Gain a Super-Power
A lot of people are confused about their future, especially when it comes to their careers. Many school students, high-school students and college students, as well as their parents, ask me for advice for many decisions in their careers. Just a few days back, there was a session where some parent-student pairs were seated (virtually) in a meeting with some IITians, assumed to have done well in their professional lives. And a student’s father asked the group, that his child has scored some 95 marks in the IIT-JEE examination, so which are the colleges and branches that he should apply for.
Fortunately, the moderator of the session, Mr Hasmukh Parekh, himself realized that this question is coming from a point-of-view plagued with biases. Hence, he asked one of the seniors in the meeting, who had come with some material prepared, to tell these students and parents about all the possibilities there exist in the job market. Mr Narayan, who probably has more than 30–40 years of experience in the industry, presented a long deck of slides, meticulously stating a plethora of career paths that someone can pursue after their school. But mid-way through the conversation, I and a few others were realising that just stating all the options is not going to help the people who are seeking advice because they know a lot of those career paths exist; they just don’t consider them worth pursuing.
The discussion was hence going back and forth a lot. We were coming back to the slides, primarily because someone had put in the time and effort to create them (you might recall the sunken cost fallacy here). I observed that I had been mostly talking about how useless college and other higher studies are, whenever I was asked to speak. I even declared that my undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur (one of the most reputed technology institutes in the country) is absolutely useless. That the main value of being a student of IIT Kanpur was the environment that staying on campus created around me: An environment where I was free to explore myself, to pursue various things and figure out what I like and what I don’t.
“Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”
— Peter Thiel (in his book, Zero-to-One)
But my extreme stance made one of the parents go on the defensive. When I said that the careers of the students are not decided by what stream they take. That anyway, no matter what branch or college they take, they will be changing their field of work every 5 years. That the college setup is just about paying an institute a lot of money to buy a student time to really know what they want to do with their lives. And if someone already knows it, they don’t need colleges. They just need to start working. All knowledge is available online. All guidance and mentorship can be arranged by the network of IITians, part of which was already present in that meeting. He, being the father of a high-school student, was probably, and reasonably, not finding any answers in my statements. He claimed that one needs the confidence to start working on whatever they would like to try, and I just dismissed him by saying that people aren’t confident even after studying for 4 years. They are still super-nervous and most of the time, still incompetent, when they join their first jobs, pointing out to the extensive training programs that most companies have to create for every fresher that they hire right out of college.
“By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready-for nothing in particular.”
— Peter Thiel (in his book, Zero-to-One)
So I dug deeper in my thoughts, tried to understand his point of view. I recalled that just a few months back, when I was exploring my childhood stuff while clearing out a room in my old house, I found a notebook, with the title “Sustainable Development” (this was written in 2008, and the term hadn’t become popular until the Paris conference of 2015). This was a notebook filled with ideas that I wanted to pursue towards the vision of a sustainable future for humanity. I discovered that I had found my purpose when I was 13 years old, forgotten it in the rat race, and rediscovered it when I was 23 years old. And this discovery made me feel really bad. I felt as if I just wasted 10 years of my life. On introspection, however, I understood that I didn’t really waste all that time. At 13 years old, even though I knew the purpose, I probably didn’t have what it takes to work on them. I had the vision, but I couldn’t see the path to it. And at 23 years old, I was capable enough to start working towards any of the visions that I could imagine. I labelled this period of my life as a period when I was picking up superpowers.
I observed that in these 10 years, I had learnt, first of all, how to live independently. Without my family, without the trap of comfort created by privileged Hindu families for their male children. I had learnt how to work my ass off. How to really dedicate my everything to a purpose and give it my all. To sacrifice for a goal. I learnt how to collaborate in teams to create something. I learnt to navigate social connections and situations by failing at them repeatedly, and still getting the chance to attempt again. I learnt how to do software programming, which is currently my single most overpowered` skill. In fact, I also topped it off by learning to touch-type and maximizing my interfacing speed with the computers. I learnt to process and analyse data, and create machine learning models on top of them to be able to automate things. And all of this places me much better than my 13-year-old self to pursue the visions that I had started seeing at that age.
In fact, even right now, I invest quite some time in building some other super-powers, like leadership and influence. So, in the meeting, I talked about working on gaining superpowers, if you do not have a sense of direction career-wise, or lack confidence in pursuing it. I suddenly had everyone’s attention. I had struck a chord with everyone. This was the answer that everyone was seeking.
I define a super-power as a skill that would be super useful in any field, no matter what domain you choose in the future.
I define a super-power as a skill that would be super useful in any field, no matter what domain you choose in the future. Gaining them is super helpful because as the world is evolving, the nature of jobs will keep on changing. Just 10 years ago, the job market looked nothing like it does today. And there is no merit to the belief that we can predict how it will look 10 years from now. This makes it even more relevant to pick up superpowers that will come in handy, and even open up many opportunities, no matter what the job market evolves into.
Some examples of super-powers, which you can easily start working on today (year 2021 A.D.) are as follows:
- Speed reading
- Touch typing (or mastering whatever computer interfaces are relevant in the time that you live in)
- Writing
- Public speaking
- Video editing
- Product design
- Software programming
- Hardware programming
- Data science and analytics
- Leadership
Note that these are only some examples right from the top of my head. One of the people in the audience, while inquiring about this idea of ‘superpowers’, asked me if specialized knowledge about any one thing would be called a superpower. For example, he asked, if Chemical Engineering could be called a super-power. My firm opinion is a strong “NO”. Chemical engineering, or even computer science, physics or any other specialization is not a super-power in my opinion. You might pick up a few superpowers as you pursue chemical engineering, like speed reading, data science, etc. But chemical engineering itself is not a superpower.
A superpower must either empower you to pick up any domain-specific knowledge much faster or help you create impactful contributions in it much more efficiently. If it doesn’t, then it is just knowledge. Not a superpower.
I believe that everyone should keep on picking superpowers throughout their lives. In fact, you MUST dedicate at least 5–10 hours every week to learning a super-power. You don’t have to do it in a “pure” form. As in, you can work on your analytical thinking and pattern recognition just by learning music. You can work on your team building and leadership skills by organizing events or by playing sports. You can pick up speed reading and creative writing by reading a bunch of fiction novels. And this list can go on and on.
If you have any remaining doubts about this concept of superpowers or need any guidance on how to earn them, feel free to get in touch with me. I am open to any and all critique, as long as it challenges my thoughts. In the end, I would like to acknowledge that I gained the inspiration of writing this blog after a follow-up conversation that Mr Shishir Nigam, another one of the IITians in the meeting mentioned previously, initiated with me. He made me realize how important this idea can be for so many people, hence making me realize how important it is to put it out there for everyone to read.
He also asked me whether the “super-power” concept is my original or if I have read it somewhere. As far as I can recall, I haven’t read it anywhere. It is, in a sense, my original concept. But driven by my belief that there is absolutely nothing original in the world and that every idea and concept is always a derivate of the things that already exist, I am not convinced that I don’t have any inspiration. My current best guess is that this concept of gaining superpowers is inspired by the character of Tony Stark (Ironman) of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you have read or heard about a similar concept somewhere else, I would love to find out about that.