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Identifying our true, unique, individual strength and focusing on excelling at it might be the key to our future in the changing world. Easier said than done though. If nothing else, such self analysis and improvement will require at a minimum, absolute honesty, an open mind and courage as the basic ingredients.

Things are changing and changing really fast. Leveraged by the pandemic effect, the accelerated disruptive change, penetrating into every aspect of our lives is now becoming visible even to relatively conservative eyes. More of us are coming to an acceptance that things will never go back to how they used to be and not holding any longer on the hope of seeing the end of this wave with a soft landing to a stabilized state. Rather, our focus has shifted towards keeping up with the trends and trying to adapt to the coming new for our businesses to survive. 

As the technology has become a closer ally for many of us, already redesigning our routines, even reforming social behaviour and as we have somewhat discovered the unbearable comfort in it, services business was among the first to react and adapt. Over the last months, we witnessed for instance fine-dining restaurants starting offering online delivery service menus or cooking kits and limiting their physical space. Several companies - small or large corporations of various industries, sizing (or shutting) down their offices and making arrangements for permanently remote setups providing the employees with the freedom of choosing their preferred place to work. Perhaps some are faster than the others, but overall the businesses are somewhat finding their ways to survive.. redefining their purpose and keeping up with the change. 

With the businesses acquiring new purposes and redesigning the way they handle things, today’s structures, positions, or even cultures are likely to be a misfit soon. This would be the point where irrelevance of professions or skills will become a topic to deal with.

The biggest challenge ahead for us as the human beings is adapting ourselves to the change. Saying so, I do not mean increased computer literacy and using some algorithms for running daily errands. Similar to the businesses, we as individuals, have to transform. Redefining our purpose, we have to reinvent ourselves. However, there are so many unknowns.. “transforming into what” is the question.

Time to time, I come across predictions related to the most needed skills of the future. “Future” in this context, refers to relatively imaginable future.. often around 2022 to 2025. And the list of the skills in general consisting of soft ones, such as creativity, critical thinking, judgement or cognitive flexibility to count a few. Considerably difficult than developing the hard ones. When I read such articles, the very first question coming to my mind is “how much time a human being would need only for a slight improvement in any one of these skills?” Not to mention the likelihood of a dramatic change in the list already by 2022. One obvious fact is that the pace of the change happening around us and our ability to adapt is very different. 

Vast amount of developments are happening in very short and even shorter times and it is becoming impossible for an average human being to follow up or to understand, let alone adapting to them. In an environment where we are confronted with continuously new information, which often is questionable in accuracy too, it may not be the wisest approach trying to follow up and to keep up with it. Instead, proactively focusing on what we can, on something we are familiar with, might be a much more effective one. And taken for granted, we at least have our own-selves in our reach. 

To be able to make considerable progress, it is usually a good idea narrowing down the battlefield - especially when it is unknown territory. Your unique strength - unique in the sense that not easily replicable either by the human beings or by the algorithms - whatever that might be, could be your niche to focus for excelling at it. Such level of excellence is likely to be your unique vantage point to hold on for a possible future where your profession does no longer exist or your skills are not needed anymore. And since we are supposedly “the masters” of ourselves we should be able to reach that level if we want to. 

There are lots of research, books and articles on self-assessment and personal development as well as respective tools and techniques suggested by the experts of the area for faster and/or better results. I am not an expert, nor to tell you how to self-analyse or improve certain skills. Rather, I am writing to share my insights, observations and personal experiences related to the pitfalls along the way.

Putting our efforts in identifying what we already have as a unique strength to strengthen it further may sound straitforward and easy. Yet it is not. Not because the process of self development is tough. It is though - remember your tries for quitting a simple bad habit for instance. However, there are further and even more severe challenges. Perhaps the biggest of all relates to misconception of our own-selves. 

We need honesty to start with. Then an open mind and courage for embracing whatever comes out at the end of our self analysis. The result may suggest a complete change of direction of your life. Imagine that you have been working in accounting for all your professional life and that you happen to find out as your unique strength your extraordinary sense of smell. How do these two match?

When it is about ourselves, maintaining honesty and remaining open to and embracing what might sound absurd at the first instant, is no easy task. First, it is extremely difficult to be truly objective and second, quite often our perception is coloured with who we want to be rather than who we really are. Not because we would like to be cheating anyone. It is merely the unconscious barriers holding us from coming clean with ourselves. We all are with our individual backpacks we have been carrying for our lifetime. There is the education we got, the family we were born into, the culture we have been thought, and the list goes on and on. There is an artificial landscape, drawn with the norms and biases we did not set for ourselves, however which eventually ends up with creating concerns such as status, power and pressure and fear of letting others get disappointed in us. 

Among numerous other challenges ahead humanity, I believe irrelevance stands out as a serious and immediate topic to think and work on. In my article couple of months ago, I had written about finding out where to start transforming our businesses https://www.garudax.id/pulse/leaping-pandemic-buket-bas. Same applies to us individually to be able to keep up with the disruption. However, as long as we cannot predict what the future holds for us, we can only rely on our individual capacity to improve and change. Therefore, putting aside the biases and norms of today, which are also likely to become irrelevant in the future, we have to start as a priority working on the true identification of our unique strength. We might eventually find out something apparently tiny. Nevertheless, that single feature of yours might distinguish you from the rest of the crowd, providing you with a fair amount of advantage points although in a different lane you haven’t been to. It would then be on you whether to take it further, make something out of it.. Something not easily replicable. What distinguishes you remarkably might be the survival strategy..