Tim Ferriss in “The Four Hour Work Week”:
“Here are two truisms to keep in mind: 1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. 2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important. From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.”
What are you too good at?
I got pretty good at outlining ideas quickly. Which meant I also got very good at not finishing work on different ideas. I practiced starting writing and got very bad at finishing writing.
Are there skills you’re practicing that might be automated in the near future?
In his Building a Second Brain course, Tiago Forte describes getting very good at organizing his music library. He had a nice workflow going, developed over years.
And then it was entirely replaced by iTunes Match.
Don’t become the best at organizing dirty dishes in the sink. Or becoming the best at tying shoelaces.
Or becoming the best at transcribing audio completely manually.
Many valuable skills will become automated or much easier with tools to augment yourself. Here’s Michael Bierut in “Now You See It”:
“Design work that would have taken me a week in 1980 can now be done on a personal computer in less than an hour. Cutting and pasting, when necessary, is a special task performed in the basement, often by interns. I get the impression that this kind of work, to which I once applied myself with the pride and intensity of a master chef, is now regarded as a chore akin to dishwashing.”
Entire roles won’t be replaced quite as quickly as self checkout replaces cashiers. But aspects of roles will no longer need specialization.
Take a look at skills you’re actively developing. Are there more important parts of the workflow to practice?
Master skills that are worth mastering.