#6 Writemas: The Intersection of Disparate Skills

My mother used to say to me, “Go work for a good company and build your career within it.”

Her advice came from a good place. She didn’t want me to struggle and have the safety of a salary.

As many of you know, I didn’t do that. However, when I look back and reflect on that advice, I see that she was right but also wrong.

Right in the sense that it’s important to build something and try to compound it. Wrong in the sense that it had to be your career.

My mother’s advice made contextual sense for her growing up. Job security was practically guaranteed.

However, in today’s fast-paced technological society, putting your eggs in one job basket is risky. Companies are changing, evolving and dying faster than ever.

In Berkshire Hathaway’s 2021 annual shareholder’s meeting, Warren Buffett shared a list of 20 stocks with the largest market capitalization as of March 2021, including Apple, Saudi Aramco, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook.

He asked the audience which of those stocks they predicted would remain in the top 20 in the next 30 years.

Buffett then shared the top 20 companies by market cap in 1989; it included Japanese firms, Exxon, General Electric, Merck and IBM.

None of those remain in the top 20 today.

If I were to update my mother’s advice, it’d be to focus on building skills.

The skills you pick to build don’t have to be related.

In fact, I think the more disparate, the better. Because your unique skills and obsessions, when stacked and applied, make you become the only.

When Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College, he was now free to follow his curiosity. This led to him taking a calligraphy class. He learned about typography, the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible and appealing when displayed.

Although he didn’t know it then, but this experience would later inspire him to incorporate beautiful typography into the Macintosh.

Jobs wanted the Macintosh to be more than just a functional computer. He wanted it to be an intuitive and user-friendly device that anyone, not just computer experts, could use.

To achieve this goal, Jobs turned to his love of calligraphy and typography.

He insisted that the Macintosh display fonts with variable widths and proportional spacing, which was a departure from the standard monospaced fonts used in early computers. This allowed for a more natural and aesthetically pleasing reading experience, and it set the Macintosh apart from its competitors.

It’s the reason why we have different font choices on our screens today.

Jobs and Apple is an example of how extraordinary new concepts and ideas can emerge when skills from various backgrounds step into the intersection of differing fields. 

“To develop a complete mind: Study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

Speak to you on Monday,

Jason.