’s founding principles is to foster global citizens who have the compassion to maintain an imaginative empathy that reaches beyond one’s immediate surroundings and extends to those suffering in distant places.
It’s something I’ve always believed in, but until I read Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki’s book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, a few years ago, I didn’t know how to put it into practice.
(I highly recommend reading this as we enter a new season of divisiveness.)
In it, he explains that empathy is less a trait and more a skill that can be practiced. He walks through how we evolved to be capable of empathy, why it’s feeling harder than ever in the world today, and different ways people have exercised it.
One thing I’ve heard a lot of people say in reaction to the invitation to “practice empathy” is that offering empathy to someone who just isn’t acting okay feels like letting them off the hook.
But what I think this book offers us is a chance to separate conversations about empathy from conversations about our enemies.
Empathy is a skill anyone can practice in low-stakes situations. But even there, we don’t. Zaki goes through countless studies in which people prioritize their own needs over the needs of other people. Realizing this helped me decide that I need to better understand what empathy is and find opportunities to practice it in my regular relationships. You wouldn’t start up a mountain if you’ve never climbed a hill. Why are most conversations about empathy only in the context of understanding our worst enemies?
And of course, practicing empathy is also good for us. Zaki writes:
People who avoid empathy often hurt themselves in the process. Decades of evidence demonstrate that individuals who empathize with others also help themselves: attracting friends more easily, experiencing greater happiness, and suffering less depression than their less empathic peers. When someone decides they don’t have the resources or energy for other people, they deprive themselves of those benefits.
In one study, the psychologist John Cacioppo and his colleagues surveyed people annually for ten years. Individuals who were lonely in a given year reported being more self-centered the following year. Self-centeredness, in turn, predicted deeper loneliness and depression in the future. Lonely individuals’ motives were off base—empathy felt like it would overwhelm them, so they focused on themselves and ended up worse off.
All this to say, I feel like a fire has been lit in me to identify and understand what soft skills I want to protect and invest in.
They matter, even if invisible on most days.
What soft skills do you want to get better at?
I’ll leave you with a quote I shared on the AI panel from the university founder/Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda on what it means to explore your own humanity from an essay titled The Flowering of a Creative Life Force:
Never for an instant forget the effort to renew your life, to build yourself anew. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway of life itself. This is not an easy task. Indeed, it may be the most severely challenging struggle there is. For opening the door to your own life is in the end more difficult than opening the door to all the mysteries of the universe.
But to do so is to vindicate your existence as human beings. Even more, it is the mode of existence that is authentically attuned to the innermost truths of life itself; it makes us worthy of the gift of life.
Happy Monday,
Jihii
Thank you😀
Inspiring read! Than you