3 Skill Sets

Future-proof your skills as a creator, facilitator, or driver.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

—PARKER PALMER

Mastering Your Superpowers

The wonder of parenting is witnessing your child’s disposition unfold over time like the petals of a blooming flower. The universal aspects. And the unique aspects. The parts you know and the parts you don’t know. Of course, humans come into the world with slight variations, but the similarities are mind-boggling. The Dalai Lama went so far as to say: “Basically we are the same human being—different faith, different race, different language, even different cultures. These are secondary. When we come from [the] womb—no difference of religion, no difference of nationality, no difference of culture … We are the same human being—mentally, emotionally, physically the same … everybody has a sense of self and experience of pleasure, pain, suffering, happiness.” This is the Dalai Lama speaking—recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for uniting diverse groups of people. And yet he points out that when it comes down to it, we—the 7.8 billion people in the world—are not that different.

This universality means we can draw on a wealth of research (and wisdom of generations) to do right by our students. Sure, there are dicey moments when we don’t know what to do. But thanks to the countless parenting books and websites hawking advice on major milestones and experiences from birth through young adulthood, we have good intel at our fingertips. How to help them sleep through the night. Recover from tantrums. Eat their veggies. Mind their manners. Ride a bike. Be a good friend. Get off their phone. Read for pleasure. Not blame us for everything in therapy. And have good taste in music.

But there’s a mysterious part of parenting that doesn’t come with a manual. Genetic predictability has its limits. No matter how similarly we parent our children, the siblings each have a unique essence. It’s this elusive, unique core of an individual that’s hard to put a finger on. Students often lack this deep self-awareness. We must observe them closely to catch glimpses of this essence—their unique predispositions. Their way of being in the world. Parker Palmer likened one’s true self or soul to a wild animal: “tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”¹

It’s this true essence of our students (what truly matters to them, and what makes them tick) that we have to tune in to as good mentors. And we should bring these parts of ourselves into the relationship, too. When we know our own true strengths and motivations, we can support our students to know theirs.

A student’s activity in the physical world is a window into their hidden world—their unique persona. And this hidden world (of their strengths and motivations) is what fuels them in the physical world. So there’s a reality beyond what we see. A reality that we have to wait for patiently … like watching for that wild creature in the woods. We can also call it forth.

It’s this mysterious aspect of parenting/mentoring—how to welcome and water these predispositions—that we discuss in this chapter. So far we’ve introduced how to navigate life when you commit to one mindset and play two games. Now, we introduce a third navigation principle: future-proof three skill sets.

We’ll show you how to build skills that have lasting relevance. Strengths and skills are two types of competency. By strengths we mean the abilities, curiosities, and character qualities you most delight in. When you’re using these strengths in growth and fixed games, you feel like your best self. By skills we mean the expertise you need to do a job or perform a role. You master these competencies through zeroing in on activities and settings where you can practice them.

Mastering and future-proofing skills boost purpose in two related ways. The first is pragmatic. Building relevant skills enables you to become gainfully employed in a rapidly changing economy. The second is psychological. Building skills fulfills our innate psychological need for mastery. Skills help us navigate toward the activities, careers, and other pursuits aligned with our purpose.

Respect the Tech(nology)

Four of the world’s largest companies—Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook—are worth a combined $4 trillion. Together, the wealth of these four companies makes them richer than Germany, the fourth-wealthiest country in the world. Apple was the first-ever multi-trillion-dollar company. More than four of five US households have an Amazon Prime membership.² Eighty-eight percent of all internet searches,³ over 8.5 billion a day,⁴ use Google. More than one in three people on the entire planet are active Facebook users.⁵

How did these companies become so dominant? What’s behind their mind-blowing influence and growth? It’s simple—they’ve leveraged emerging technology. Whether we like it or not, technology rules over the economy, as well as our lives. So what can we do to prepare our students to survive in “the real world”? To start, we need to get a better grasp of how technology is impacting the world they’re stepping into.

Times They Are A-Changin’

Technology is responsible for the dramatic upgrade in quality of life we take for granted. Life expectancy has doubled in the last hundred years.⁶ The infant mortality rate has dropped over 20 percent since 1960.⁷ Thanks to the phone in your pocket, which has more power than the computers that first put humans on the moon,⁸ you can access almost any article, book, or piece of music at the tap and swipe of your finger. A lion’s share of societal progress directly results from technology.

Perhaps technology’s most visceral impact is how it replaces the old with the new. We used to call a cab for a ride to the airport; now we push a button on our phone. We used to push a button to turn on the radio; now we ask the radio to turn itself on. We dialed up friends and family on rotary phones; now we text them. We drove to in-person doctors’ visits; now we can Zoom in. Technology’s long reach replacing old for new is felt in every nook and cranny of life.

A foundational theory in labor economics is creative destruction.⁹ Its premise is that any economic innovation will destroy old ways of working and introduce new, more efficient ones. The theory first referenced industrial and manufacturing innovations, but it holds true today. What’s changed is that digital technology—as opposed to the steam engine or the assembly line—is now the harbinger of employment destruction and growth. Automation, machine learning, and artificial learning are replacing human jobs by the day.

Over 36 million US jobs are at “high risk” of being automated.¹⁰ Nearly 10 percent of all global manufacturing jobs, over 20 million in total, may be done by robots by 2030.¹¹ About one of three jobs in the world (1 billion in total) will be transformed by technology.¹²

Routine Is the Enemy

Technology replaces jobs, but not all jobs. Tech is on the prowl for routine tasks, especially the ones requiring minimal skill. This is called routine-biased technological change (RBTC).¹³ If you’ve withdrawn cash from an ATM, used the self-checkout line at the supermarket, or been greeted by a machine when calling customer service about your phone bill—you’ve rumbled with tech that’s replaced human jobs. A young fan of the Netflix series Stranger Things posted a question to fellow aficionados about the purpose of the “red room” on the show—“we frequently see Jonathan go inside this to ‘refine’ his photos or something. I don’t quite understand what happens here. He puts the photo in water, and somehow this makes it more clear?”¹⁴ He’d never heard of a darkroom! Tech has so rapidly automated photography that kids don’t know that an entire industry was once devoted to developing photos. This is the power of creative destruction. Creative destruction first came for manual labor and blue-collar jobs. In the 1850s, over half of all American jobs were agrarian; it took half of the country’s entire workforce to produce enough food for people. They worked hard at routine tasks like digging holes, harvesting crops, and tilling land. Machines have now upended manual labor. Less than 1.5 percent of US workers remain in agriculture.¹⁵

And that’s not all. Bots are scanning for ways to transform our digital lives. They’re watching our every move and capturing previously invisible human patterns—tracking mouse patterns, clicks, and communication. They do our chores, pay our bills on time, and get our appliances to obey our every thought. Anything we do on a computer repetitively or routinely, machines can do more efficiently. Routines consist of patterns; and if there’s a pattern, a system can be designed. And if a system can be designed, an algorithm can be built. And if an algorithm can be built, a machine can automate our work. With each day, tech gets smarter at picking out patterns. Where machine tech automated the farming industry, automation is now coming for high-skilled, white-collar work.

College-educated workers are four times more likely to be negatively impacted by automation than those with just a high school degree.¹⁶ Over 100,000 legal jobs, such as junior lawyers and paralegals, will be replaced by automation by 2036.¹⁷ Artificial intelligence (AI) experts predict that there’s a 50 percent chance that AI will automate 90 percent of human tasks in the next fifteen years.¹⁸

Like a plant, automation needs the right conditions to grow. It needs rigid settings and work characterized by rules, concrete thinking, and routine skills. Rules and skills, like compliance, memorization, and unquestioned rule following, are fertile ground for creative destruction.

If we’re serious about preparing students for their future careers, we have to ask: Are schools prioritizing skills that will be evergreen, or the ones that will soon be automated? If aliens from outer space spent a day in an average US high school, what would they make of grade point averages, standardized test scores, and AP exams? All reward routinized behavior. How many of the tasks that are rewarded in school rely on compliance, rote memorization, and recall—routine skills that can be performed by the devices in students’ pockets? Would an alien think we were designing robots, or preparing students for the future?

Worse yet, would it seem that our current education systems penalize students for being creative and original—two skills that are impossible to automate? Adam Grant, author of Originals, noted:

… the most creative children … are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet. In one study, elementary school teachers listed their favorite and least favorite students, and then rated both groups on a list of characteristics. The least favorite students were the non-conformists who made up their own rules. Teachers tend to discriminate against highly creative students, labeling them as troublemakers. In response, many children quickly learn to get with the program, keeping their original ideas to themselves.¹⁹

When students rebel against the rote, routine, and repetitive, they’re met with resistance. It’s easier to teach a classroom of conforming, unoriginal students than to teach the type who change the world. We prefer well-behaved students to the ones who question everything. Education systems are not well designed to cultivate the very skill sets and roles essential in the race against technology.

Tech Is the Terminator (of Tech!)

Schools are really into preparing students for this tech-centered future by doubling down on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). A persistent narrative in the education world is that technical/STEM skills reign supreme over other skills. Here’s why. First, people associate “skill-building” with technical skills. Second, RBTC suggests that automation is replacing more middle- and low-skill jobs than high-skill jobs, especially those that require technical/STEM skills.²⁰ Third, we assume STEM careers are more lucrative.

New graduates experience what economists call “rapid earnings growth.”²¹ Overnight, broke college students subsisting on ramen noodles and thrift store purchases make the leap to salaried positions with benefits. This jump, called the “college wage premium,” represents on average an 85 percent increase in wages over those with a high school diploma.²² The highest-paid entry-level workers of them all are those entering STEM fields.²³ They succeed on the job market because they’re up against limited applicants for high-paying jobs. And employers value their skill set because it’s tangible and coveted outside of STEM fields, including in finance, business administration, and law.

What Got You Here Will Not Get You There

Little wonder everyone’s so pumped about getting students into STEM fields. And students are heeding this advice. Since the great recession, while the number of humanities majors have been tumbling, the fields that have risen are almost entirely STEM majors.²⁴ Sixty-eight percent of students are mainly motivated to pursue STEM to follow the money.²⁵ They’re thinking: technical skills = well-paying, stable jobs.

But here’s the twist. STEM majors make more money at the beginning of their careers, but not necessarily throughout their careers. The wage premium STEM majors enjoy over liberal arts majors doesn’t last. Harvard University economists David Deming and Kadeem Noray found that “the relative earnings advantage for graduates majoring in applied subjects like STEM is highest at labor market entry and declines rapidly over time.”²⁶ The Academy of Arts and Sciences explained that “vocational training focused on narrow job-related skills helps students find jobs when they are young … but they are often not prepared to adapt to changes over time and thus are more likely to be unemployed or have lower salaries when older compared to those who received a more academic general education.”²⁷ STEM majors are the hares of the career race, but liberal arts majors are the tortoises—starting off slow and building momentum over time. This is because STEM occupations have a steep learning curve and a declining value curve. Specific technical skills depreciate over time. Highly skilled workers who know how to use technology are needed. But if these professionals are not diligent in constantly upgrading their skills to keep pace with the times, their skills are quickly left behind as innovation marches forward.

Take, for example, learning to drive a car. You’re on a steep curve while you’re learning to parallel park, separate the gas and brake pedals, keep to the speed limit, avoid hitting pedestrians, and obey traffic laws. Over time, your skills become second nature. The initial learning curve pays off because it means you’ll be set with skills that last a lifetime.

Or will it?

Driving is going out of fashion. Learning to drive among teens is down 50 percent since 1983.²⁸ Why learn to drive when Uber and Lyft can do it for you? With autonomous vehicles coming soon, driving skills will be obsolete before we know it.

Tech-centric professionals face the same conundrum—the skills they’re investing in are always on their way out. The speed at which a skill gets outdated is called “the rate of skill change.” Occupations with the highest rate are in STEM fields.²⁹ STEM professionals are beholden to a vicious cycle: learn skill, tech makes it obsolete, learn new skill. Repeat.

This learn-rinse-repeat cycle is a reason that people leave STEM: “STEM Majors with higher academic aptitude scores leave STEM careers more often and at younger ages.”³⁰ It’s a disincentive to invest so much in skills that are gone by tomorrow.

We certainly are not trying to dissuade students from STEM pursuits if it’s their growth game. But if money and a cushy life are why you’re going into STEM? Buyer beware. Investing years in learning skills that’ll be replaced in less time than it took to learn them isn’t a wealth-building strategy! The steep learning curve of STEM occupations comes with commensurate potential sunk costs. Learning a specific job or skill set makes it easier to get a good-paying job when you start your career in STEM, but is much harder to keep up as you advance.

At the Speed of Light

Just when we think that the creative destruction rate is at its peak, it accelerates exponentially. For example, computers become twice as fast and half as expensive as their predecessors every eighteen to twenty-four months.³¹

To illustrate the power of exponential growth, suppose we make you a deal. We give you $1,000 every day for 30 days and you give us a penny on day one and double the amount every day for 30 days (2 cents on the second day, 4 cents on the third day, etc.). Any takers?

On the thirtieth day you would have $30,000. Not too shabby. But we would be getting $5,368,709.12!

Now apply this exponential function to technological progress. When households first had dial-up internet, we connected at 28.8 kilobytes per second, then 56k, 128k, and so on. Today, average Wi-Fi speeds are over 2000 percent faster than dial-up speeds of the past. Soon, 5G will increase internet speeds to a nearly 40,000 percent increase over today’s speed. A 1,115,970 percent increase from dial-up. The PlayStation 5 is over twice as powerful as the PlayStation 4, but it is over 850 times faster than the original PlayStation that came out twenty-five years ago.³² Author Tim Urban drives home the rate of progress this way:

If you divide the 100,000 years of human history to a 500-page book (with each page being 200 years), on the first 499 pages we had 1 billion people or fewer. Then, on the 500th page, we’ve crossed the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 billion person threshold. For the first 499 pages of the book, we barely used any energy at all—we got around with sailboats and walking and running and horses; we developed submarines and cars and planes and space travel all on page 500 alone. Communication was just talking—and maybe letter writing—for the first 499 pages; on page 500, we have FaceTime and the internet.³³

Who knows what’ll be on page 501! We might not be vacationing on Mars or flying to work via jet pack, but the next chapter will surely bring advances beyond imagination. Exponential change mapped on a graph looks like a hockey stick; the curve is steadily flat until it dramatically rises, almost vertically. The bigger surprise is that tech innovation accelerates during economic downturns.³⁴ Why? The opportunity cost to invest in new technology is reduced during a recession or bear market. When things are good, people are buying things and business is growing. Business leaders don’t want to fix what isn’t broken. They hate to take a foot off the gas to make an investment in tech that won’t pay off for a while. When the economy is bad, the decision is easier and essential. It’s a cold reality that firms trade off humans for new tech. Organizations shift their strategy from growth to efficiency—this makes tech very appealing.

In 2020, we saw a historic disruption that has thrown our economy into a tailspin that will take years to stabilize. In just weeks, it’s estimated that COVID-19 destroyed 22 million jobs. More than triple all jobs lost during the great recession of 2008. Labor economists predict that 42 percent of these jobs are permanently eliminated. In addition, McKinsey estimates that 45 million Americans could lose their jobs to automation by 2030.³⁵ COVID-19 ushered in the perfect storm for creative destruction and permanently altered the labor market our young people are entering. So, are students doomed to be swallowed whole by this tech revolution?

No.

We can prepare them to thrive in the face of it.

Future-Proof and Future-Ready

There’s another highly valued set of skills in the workplace. We call them universal human skills. These skills, also commonly known as “soft skills,” “twenty-first-century skills,” or “power skills,” differ from tech skills in some critical ways. First, where tech skills are narrow and specific to one domain, universal human skills are broad. Second, where tech skills depreciate over time, universal human skills appreciate. Third, universal human skills are future-proof. Never to be replaced by automation, machine learning, or artificial intelligence. In fact, the more technology dominates the world of work, the more valuable universal human skills become.

Technical Skills	Universal Human Skills
Narrow	Broad
Depreciates over time	Appreciates over time
Dependent on technology	Leverages technology

Universal Human Skills

Three essential ingredients make any skill human. First, they’re universally applicable. Unlike tech skills, which are domain specific, these skills can be applied anywhere, anytime. In an analysis of 150 million online job postings, universal skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and ethical reasoning, were the most in-demand skills across all labor markets.³⁶ A majority of all job openings required at least one of these skills. “Demand for [these] skills outpaces all other skills and spans a diverse range of careers and industries.”³⁷

Second, these skills are universally valued, especially by employers. In a series of large sample surveys, CEOs and other employers across the globe overwhelmingly endorsed universal human skills over all others. Creativity and management of complexity.³⁸Problem solving and teamwork.³⁹Written communication.⁴⁰ Employers get that these skills predict success in careers.⁴¹ These skills cause success to happen.⁴² Students with universal human skills were more successful at landing jobs and had higher salaries than their peers.⁴³ When Google analyzed their most productive workers, they found that it wasn’t technical skills, but universal human skills, including being “a good team player,” “communication,” “possessing insights into others,” “empathy toward colleagues,” “critical thinking,” and “ingenuity” that best predicted success.⁴⁴

The final ingredient of universal human skills is that they can be learned, developed, and mastered anywhere, anytime, by anyone. The designer Peter Skillman created a challenge to see which groups of people could make the tallest tower that could hold a marshmallow using only spaghetti and tape. Guess which of the teams were the best at tower building. College students? Lawyers? High-powered CEOs?

Nope. Kindergartners.

What did five-year-olds have over adults that made them the winners? Universal human skills—like collaboration and problem-solving. Skills that are maybe lost on adults after years of playing fixed games.

To sum it up, the best skills to develop are: Applicable. Transferable. Widely valued. In-demand. We invite you to look at our list of universal human skills and put a check next to those you’re most motivated to master. Now, circle the ones you think you or your students are most interested in.

Universal Human Skills

   Critical Thinking

Identify problems and access available information to come up with a novel solution.

   Collaboration

Help other people and work with them in effective ways, using communication, coordination, empathy/perspective taking, trust, service orientation, conflict resolution, and negotiation.

   Accountability

Consistently follow through on one’s responsibilities and be seen as reliable.

   Ingenuity

Create novel ideas by cleverly combining existing constructs.

   Cross-Cultural Skills

Meaningfully connect with a diverse population of individuals and groups in a variety of different settings.

   Technology Skills

Identify different types of media, understand the messages they’re sending, and use them agilely.

   Initiative and Self-Direction

Independently create and follow through on a goal one is motivated to achieve.

   Social Skills

Meaningfully engage with people in one-on-one and group situations.

   Productivity

Create systems to complete tasks as efficiently and quickly as possible.

   Media/Communication Literacy

Seamlessly adapt to and communicate through emerging digital environments.

   Flexibility and Adaptability

Effectively and appropriately respond to any changes that may occur.

   Responsibility

Act independently and make the correct decision without needing authorization.

What’s Your Role?

We present three universal roles that represent three skill clusters drawn from a competency framework developed by the National Research Council.⁴⁵ Each skill set and role will be essential in the future of work. They are needed in all workplaces, and they complement each other. We call these professional roles the Creator, the Facilitator, and the Driver.

Creator Competencies	Facilitator Competencies	Driver Competencies
Critical Thinking The ability to identify and question problems and access available information to come up with a novel solution.	Collaboration The ability to help other people and work with them in effective ways, using communication, coordination, empathy/perspective taking, trust, service orientation, conflict resolution, and negotiation.	Accountability The ability to consistently follow through on one’s responsibilities and to be seen as reliable.
Ingenuity The ability to create novel ideas by cleverly combining existing constructs.	Cross-Cultural Skills The ability to meaningfully connect with a diverse population of individuals and groups in a variety of different settings.	Technology Skills The ability to identify different types of media, understand the messages they’re sending, and use them agilely.
Initiative and Self-Direction The ability to independently create and follow through on a goal one is motivated to achieve.	Social Skills The ability to meaningfully engage with people in one-on-one and group situations.	Productivity The ability to create systems to complete tasks as efficiently and quickly as possible.
Media/Communication Literacy The ability to seamlessly adapt to and communicate through emerging digital environments.	Flexibility and Adaptability The ability to effectively and appropriately respond to any changes that may occur.	Responsibility The ability to act independently and make the correct decision without needing authorization.

The Creator

Creators are visionaries who see beyond what is to what could be. They are all about bringing into existence new things, or bringing together old things in new ways. They are critical thinkers who question the status quo. What emerges from the rich soil of their imagination, creativity, and ingenuity are ideas, solutions, media, art. The skills they draw from include ingenuity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and self-direction. Research on the characteristics of top businesses and business leaders reveal the top skills that high-profile creators, like Indra Nooyi, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook, have in common.⁴⁶ Forward thinking. Creative problem-solving. Persuasion. A study of two hundred founders and CEOs of game-changing organizations identified five similar “discovery skills”:⁴⁷

• Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom
• Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
• Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge
• Associating: making connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
• Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives

The ability to innovate depends not just on our minds, but on our behaviors. Blending Creator skills into our daily lives can boost our innovation aptitude.

Rising Passion + The No Code Revolution

Workers have been negotiating wages and benefits for decades. Automation and the decline of unions have dealt a serious blow to the middle class. Workers of the industrial economy in the twentieth century needed to conform (they needed reliable and routinized skills).

Are You a Creator?

• Are you a question asker? Are you inherently curious and eager to challenge the status quo? If so, you have critical thinking skills.
• Are you a problem solver? Are you inherently drawn to try to fix things? Do you love coming up with novel solutions, often to problems other people aren’t aware of? If so, you have ingenuity skills.
• Are you a self-starter? Do you expect to win? Are you more likely to ask for forgiveness than permission? If so, you have initiative skills.
• Are you a bit of a rebel? Are you excited about making life changes? Does your style seem a bit “out there” to others? Do you question everything? If so, you have self-direction skills.
• Are you a trendsetter? Are you an early adopter of new technology, fashion, or slang? Are you a hypebeast? If so, you have media literacy skills.

We need a different skill set today—one more original and creative, in keeping with today’s “passion economy.” Any Creators out there? This is your moment to shine. People who excel at creating content. Solving problems. Inventing solutions for specific communities. If you have these skills, you’re golden. Content creators on the membership platform site Patreon make an estimated $1 billion annually.⁴⁸

Tech has supercharged the Creator’s skill set. Through the no code revolution, creatives can leverage sophisticated tech without hiring a programmer to help them. With little to no training, Creators can now whip up their own beautiful websites, shoot and edit high-definition videos on their phones, or create professional-sounding podcasts. The no code revolution has shifted the value from tech skills to creative skills.

Young people with their tech agility are leading the charge. See platforms like TikTok, Medium, Instagram, and Twitter. Among three thousand youths, the most common response to the survey question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was a YouTuber. More kids reported YouTuber than pro athlete.⁴⁹

We’re not suggesting students drop out of school to make it as YouTubers. Just saying that creating, problem-solving, and critical thinking are skill sets that’ll pay off in the long run.

Pro-Tip for Creators: Join with Facilitators and Drivers who share your vision, and leverage their skill sets to help turn your ideas into fruition.

The Facilitator

Facilitators are the glue that holds people together. They are community builders and team players who unify people behind a shared vision. Teams work better together when they are around. They’re emotionally intelligent, adaptable, and relationally savvy. Communication skills, including writing, speaking, and cross-cultural adaptability, are their toolkit staples. Facilitators are awesome at collaboration and getting their points across. They can even get obstinate people on board with a plan or a change. They help people to feel heard, brave, and open in all kinds of situations.

The Rise of Sharing + Amplifying Collaboration

The Facilitator’s skill set is of particular value in today’s collaborative or “sharing” economy. This economy joins people holding particular assets with those who want to use these assets. For example, Airbnb joins homeowners with travelers. Uber joins car owners with passengers. Kickstarter joins creators with their fans. And this is just a sampling of sharing economy businesses.

Tech amplifies Facilitator skills through collaborative technology. Broadband internet tech and remote work further elevate the value of communication skills. Where work once happened in boardrooms, now it’s on Zoom, email, and various communication and project management platforms like Discord, Slack, and Salesforce. Businesses have moved marketing and sales online. More than four out of five businesses post video content on Facebook as a way to engage customers.⁵⁰ These conditions make communication and collaboration invaluable to employers. They want employees who communicate well inside the organization and outside with clients.

Are You a Facilitator?

• Are you a team player? Do you play nice with others and promote harmony within groups? If so, you have collaboration skills.
• Are you a code switcher? Are you good at adapting to the situation? In other words, do you feel comfortable in a variety of situations and with different people? If so, you have cross-cultural skills.
• Are you a spokesperson? Do you love communicating ideas and making connections with people through shared experiences? If so, you have good social skills.
• Are you an improviser? Are you good at thinking on your feet and changing on the fly as needed? If so, you have flexibility and adaptability skills.

It’s interesting that these skills can be gained through activities that students enjoy and parents worry about—posting life stories as captions on their Instagram selfies, texting, and tweeting. No matter how these skills are gained, communicating effectively, whether in written or visual form, is the digital equivalent of gold.

Pro-Tip for Facilitators: Notice whether there are assumptions, rules, or red tape that prevent people from diverse backgrounds from working well together. Figure out how to work around these barriers to allow for more progressive strategies that think outside the box.

The Driver

Drivers have a bias toward action. They are movers and shakers. While others may do a fine job thinking and talking about the job, Drivers get it done. Whether through self-discipline, reliability, or obsession with progress, they meet deadlines and expectations. Their skills include flexibility, productivity, responsibility, and accountability. Drivers are really good at creating and managing systems to stay organized and get things done. If you know someone who’s into making to-do lists, never has to be reminded to clean their room, and loves managing projects, you may have a Driver in your midst.

Rise of the Gig Economy + Project Management Technology

The Driver’s skill set is a boon in the gig economy, which emerged from the shift from full-time employment to shorter-term (even one-off) contracts with workers. As a result, workers who can execute specific tasks are in hot demand. It’s estimated that by 2027, close to six out of ten Americans will be or will have been gig workers.⁵¹ This economy signals a shifting trend toward unbundling tasks from workers. Organizations used to hire full-time workers responsible for a mix of tasks. But today, similar to how the Industrial Revolution caused workers to mono-task, technology makes it possible for companies to find workers who specialize in specific tasks.

Are You a Driver?

• Have you been the “grown-up” among your friends? Do you like to be in charge of important tasks? If so, you have responsibility skills.
• Are you reliable? Do you consistently follow through on what you say you will do? If so, you have accountability skills.
• Are you an organizer? Do you love to build and maintain systems? Do you maintain your own checklist and get immense joy from crossing items off the list? If so, you have productivity skills.
• Are you a techie? Do you love staying up-to-date on (and are you an early adopter of) the latest technology? If so, you have technology skills.

Content Is Not King

Give a five-year-old a brick and a two-by-four and they’ll come up with endless, imaginative ways to entertain themselves. This is the beauty of being a human. Observe your students and notice how they are constantly developing their universal human skills while engaged in the activities they most enjoy. Minecraft fosters innovation and collaboration. Fortnite is built on effective communication skills. Knowing when to pass out of a double-team takes critical thinking skills. The editing suites of TikTok and Instagram cultivate creativity.

When it comes to universal human skills, what students are learning to do is much more important than where they’re learning it. You don’t need to take up an international relations class or violin lessons to learn these skills. They can be developed in vast ways beyond academic or extracurricular content, as long as you become attuned to these skills and roles.

Not Just Facts

So, should students drop out of school? No. There are no shortcuts to developing the skills and mindsets that enable people to learn how to learn, embrace responsibilities and challenges, collaborate with diverse people, and think outside the box. Albert Einstein noted, “Education is not learning of facts, but training of the mind to think.” Students who attend college, compared with those who don’t, are much more likely to have opportunities to gain these skills in various ways. Especially in high-impact practices like writing-intensive classes, mentored research experiences, and community service and internships.

And then there’s the power of a liberal arts education. Philosophy teaches students to think critically, to challenge assumptions, and to use reasoning to solve complex problems. An English degree teaches people how to make coherent arguments, organize information, and persuasively communicate across mediums. A history degree teaches people to curate and contextualize information from disparate sources. Because of their emphasis on universal human skills, liberal arts programs teach people how to learn. In the future of work, a professional’s value will rest not on a specific skill, but on the ability to acquire any skill.

A common narrative of policy-makers is that a liberal arts education doesn’t prepare workers for the twenty-first-century workplace. They think short-term certificate programs are the solution for teaching workers “real” and “tangible” skills needed now. While short-term, vocational programs are a good fit for many students, evidence doesn’t support the claim that they best prepare workers for the twenty-first-century workplace.

Cutting back educational and personal development in the interest of immediate economic productivity is shortsighted. The students in short-term training programs are disproportionately from historically underprivileged backgrounds. They make up the majority of students who were misled by various for-profit institutions promising to deliver a good return on investment. Those who complete four-year college degrees tend to come from more privileged backgrounds; they remain more privileged because of their exposure to universal human skills—the ones needed in the future of work.

From Makeup to Grown-Up

A high school senior we will call Mya declared the day she started post-secondary planning with Tim that she “despised school.” School triggered feelings of shame and failure for her. Until Mya discovered makeup artistry. Through this medium, she expanded her sense of self beyond the narrow identity imposed by her previous school experiences. She pored over YouTube videos, volunteered at a salon in exchange for free samples, and did makeup for friends, family, and strangers, pro bono. This investment began to pay off. Mya started her own YouTube makeup channel, which grew to five thousand subscribers. Her cadre of paying customers grew.

She was very disappointed to find out that cosmetology school could cost as much as college tuition and that many graduates have trouble making a living in makeup artistry. Mya and Tim identified three skills that drew her to makeup artistry:

• Constant learning of current trends in a fast-moving industry.
• Novelty in approaching every face as a fresh canvas.
• Collaboration with clients.

Mya’s interest in makeup was tied to her interest in being a Creator and Facilitator. She enjoyed critical thinking and problem-solving; creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration. When Tim asked whether she could be happy using these skills in another career, Mya’s interest was sparked. As they brainstormed, they landed on web design. She believed designing websites would be a creative outlet for solving challenging problems while providing the economic mobility important to her.

Mya went to college and majored in graphic design. She still loves makeup artistry, but currently uses and grows similar skills as a designer.

Hardwired for Mastery

Most students have a fire in their bellies. They won’t be content lying on their parents’ couches with a bag of chips and playing Xbox every day for years and years.

If you question your students’ work ethic and ambition, be encouraged—humans are born wanting to learn skills. We’ve never come across a young person who didn’t want to work hard, to get better, to make something of themselves. Finding aims worth getting up for in the morning gives them a direction for that energy. We have an innate desire to learn and grow new skills. “How do I teach my students these skills?” is the wrong question. Instead ask yourself: “What skills are they already pursuing?” Angela Duckworth (MacArthur “Genius” award recipient) and colleagues have identified “mastery behaviors” associated with “grit.”⁵² People with these behaviors have better learning and emotion-management strategies. They have more positive attitudes and stick-with-it-ness in the face of difficult tasks. When we have mastery behaviors, universal human skills follow. So, to understand which skills your young person gravitates toward, look for these four mastery behaviors.

Mastery Behavior #1: Lean In

Mastery starts with throwing your weight into meaningful activities. Exerting some serious energy in the direction of the skills you want to learn. It’s not sitting back passively and waiting for money to grow on trees. Where do you proactively invest time and energy? Where do you focus your efforts? What are the things you get lost in? Video designers differentiate between lean-in and lean-back activities or moments in a game. You know you’re having a lean-in experience when you’re on the edge of your seat, fully engaged in a task. Maybe even forgetting to eat, drink, sleep, or go to the bathroom. Lean-back energy is laid-back energy. You’re relaxed and more passive. Think lying on the couch Netflix bingeing or Pinterest scrolling. Where we invest our time and energy is where we lean in.

Where do you and your people lean in, rather than lean back?

Mastery Behavior #2: Do Hard Things

Now that you’re leaning in, consider what direction you’re leaning in. Mastery comes with leaning into challenges. You push yourself and want to be pushed by others. You stop taking safe shortcuts. Instead of the Magic Kingdom ferryboat, you line up for Splash Mountain. It’s choosing “hard” over “easy.” Yes, it sounds crazy. But when you’re hot on the trail pursuing mastery, you have a whole new take on challenges. No longer a threat to your success, challenges are now fuel for learning, growing, upping your game. Instead of dodging a good challenge, you seek them out and master them! Now we’re having fun.

Where do you and your people choose hard instead of easy?

Mastery Behavior #3: Stay the Course

Challenges are hard. You will hit some bumps in the road. You may get tired or stuck. But when it’s an activity or role you’re determined to master, you push through the challenges. You stay the course even when the going gets tough. Mastery isn’t just about tackling challenges but persisting through them. In fact, mastery comes when the challenge makes you even more focused. It’s as if that challenge triggers your engagement and other superpowers. Staying the course means persisting through challenges, especially where other people quit. While others get distracted or defeated by adversity, you come to life.

Where do you (and your people) stay the course no matter how difficult?

When does the onset of challenges get you pumped?

Mastery Behavior #4: Flop Forward

Leaning in, doing hard things, and sticking with it inevitably exposes you to “failure.” When you go “all in” with challenges, life isn’t as uneventful as it is for people who choose the easy road. By having the audacity to lean in, you’ve increased your opportunities for failure. You’ve joined the ranks of the most accomplished leaders who failed frequently (and sometimes epically):

• In the 1970s, Oprah Winfrey worked as a news anchor at Baltimore’s WJZ station and was told by supervisors that she was “the wrong color, the wrong size, and showed too much emotion.” She was unceremoniously “demoted” to co-host of People Are Talking with Richard Sher, and it was through this “failure” that she realized that her true passion was human interest stories rather than hard news. The rest is history.
• A desegregation campaign in 1961, called the Albany Movement, ended in the jailing of hundreds of Black protesters, including Martin Luther King Jr. While it was considered a failure by many of its leaders and the media, King used the lessons learned to help build a movement even more powerful and beautiful.
• Elon Musk got ousted as CEO of his own company, Zip2, fired from PayPal during his honeymoon, and watched his company’s rockets explode multiple times. He told himself, “No worries, these are experimental landings.” They taught him just what he needed to know for subsequent successful landings.
• Ruth Bader Ginsberg once wrote to a five-year-old who asked if she had ever made a mistake: “I have made many mistakes, but I try to learn from them so that I will not make the same mistake twice.”

When you’re dedicated to mastering something, you have ways of handling the inevitable failures. Many people who’ve been told repeatedly that they’re awesome are afraid to not be awesome. They’re fearful of underperforming, so they are reluctant to try new things. This perfectionism and image-consciousness makes them afraid to show up as their full selves. They quit prematurely because they somehow think that if it was meant to be, it would’ve gone their way without a hitch.

But when you’re determined to master something, a switch turns on, and instead of evaluating yourself by your failures, you’re dialed into your response to them. You tell yourself, “Of course I’m going to fail at times, because mastery is a process of constantly learning things that are new to me.”

Let’s be real; failure doesn’t feel as good as success. But it’s an opportunity to use the lessons learned to get better and smarter. It’s also a heck of a better story to tell yourself. Doing something successfully the first time is a fact, but saying, “I couldn’t XY and got knocked on my butt, then figured out that if I did AB, it might work. And after three tries, I XY’d!” is a good story. Flopping forward, even for colossal failures, always looks ahead. Instead of “I failed at this relationship,” you say, “I struggled with communicating in this relationship. I’m learning to communicate better now.” You use failures to learn what works and what doesn’t so that you can keep honing your skills and craft. Failures are your training ground, and your mantra is “Learn to fail or fail to learn.”

What would you (and your people) do even if you knew you’re going to fail?

Where and when have you bounced back from failure?

Finding Mastery

Mastery behaviors provide clues to which skills students are motivated to master. What are the things they’re already investing in? Think about how they spend their time—are they most often creating, facilitating, or driving? The language of universal human skills can help young people understand how the skills they’re into now can be the ones they’ll still find purposeful in their future work.

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Feel free to think of ways to cultivate students’ universal skills inside and outside traditional education. We don’t have to stress over academics as the end-all and be-all. We can meet our students where they are. How can they get the most out of things they already enjoy doing? As long as they’re developing universal human skills, it doesn’t matter where they learn them.

This opens up a whole new landscape for cultivating skills. No need to fixate on content-knowledge; students can make skill-building their learning goal wherever they are. They can pick the content they’re interested in and build universal skills within that content. This means that the activities we thought were wasting their time—video games, social media, socializing—are actually ripe with opportunity. As long as students are leaning in and learning new skills, the time will be well spent.

Below we’ve made these lessons actionable for your own self-care and for your role working with students.

Self-Care

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Knowing where and when you use mastery superpowers will show you which activities or roles reflect your purpose and which specific skills you’re motivated to master.

1. THINK. What’s an activity or role that you’re really into (even obsessed with)—one that inspires you to lean in and challenge yourself? One that you find yourself pushing through even when there are rough patches?
2. WRITE. Voilà—these activities or roles are ones you’re motivated to master! Write them down! (For example: “authoring a book” or “training for American Ninja Warrior.”)
3. THINK. Now break it down further. Which specific skills (on here) do you use when engaged in these activities/tasks/roles (e.g., ingenuity and cross-cultural skills)?
4. WRITE. Record these as the skills you’re motivated to master while doing the activities that matter!
5. PLAN & ACT. How can you lean in and challenge yourself even more in these activities? Come up with one or two actionable plans. (For example: “say yes to public-speaking gigs despite my stage fright” or “run two extra miles this week”).

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Case Example:

Belle’s son (a high school student) is constantly devouring documentaries to collect facts and information about spectacularly far-flung topics, including the ability of ants to navigate by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field, the controversy over whether Goofy is a dog or a Scottish cow, and the plight of child soldiers in Myanmar. His particular expertise is in history, ranging from an encyclopedic knowledge of the Greek city-states to contemporary global politics. He’s always asked “why” questions and isn’t satisfied with surface-level answers (sometimes to the chagrin of his exhausted parents and teachers). This love of learning extends to a love of sharing knowledge through teaching, mentoring, and leading others. These choices of activities and patterns of thinking are evidence of the skills he’s motivated to master, including synthesizing information quickly and drawing connections between disparate ideas and concepts. To build these skills, parents and educators give him ample learning opportunities on various topics, investing in piles of books and multimedia resources. He eats it all up. His parents have also engaged him in debates and taught him to build solid arguments and rebuttals using CER (claim-evidence-reasoning). And they sometimes regret it.

What You Can Do for Your Student

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Role-modeling mastery behaviors—leaning in, doing hard things, staying the course, and flopping forward—is the best thing you can do to support your student to do the same. Once you’ve practiced self-care in the above section, reflect on the times you’ve seen your students exhibit these behaviors.

1. THINK. Where do they spend their time and energy? Where are they leaning in? Is it in academics? Video games? Other hobbies? Are they making YouTube videos? Are they playing sports, painting, editing photos on their computer? Wherever they are actively engaged is where you will find mastery happening.
2. WRITE. Write down the one or two activities where they are exercising mastery superpowers!
3. THINK. Where we find a mastery orientation, universal human skills will follow. As you reflect on those activities your student is mastering, what specific skills are they practicing there (see skill list, here)?
4. PLAN & ACT. Talk with your student about their skills. Students often struggle to identify where and when they practice mastery behaviors and specific skills.

1. Share examples of your own mastery behaviors and skills, as well as what you’ve observed about theirs.
2. Ask if they agree with your assessment. Affirming and validating the mastery behaviors you see in your student can be an uplifting “aha” experience!
3. Help them find activities or hobbies they enjoy. If you can’t identify an area where your student is applying mastery behaviors, that’s a warning sign. Give them opportunities to explore different activities where they can practice mastery. Mastery behaviors are like muscles; use them or lose them.

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