The Future-Proof Skill Stack (How Average People Become Millionaires)

What Will Be Relevant In 20 Years?

00:00I'll be honest, I am pretty worried, as I'm sure many of you are. I am deep into the AI and AGI rabbit hole, and there's been a few questions on my mind the past month. What can humans do that machines can't? What will the future of work look like?

00:14What jobs, if any, will persist over the next 20 years? What can we as humans do to secure an above average future with these problems at the forefront of my mind? I found a few answers that may bring you optimism and clarity going into the unknown.

00:30I want to focus on one point that most people are worried about. We don't know what to teach children because we don't know what will be relevant in 20 years. And I was worried about this too, until I came across a post by this guy named Devin Erickson.

00:45And so I read the post. It was extremely good. It was just a long form post on Twitter and I ended up diving into more of his work. I watched a lot of the podcasts that he was on. He's not a huge name yet. I hope that he does become one. But he recently released a fiction book called Theft of Fire that I've started reading.

01:04I haven't read a fiction book in so long, and it's actually really good. So I'd encourage you to check both him out and his book out Theft of Fire. So throughout this video, I'm going to be bringing up multiple points of his on just the future of work or what people should be learning, etc..

01:20And then we'll dive into some of my thoughts throughout it as well. So it'll be like a mixture. So onto a few of his points, only slaves are expected to perform one task for their entire life. This is one massive point is that our current education system reflects the education that slaves were given.

01:37So slaves, as an example, were given career specific skills like herding sheep, growing wheat and riding a horse. And today we are taught to be useful workers. That's what we're taught to do. That's what school is designed for us to do. That's in our entire life trajectory since we were born, as you're told.

01:55Okay. Do this. Obey at school, do your assignments, do the things that you don't care about, so you can eventually continue doing something you don't care about so that you never actually get around to the things that you do care about. We are conditioned to get good grades out of fear of punishment, and the same thing happens as we're growing up.

02:11It's you need to speak the certain way or else you're going to be punished. You need to learn these specific skills so you can perform the specific tasks so you aren't punished by having a bad life filled with not so much money. You need to learn how to get paid by doing a specific skill for a specific person so that they can become your master and you become a wage slave.

02:32Point number two is that a free man is expected to act on his interests and do many things throughout his life. So as I say, multiple times in my book and just in general, in many different variations, if you don't create a purpose, you will be assigned one.

02:46Or if you don't choose a purpose, you will be assigned one. A purpose is a goal, and most people don't set in pursuit their own goals. Goals are literally everything since the day you were born. That's how you survive. You are given a goal by your parents and then your teachers and then your employer.

03:03And that's usually it for people that can't zoom out and choose their actual long term goals that they want to pursue. And a goal implies that you have to learn the knowledge and skills that allow you to achieve that goal. So if you are assigned goals by other people, then you are only going to be learning the knowledge and skill necessary to achieve those goals.

03:24You're not going to learn or explore anything outside of it, meaning you are going to take the same path that people have already took and you are going to get the results that people already have. And for 99% of the population, people aren't satisfied with those results.

03:38They don't like their lives, they don't like their work. If you don't choose your own goal, you do not choose what you learn or what problems you solve. Your destiny is decided for you because the only potential you know is the one you were assigned.

03:50The third point is that the difference between the two is how to live, how to think and how to learn. So the difference between a slave and a free person is how to think, how to live, and how to learn. True education is not a clone producing machine that we call the public school.

04:04True education is an orientation for how to live without being dependent on everyone but yourself for your survival. True education does not teach you only career specific skills that everyone is worried about children learning. It is how to become resilient and creative and how to learn faster and how to be adaptable and how to use the new tools that technology is creating so that you are not used by them.

04:31The last point is to stop worrying about what career skills I will make obsolete. Worry about whether you are training or being trained to make ideal future align decisions, be open minded and perceptive, and be self-motivated. Everyone is creative and creativity is about achieving any goal with the knowledge and skill available to you, not fancy art or designs.

04:51In other words, you need to learn how to set self-generated goals, utilize the internet and mentors and the abundance of information you have access to so that you can educate yourself. Then you need to embrace trial and error, self-reflect and experiment to create your own path.

05:06We're going to talk about the seven traits of the irreplaceable individual in the next video. Creativity gives you the power to do whatever you want in life. Those who don't realize this gift are going to be doomed to the assignments of others.

05:18So as I said, we're going to be diving into this more in the next video, but let's discuss what it takes to be an irreplaceable individual.

The Irreplaceable Individual

05:27Now, I want to talk about the skills and interests and traits that make you future proof. Study human nature. Then study whatever you want. It is impossible to know what the future will hold. All we know is that there will be a way of life that leads to the most satisfaction.

05:43Meaning that your life only goes to shit if you let it go to shit. You can't depend on the school system or the government or your parents or anyone else. To secure your future, you have to take it into your own hands. That is what every successful person by any measure has done.

05:58The point here is that certain aspects of an ideal lifestyle in the future that humans will want to live and achieve. There are going to be unique aspects of that which we'll talk about, but there are also going to be immutable principles of human nature that have persisted and will persist.

06:16And you need to learn and understand those. Those are what we're going to talk about and to discover what these are. We have to look at what is not taught in schools. If schools train you to be a modern slave that performs one task in one career for the entirety of your life, what is the knowledge and skill that sovereign individuals are taught or teach themselves?

1) The Future-Proof Skill Stack

06:34Now let's talk about the future proof skill stack, and I want to frame it with what Devin Ericsson, the guy I talked about earlier, called the seven liberal arts. So his version of the seven liberal arts. And he likes to call these the liberating arts because they are not to be confused with the ideological monstrosity that is taught in liberal arts school.

06:54So these are, quote, logic how to derive truth from known facts, statistics, how to understand the implications of data, rhetoric, how to persuade and spot persuasion tactics, research, how to gather information on an unknown subject, practical psychology, how to discern and understand the true motives of others investment, how to manage and grow existing assets, agency.

07:17How to make decisions about what course to pursue and proactively take action to pursue it. If you prepare yourself with these traits or skills or arts, the technical skills or the career specific skills that you learn won't matter. You'll be able to adapt to them and change them at any time.

07:34So the reason this post by Devin Erickson stuck out to me so much is because I had already learned these skills, but I learned them in a unique way. At least by my standard. And voila, they fall within the world view that I teach here on my channel, which is to start a creator based business because you are naturally a creator.

07:53I'm not talking about a content creator. I'm talking about just a creator of value and distributing it as a content creator. Because with the advancement of technology, you can do that as a one person business and that is one of the most viable ways to do that.

08:08So to learn these arts or skills or traits that Devin Erickson talked about, I personally learned marketing and sales. So if you don't know how to attract and persuade, you will never get what you want and your only option will be for an employer or the government to give it to you.

08:22This covers rhetoric in psychology. The next things I learned were writing and thinking, so the ability to communicate the value in your unique mind, the foundation of getting in front of other people. This covers logic and research. And then the last thing I learned was entrepreneurship, which is the process of taking my future into my own hands, hunting for my survival and building products that I want to see in the world that others care about.

08:44And this covers statistics, agency and investment. Some may say things that like entrepreneurship isn't a skill, it's more so a stack of skills that allows you to be an entrepreneur. But I would argue that any mental process that becomes more efficient with time is a skill.

08:58Everything is a skill, but people just aren't showing up to their life as a practice. And the thing here is what makes these skills beautiful is that nobody can teach you how to market, sell, think or write. They can only show you how they did it.

09:12Meaning that to learn these skills you have to self experiment. You have to take it into your own hands. That's how you can. That's the only way to learn them. So your job is to one researched processes that others have found success with. Thankfully, you can find these with a simple search on the internet to experiment with various techniques.

09:29So implement the processes you learn and attempt to get results. Third is identify patterns and principles. So note the similarities between each and double down on them. Fourth is to create your own process. Tailor What you learn to your unique lifestyle and situation.

09:43Fifth is to contribute to true education by passing it down. Give people education that can't be taught in schools with a fundamental grounding in critical thinking with entrepreneurship as your vessel for this. You set the scene for true education and sovereignty.

09:57With writing and thinking, you continuously create, test and iterate on the value you have to offer. Social media, as an example, is a testing ground for ideas, and with both of these, you are required to learn practical psychology, which is marketing and sales, so that you can understand the minds of your readers and customers so that your creations are actually valuable.

10:16You then persuade, not force or deceive to inspire people to care about the value you have to offer. Now, these future proof skills are the foundation of the education we teach inside of Cortex University, which is my school for becoming a synthesizer in 60 days, depending on the tier you choose.

10:3460 days is the starting point.

2) Technical Know-How

10:36Now, to add on to the futureproof skill stack to make you even more. Your replaceable. We need technical know how in the digital renaissance this means social media. So building a name for yourself as your storefront for the value you create the command center for your business content which is writing or video to educate, entertain, and inspire people to see your value.

10:57Email marketing, which is newsletters or sequences to nurture the audience, you acquire visual design to illustrate the vibe of your brand, to spark emotion in your viewers and funnel building. So creating landing pages websites and fueling them with other technical skills like content and email.

11:12When I say technical skills or technical know how, I'm talking about how you apply the futureproof skill stack. So marketing, sales, writing, thinking, entrepreneurship, that's how you apply them. And these can change and will change with time.

11:25It's like how Sam Altman says that coding will still be around, but it may just take a completely different shape. The world will still need coders, but it may not be in the same language. It may not. You may be able to rewrite it, but the the ability to think through problems is still going to persist in that domain as a coder.

11:43So it's the balance of creative work and specific work, having specific knowledge of a domain so you understand the inner workings of it, but also having the creativity so that you can adapt and change course.

3) Personal Interests

11:54Now, to make this even more potent and to make yourself even more irreplaceable. The third thing that we're going to learn on top of the futureproof skill stack and the technical knowhow is personal interests to make it unique. Because now the questions you're asking are what do I write about?

12:10What do I market and sell? What do I email design or leverage technical skills with? The answer to this is simpler than you think, but we love to overcomplicate things. You use these with the interest. You can't help but tell others about the books.

12:24You can't pull yourself away from the ideas that flood your search history. Not those ones the projects you dream of building but can't seem to find the time to. You don't find a profitable need. You create one through persuasion. Nobody can tell you what niche to go into.

12:39They can only tell you the one they went into. If you understood the futureproof skills and therefore human nature, you would understand that you controlled the perception of your interests. Interest is generated, interest is programed. You are interested in specific things because of how you were raised and the information you were exposed to.

12:58You are interested in them for a reason. That means others can become interested in them with well-placed writing on social media. This has happened to you before. Go scroll to timeline and tell me something. Doesn't persuade you to change your behavior.

13:10You spend time, attention and money on your interests. That means others will spend those same resources on you If you are valuable enough for you. People don't find a niche, they create one.

The Digital Renaissance

13:21So you know what skills to learn. It makes sense. But you have to understand that we are in the middle of a second renaissance, meaning that the generals don't win, the specialists don't win. It's the generals specialists. It's incredible that you can become top 5% and the skills that allow you to control your future.

13:38With 6 to 12 months of obsessive learning and building on the Internet enough so that you can make a living from it without investing more than a few hundred dollars, if any. Most people don't try to become top 5% in any skill because they don't realize that the 95% is comprised of people who put 0% effort outside of anything they were told to do by their parents or society.

13:5830 to 60 minutes a day for 6 to 12 months puts you ahead of almost everyone. And even that is too much to ask of most people. There is no competition if you can see it. You understand that the decentralized education system is being built right in front of our eyes.

14:14This decentralized education system is composed of creators that are forging their own path and passing down their lessons, experiences and new paths to new career paths as education on social media. And that means you can learn from them and you can quickly learn relevant skills that allow you to adapt to the changing career landscape.

14:34So if you aren't learning online, if you don't have a habit of learning online, then you probably aren't going to make it in the future because one university curriculums can't be updated that fast to match the times to Tolu. Back to what we said earlier, you have to be self-reliant.

14:49You have to take responsibility for your future here because no one's going to teach it to you. You have to learn it. And in my eyes it is silly to bank your future of education on those who are employed to be teachers. I'm not talking about general education that is very useful for getting people on the same page.

15:05I'm talking about further education. When you are at the pivotal moment where you must choose what interest you want to pursue. If the goal is to be in control of your future, it is wise to avoid education by those teaching how to be free but aren't free themselves.

15:18STEM education makes sense because it teaches people hard skills, right? They're not teaching you how to be an entrepreneur or how to live a better life or how to make more money. That's why the Internet is flooded with those people. A lot of people view that as like a scam or grift when that's the only place it can be teached.

15:36And it's the only way that people can learn how to actually make more money sustainably. You aren't going to learn how to do that in school, and you can't get credentials from school that make you a business owner. You just have to be a business owner.

15:50So an education in the things that you want to be doing is better learned from the people that are actually doing that, a.k.a the people that are teaching on social media. The people that you watch every day posts, podcasts, videos, courses and coaching use them to study every skill or interest we've discussed in this video.

16:07Nobody is going to give you the time. You must take it. Set aside 30 to 60 minutes on a non distracting block of your day and build the habit. It will be difficult at the start, as with anything new. Don't expect otherwise.

The Domain Of Mastery

16:19Let's make this all practical by understanding how to pursue a domain of mastery. Mastery is a blend of creative and specific work. Mastery cannot be trained. It must be practiced. You don't succeed by being smarter, and you don't succeed by working harder.

16:34You succeed when you possess specific, domain relevant knowledge with a creative vessel for distribution. A.K.A you need to know what you're doing and you need to be an entrepreneur because I can be smart with an IQ of 175. But if a bug occurs in a complex code base and I do not one understand how to code or to have specific knowledge of that code base, then my smarts mean nothing.

16:57My IQ may help me learn faster, but it's not going to help me solve the problem. And now I can have that specific knowledge. I can be a coder and I can understand the code base, but if I am not the one influencing the growth and vision of that code base a.k.a the entrepreneur, I am not free and I can be replaced.

17:14Now it is difficult to replace someone who is that skilled. It is much harder to find that a player, but it can still happen and if that individual is replaced, do they have the knowledge and skill that allows them to take their skill set and use it on their own to build their own thing?

17:31Your domain of mastery contains the skills and interests you listed earlier under the futureproof skill stack and the personal interests. Entrepreneurship is your vessel, so you are in full control of your future marketing and sales are your message so you can inspire people to care about what you do.

17:47Reading and thinking are your medium so you can distribute your message in public. I teach this into a writer technical know how is the how so you can succeed in the current market landscape. Personal interests are the what? So you have a craft to pour your heart and soul into your ideal future is the why.

18:03So you solve the problem that you have experience with. An ideal future is born from adversity. If you listen to stories of the most successful entrepreneurs, excluding the cases of unconscious competence where they just like are born to success, you will discover a common theme.

18:18They built a product for one of three reasons one, to make something that helped them better to to solve a problem in their life. Were three to build what they wanted to see in the world, or even better, a combination of them all. So as an example, someone who suffered from eczema and couldn't find anything aside from a boring white piece of soap that didn't smell like anything that didn't irritate her skin, that kind of stripped the soul out of relaxing in the shower and having it be like a spa.

18:48So she wanted to bring the life back into her relaxation, and she ended up studying like horticulture and botanicals for years on end so that she could create these bars of soap that both smelled good, looked good, and didn't irritate her skin.

19:05And here you can notice how the value equation that we talked about in last week's video comes into play. It starts with a problem that you face. It reveals a goal and sets a potential process to be created, like learning the knowledge and skills in order to create a process that helps other people reach that goal.

19:20To wrap all of this up, technology only continues to advance. Being scared of it is a great way to ruin your future. The wise decision is to use it, dissect it and understand it. Allow it to help you acquire skills faster so that you can take control of your future.

19:36I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, liked the video, subscribe Check out to a writer Digital Economics Cortex University. And if you haven't already read my book, just buy it. What are you doing? It's a book. Doesn't cost anything.

19:47Throw it on your shelf. I don't know. Read it. Aside from that. Thank you again. See, in the next video it'll be a good one by.