The Robot Takeover is Happening and We’re the Robots: Why You Need to Channel All Your Strengths, Not Just Those Your Current Job Encourages
Coding isn’t just a job. It’s a lifestyle. You don’t have to code 24/7. You want to. Any true engineer would. I, for one, would hypothetically love to spend every waking moment coding, yet I frequently find myself drawn to my piano, blog, or colored pencils on evenings I set aside for pet projects. There are days when I can’t wait to get home and experiment with my challenge of the moment and days when I can’t wait to look at something besides a screen.
When this craving for other forms of stimulation hit me my junior year of college, I assumed it was burnout. Yet, instead of shutting my mind off and watching TV, my go-to act of self-care while taking a college course load at the end of high school, I craved to channel it through artistic pursuits. Though programming serves as a great outlet for my creativity, I felt limited in my growth when devoting all my time and energy to one thing.
After two years of switching majors and meeting most of my core requirements in the process, I was excited to immerse myself in all CS classes and feel more like an engineer, but after two months of non-stop debugging, I missed the opportunity to feel productive developing diverse skills and perspectives that liberal arts provided. While the liberal arts experience exposed me to a broad range of ideas and taught me to appreciate multidimensional thinking, the delivery through classes, tests, and papers perpetuated my idea that productivity can only mean pleasing others in the immediate term. According to this script, self-exploration is only useful to those who haven’t decided which breed of conformist they want to be.
The societal script tells us to spend four years exploring the world and then shrink ourselves to fit within a box. While society recognizes the benefits of exposing children to diverse realms, adults are groomed to devote all their time and energy to temporary needs at a cost to their holistic potential. Venturing outside our bubbles doesn’t always prove its worth right away. We need to be patient with ourselves and others in these endeavors and resist the urge to call anything that doesn’t work out right away a failure or waste of time.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand that modern life wouldn’t be possible without delegation and I’m glad I don’t have to grow my own food or fix my own toilet, but as we devote more of our lives to our “one true passion,” we limit our worldview and with it, our sphere of influence. Frustrated that their sphere of influence only narrows as they put more work in, most people I’ve met after my academic endeavors have given up on their dreams of changing the world and relegated their lives to the path of least resistance or highest monetary compensation.
Companies are started to fulfill human needs yet their employees are evaluated and often even hired based on algorithmic metrics. While the flattening of org structures following the 2008 recession hypothetically places those on the front lines closer to those at the top of the pyramid, many employees now only see their busy bosses once a month, which distances workers from the business basis for their employment and encourages them to exclusively follow predefined paths to recognition rather than experimenting with new avenues for growth and savings, which in turn signals to supervisors not to expect anything more. This vicious cycle promotes a culture of one-dimensional thought, action, and relationships.
Like robots, we’re pressured to specialize in niche roles that won’t exist in a few years, though, unlike robots, we can’t be reprogrammed overnight. In adopting a robotic mentality, we lose touch with our only advantage over robots, ingenuity. Ingenuity is a must in adapting to our constantly changing world, yet our siloed culture isolates us from the exposure to new ideas that it stems from.
In a world built by humans for humans, the most valuable ideas come from understanding the human population, something we have a harder time doing as we spend more of our lives in esoteric microcosms in school and at work. While these subcultures pride themselves on distinct norms, they all restrict our worldviews in terms of both the people we meet and the sides of them we see. As a small town girl, singer-songwriter, and coffee shop lover, I’d picked up an open-minded, empathetic approach to conversation, which drew people of all ages, genders, cultural backgrounds, and walks of life to me as a confidant, especially in the first impression obsessed culture of my group project based grad classes. Just by staying true to my humanity, I provided an outlet for emotionally stifled acquaintances to unpack their feelings, experiences, longings, and callings in an ethos that left little time or space for introspection.
My multifaceted outlook helped me see the value in myself and others and sharing it empowered others to see that they’re worth a lot more than our oversimplified validation schemes tell them. Seeing myself holistically proved to me that I had more to offer in my field than aimlessly competing with peers who spent every waking moment coding. Though underrated in school, putting myself in others’ shoes proved a valuable asset in the work world, where I helped my teams reduce our cycle time with process improvements and worked with product managers to develop user-friendly interfaces.
Thinking for myself also kept me sane in an ethos of flawless facades, impostor syndrome, and discouraging comments from veterans who’d forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner. Instead of debating whether I was enough, I focused on finding opportunities to contribute in my work and life. Rejecting the zero sum game surrounding me gave me space to explore paths less traveled and make more of an impact.
We’re taught to defy our explorative human nature for the sake of job security and call it finding our passion, an insult to the change makers willing to venture into the unknown and do whatever it took to build the world we live in today. Making a holistic impact requires a holistic approach, yet, our cultural sorting hat labels those who live such lives as lost, unaccomplished, and not worth following until after they’ve made their vision a reality, a sentiment which discourages most along the way. When our specialist definition of passion renders liminals inadequate, it’s no surprise that we advertise ourselves as fractions of who we are.
Unlike most common measures of potential, innovation has no optimal age or experience level. Valuing the insight developed over each of our unique lifetimes invalidates the arbitrary expiration dates companies put on each stage of our careers. By embracing it, we free people to live and grow according to their unique dreams rather than stereotypes. Fostering such a reality for ourselves and others requires embracing our whole selves throughout our lives, not just the parts that provide immediate value to those in our immediate vicinity. If we don’t, we lose the parts of ourselves we don’t use and become robots programmed for yesterday rather than humans equipped for tomorrow.
Even the most career oriented of us are more than a job description. It’s a small fraction of our potential value to those in our professional and personal lives. Considering 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet, neglecting strengths that don’t impact our current paychecks greatly restricts our potential for growth.
In our changing world, adaptability is our greatest asset, yet many see specializing as the key to job stability. Conformist team, company, and industry cultures develop without tomorrow’s best interests in mind. It’s important to think twice before sacrificing the skills and thought processes that make us unique for an empty reward of fitting in.
While channeling our other skills might sound like extra work, there are always opportunities to apply them to activities we’re already investing in at or outside work. Since finding them can take some creativity, the path more traveled is losing its appeal in our fast changing world. As its promises expire, we need to normalize paving our own ways and stop letting a world that doesn’t know our worth define our destinies.
Call to action: What are some traits that your current environment doesn’t nurture that you’d like to develop.
