The Opposite Project
Helping you learn the skills necessary to lead yourself so you don’t have to wait on others to do it for you.
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Wisdom from Yuval Harari
News Flash: The internet is an amazing place. I am sure you already knew this, but it really is. It blows my mind how easy it is to find new and great information these days.
Anyone can learn directly from the experts themselves.
Tim Ferriss and Yuval Noah Harari are two such experts.
One of my favorite podcast episodes is Ferriss’s Tribe of Mentors — Naval Ravikant, Susan Cain, and Yuval Noah Harari (#442)
This is a unique podcast because it is not an interview. It is actually the narration of information Ferriss used in his book Tribe of Mentors. The entire episode is packed with wisdom, but in this article I am going to summarize the section with Harari.
The current education model is bankrupt.
No one knows what the job market will be 20 years from now. Therefore, no one knows what to teach young people to help them succeed in the future.
The current education system is built around teaching facts. Most of what you learn in school will be irrelevant by the time you are 40.
The current system does not help prepare students for an unknown future. Unfortunately, we have not developed a viable alternative.
Keep learning and inventing yourself.
The only way humans will be able to stay in the game will be to keep learning and inventing themselves again and again. If you want to succeed, focus on resilience and emotional intelligence.
The world is changing at an extremely fast pace and this pace is only going to get faster. People will need to be extremely resilient and emotionally stable to withstand this storm and the high levels of stress that are coming with it.
Know Thyself
This is the oldest advice in the book and it is more important now than ever. Why? Because now you have more competition than ever before.
Big technology and governments are trying to get to know you better than you know yourself. If you aren’t careful, technology will start dictating your aims.
All big tech is relying on big data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. Once they know you better than you know yourself, they can manipulate you and you won’t even know it.
We are not living in the era of hacking computers. We are living in the era of hacking humans.
What can you do? You must make technology serve you instead of you serving it. You have no choice but to get to know who you are and what you really want from life. When you know what you really want, you will be more aware of attempted manipulations.
You define the job. It does not define you.
“Personal greatness is not determined by the size of the job, but by the size of the effort one puts into the job. This applies to everyone on the team.” – John Wooden
I recently came across an amazing example of this on Twitter. When you act and think like an owner, you can accomplish amazing things.
A janitor making $4/hour walked into a Fortune 500 company boardroom. Shaking, he took a seat opposite the CEO.
"So I had an idea…" he nervously began.
Years later, that idea would become an iconic consumer brand and make him worth ~$20M.
Here's how that meeting went 🧶👇
— Ankith Harathi (@ankithharathi) December 22, 2020
Quote of the Week:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor Frankl
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Have a Great Week!
Yancey
Follow me on Twitter @YanceySanderson
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