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The Future of Work: Thinking About Your Career

Nowadays more and more people are embracing not only one career, they have at least two careers. The rise of so called "Slash Youth",  which means that people especially the young generation have "multi-hyphenates" or "blended careers". As Damon Brown stated in his published article "Why you should have more than one career at the same time" on Inc.com that "Focusing on one subject may give you accolades, but true success comes from being multidisciplinary."

I agree with that, being multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary will bring great benefits to us. We can absorb diverse knowledge and gain insights about the fields that we have never touched before, furthermore, we can be creative by combining the knowledge that we have acquired to innovate something. 

Embracing multi-hyphenates not only adds value (whatever it is material or spiritual ) to our life, but also helps us to rethink our work, to discover our intrinsic motivation and achieve our self-realization. In the near future, most of us will be free to work, not restricted to working for only one company as a white-collar, we will have more free time to create something for ourselves and be content with that.

While Thinking of the future of work, in order to grow the business and maximize our value, we must have a Bold Mindset. There is a model called "6Ds of Exponential Growth", as Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler said
"The Six Ds are a chain reaction of technological progression, a road map of rapid development that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity. "
So what are the 6 Ds? 
The 6 Ds model includes Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, Democratisation.

Once understanding the 6Ds model, we can take action by developing a strategy that fits in the 6Ds model, and then develop a plan to get on board, recognize and leverage the technology that is relevant, keep on executing and adapting, finally witness the evolution of success.

Final Thoughts:

As the thriving of  the emerging technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence, some people are worrying about whether the robots and automation process could replace human's work,  and that a lot of people will run out of work in the future. 

However, the fact is that there are still so many jobs in current society. Because humans are different from robots, human mind is quite complex, it is not linear, you can not imagine even within 1 second, your mind has already processed a tons of information. 

Here I'd like to end with two fundamental economic principles that explain why there are still so many jobs created by humans.

  • The first is Human genius & creativity,O-Ring principle - it requires us to have multiplicity of skills, technical expertise and intuitive mastery, perspiration and inspiration etc. Technology magnifies our leverage, increases the importance, the added value of our expertise, our judgement and our creativity.
  • The second is Human satiability or greed, Never-get-enough principle - the endless inventiveness and bottomless desires means that we never get enough.
Adjusting to the rapid pace of technological change creates real challenges. Due to the two principles described above, the world is evolving and our career in the future is also evolving, it will facilitate the creativity. 

With imagination, we can connect the dots. Let's just imagine the future, embrace the future of work.




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