“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”
-Abraham Lincoln
My friend said, “my father recently passed away. When my father was in deathbed, he talked to my mom and me to say good-bye. My father could barely speak. I remembered, my mom was crying all the time during the entire conversation.”
“At one point my father drew me closer to him and whispered to me in my ear, “son, don’t live life like what I did. I’m telling you now, I didn’t do many things right in my life. I didn’t do many things right for your mother, your sister, your younger brother and for you. Son, promise me you won’t be outsourced or offshored like what happened to me.”
This conversation with my friend shocked me and I started to think how does anyone carry one past life experience so heavily till deathbed.
This conversation compelled me to write this content.
I understand losing our job to outsourcing and offshoring is no more fun than losing it to a robot and automation in the future.
Outsourcing means a company hires a third party to do our job.
Offshoring means a company replaces us with someone else in a different country.
Offshoring currently appears the far bigger problem to many expensive countries like USA jobs.
The recent study suggests that a quarter of all jobs could be offshored in coming years.
Let’s put this into perspective why this is happening so quickly.
First of all, we are no longer in the industrial age, we are in the knowledge worker age, this will eventually bring down the industrial age workforce.
Now we have to be open to knowledge workers and their productivity and it can happen anywhere on the planet because of accessible technology.
When we face a challenge, we tackle it, which is called success.
And suddenly we face a new challenge but we try to tackle it in an old way which no longer works for some reason, this is called failure.
We have to understand that today’s knowledge worker age is different from past industrial age models.
This is one of the big reasons for outsourcing and offshoring which will remain prevalent in today’s knowledge worker economy.
Do you think that the big tech companies are spending money on machines and equipment or knowledge?
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft alone spent a combined $125 billion in R&D in 2020 and it’s increasing every year after that.
These figures are larger than the total country budget in many parts of the world.
These companies are not treating humans as machines and equipment, they are treating humans as potential knowledge power.
They are playing the game of human knowledge transfer across many fields on the planet.
If we start to think and manage people as equivalents to machines and equipment then there is a serious problem.
Human beings are not things, as Stephen Covey said, humans are four dimensional in nature: body, mind, heart, and spirit.
The new knowledge worker age at present is emerging at a rapid pace by giving equal opportunity to each of the four dimensional human components.
They are basically the combination of four intelligences that we have: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
We have a highly productive economy with a highly productive workforce in the USA.
But our workforce isn’t productive just by virtue of everyone with a college degree, because college degrees still have many reminiscences of the industrial age.
Sixty four percent of the US population never get a college degree.
Just for the sake of information, in Switzerland, this is even higher, 75 percent don’t have a college degree, yet they are far more productive on average than USA workers.
So, somewhere something needs to be re-evaluated.
In the recent past, a college degree was a prerequisite for employment in cutting-edge companies.
That’s no longer the case at present and probably will be more in the future because knowledge, nowadays, is found everywhere, not confined only in college classrooms.
The world has changed and is still changing.
New knowledge is being distributed globally via the internet technology, we are no longer constrained in a particular area, school, or university for specific knowledge.
We can take Harvard and MIT courses, if we want, from Kathmandu and Johannesburg at the same time.
Just check Apple, the giant trillion dollar company.
Half of its new hires haven’t graduated from college but they might have real world application knowledge or Apple trains them once they get hired.
If we go at the core of our human potential and spirit, there is certainly no college diploma needed for becoming amazingly successful.
Here are a few examples of amazingly successful people without fancy college diplomas.
Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, are the richest people on the planet as proof.
Here is another astounding list of top multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies whose founders didn’t go college or didn’t make it through.
Twitter, Fitbit, WhatsApp, WordPress, Tumblr, Square, Stripe, Spotify, Oracle, Napster, Uber, Dropbox, Virgin, Dell, DIG, IAC, just to name a few.
Many of them are top technology companies in the world and they do businesses based on knowledge workers.
The point I’m trying to make is that a college degree is not the only means to success in today’s knowledge based world.
Let’s be honest, I’m not discouraging any of you or your children from attending or finishing college.
I myself have a PhD and Ivy league training.
But what I’m saying here is my understanding based on my last 15 years of research, reading, work, visit, communication, and whole life experiences in poor, developing, and most developed countries.
My whole purpose is to change the conversation to real knowledge or education that gives real value to society rather than a diploma on the wall.
One more time, I’m not saying lightly, as I said I’m a PhD and Ivy league trainer.
I think higher education is of enormous individual and social value.
But we can receive a fine college education anywhere if we become intentional about our core career, values and success.
One more point, we can’t eat and live with the prestige of school that we attend, especially in the future, which we always emphasized in the past.
The person who stands out in the society would be irrelevant to his educational degree or background very soon.
For example, where the person went to college or, indeed, whether he or she finished college or not, those factors won’t be huge.
Highly successful people work their tails off, they learn on the work what’s required to accomplish their tasks. They think about big problems, try to solve these problems, and end up becoming very successful themselves.
Because of these traits, they make financial independence no matter what their precise educational background is.
Remember, elite Ivy League schools gather many successful people from across the globe; they rarely make people successful in their classrooms.
In many cases, connections matter in today’s interconnected world but that helps to access the first job.
But if we aren’t performing up to good standard expectations, then the Harvard or MIT sweater that we like to wear won’t save our job in the future.
Successes are built on trust and power of knowledge transfer, but most of us think more in terms of me, my wants, my needs, my rights.
This “my” mentality doesn’t help in this global knowledge age.
Many successful businesses are run by the diverse economic rules of the global marketplace and many organizations are run by the respected cultural rules of the knowledge workplace.
Keep in mind that nobody is a whole chain in today’s knowledge world.
Each one of us is a link of a chain.
But if we take away one link and the chain is broken.
You guessed it.
Core sciences and medical sciences are no more isolated sciences and are more connected to information technology.
For example, one whole body MRI powered by AI can detect early stage cancer, brain aneurysms, Alzheimer’s, visceral fat, and liver fat.
Similarly, business, finance, and accounting are equally interconnected to information science.
Software drives today’s economy and software requires very few assets to generate large income streams. Many physical assets are becoming more and more irrelevant.
Today, we need each other’s expertise to be happy, healthy, and successful in any area.
We need someone and someone needs us.
Isolated islands we’re not anymore.
To make this thing called “life” work, we gotta lean and support, relate and respond, give and take, reach out and embrace.
These all are core human values in the knowledge worker age.
Let’s just take Facebook.
Why do you think that Facebook has over 2 billion users?
Because humans are hungry for a strong sense of connection.
Unfortunately, Facebook is not meeting the need for authentic intimacy at the moment but it’s still connecting us anyway so that Facebook is growing every single day.
At the moment, the majority of people show only the best parts of their lives on Facebook.
Who knows, in the future, people might bring their real or worst parts of lives on Facebook and could be the real world education platform for many of us.
Facebook is a global tool for us, how we use it is up to us.
One more example of the knowledge world, how it is shaping us, we are learning new and new things on the web each and everyday so quickly.
I was watching a TED talk the other day from Sam Berns on you tube, I saw how life treats some of us.
Sam was born with Progeria, a rare genetic disease that speeds aging by a factor of eight.
I didn’t know about this disease at all but now I know through technology.
Progeria is triggered by a single devastating typo in our DNA code.
That one mutation floods the body with progerin, a toxic nasty protein that weakens cell nuclei.
Recently, I read a research article, again on the web, about the relationship between the brain and gut as a two way street.
I knew that, in patients with Alzheimer’s, the gut microbiome gets out of balance.
When researchers altered the diets of mice in a study, they found a dramatic reduction in amyloid, killer trash of Alzheimer’s, and neuroinflammation.
They take these bacteria from the gut, figure out which metabolites within them are useful and make them available to people.
I learn all of these from my comfy sofa, no need to go Stanford’s library or attend professor’s classroom.
This is the power of the new knowledge world, we can get whatever we want from our living room.
At present, I am also learning to meditate through an app at home.
I don’t have to walk to a meditation center, I don’t have to pay money to meditation instructors, I don’t have to drive and spend money on gasoline, but I just need internet in my phone or laptop.
Remember, meditation is an important lifestyle habit to establish.
It is a process, when our mind wanders in this busy world, we have to bring it back to our focus, that could be a word or breath, or sound but we have to bring it back over and over.
Everybody’s mind wanders, no question but only the regular practice of bringing it back, over and over, makes it powerful.
Researchers at Harvard University found that meditation alone can change the expression of genes that regulate inflammation, programmed cell death called apoptosis, and oxidative stress in only a few weeks.
Many studies have shown that our brain waves become more coherent when we meditate.
It increases the gray matter in the frontal cortex of the brain which is related to working memory and executing decision making.
Here is a small snapshot of how we can become resistant proof of outsourcing and offshoring.
Let’s say you are happily working as a financial manager.
Ask yourself the basic question.
Do I still enjoy my quiet and sober clients?
If the answer is no, increase the knowledge in other occupational areas, otherwise digital advisors will replace you soon.
If the answer is yes, study the global financial market.
Who knows, maybe the financial business in India could use your service.
One final note, I would like to add.
All of these founders or CEO’s of these multi-million or multi-billion dollar companies that I mentioned above who don’t have college diplomas know the value of real knowledge.
They read a lot, they experiment a lot, they research tremendously.
And almost all of them meditate so that they remain focused to solve our problems to make our lives easier, and eventually we make them amazingly successful financially.
If we don’t want to be outsourced and offshored then let’s learn a little bit from them.
Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina
Progress for valued society