A balancing act
What might happen if we spent as much time and resources levelling up our human skills as we do our technical ones?
What might happen if we spent as much time and resources levelling up our human skills as we do our technical ones?
It's no surprise that we live in a technical-skills-obsessed society. Education drills in us from a young age the importance of learning and building our expertise to make productive citizens, yet there’s little focus on being better humans.
That obsession drives much of the life-changing innovation that brings humanity forward. Yet, the lack of human skills holds us back from so much more. We create advanced technologies, of which many we use to hurt others, ourselves and the environment.
We launch rockets into space, have self-driving vehicles, cure diseases, and manipulate DNA. Yet, we struggle to empathize and relate to what we see as different. We fail to have productive conversations on topics we disagree with. Instead, we react sheepishly or bullishly. We hide or double down. We accelerate or stomp the brakes. We explode or implode.
We are convinced the solution to our problems is somewhere in the technical skills we do not yet have; that’s a fallacy, the tendency to overvalue technical skills and believe we're held back without the right ones, as well as undervalue human skills and think that we don't need them to succeed. The logical explanation for this biased thinking is the culture we created, prioritizing sciences over humanities.
Human skills don't just help us communicate and collaborate better; they help us understand ourselves better too. They help us interrupt the default patterns we otherwise accumulate. The less skilled we are here, the more we look outwardly to fix our problems, and the more problems we create.
Instead, we might learn something about ourselves if we put in the work.
Where we hide from emotions, we might begin to recognize and acknowledge them.
Where we reach for anger to bend the external world to match our internal one by lashing out, we might instead ask what we are terrified of.
Where we make fear-based decisions, we might start to pause and give ourselves a moment of empathy.
Where we judge, we might inquire curiously.
Where we hate, we might start to appreciate and understand.
With a balance of technical and human skills, we are less reactive, more consistent, and understanding of ourselves, ipso facto of others. In doing so, we move from blame to responsibility, from hate to love, and from control to leading with empathy.
And doing so, we might add to the list below:
We might have fewer intolerable genius co-workers and more lighthearted empathic ones.
We might jump to judgment less when we disagree with something.
We might understand that different does not mean lethal.
We might engage in fewer wars and more crucial conversations.
We might have fewer competitors and more collaborative efforts toward betterment.
We might be less threatened by people's right to choose what is best for them.
We might have more empathy and less hate.
And what kind of advances might become possible then?
Miguel,
Sparknotion – Think Differently.