10pm till 1am

My previous blog post has 12 random thoughts I came up with. A few people have commented on twitter wanting more information on some of the points including young gun Adam Jaffrey. His tweet below:

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The point was this:

“What we do after 10pm has a bigger impact on our tomorrow than what we do during business hours.”

Admittedly it is a bit confusing. It could even be read as the need to get enough sleep for an energetic tomorrow. But what I was actually talking about was the ‘long term tomorrow’ and what we do late at night… the stuff we can only do once our daily tasks and family commitments are accounted for.

First of all, we must get our job done, earn our way, eat, cook, clean, be with family and friends, and generally live the tasks of life. This takes time, in fact it takes up most of it for most of us. So we know that in reality there may only be a few short hours left. But we also we know that education is a process and and not an event. And this statement is about that process. The only difference being that the most important educational process these days is not studying for an MBA at nights and weekends, it’s experimenting with the ideas, tools and technology which universities don’t have in their curriculum yet. Mind you it’s not their fault, the world just happens to be changing too quickly.

While others settle in for a night of TV, I prefer to get busy on projects. Read about technology, write an article, build a new presentation, help a startup, work on an upcoming lecture at Melbourne University, go to a hackers event… but most recently work on the Super Awesome Micro Project with Raul. We skype chat every night and plan our next steps. Not only is it inspiring, but it is building new skill sets which make me anti-fragile. More valued to the market and most importantly differentiated. The problem with traditional education is that most people have it. The problem with corporate experience is that most people have it. The problem with industry knowledge is that it ties us to a location and is probably going to become irrelevant. Technological disruption means we need to be wide in our skill base, not thin and vertical. And the best way to get a wide base of skills is the become a night time projecteer between the hours of 10pm -1am. (or whichever hours work for you). We need to be pyramids, not sky scrapers.

Not only are broad skilled business people now in greater demand, they are much harder to knock over.

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2 thoughts on “10pm till 1am

  1. Great stuff. Once people attend to their daily duties of family, pets etc… Build something. If you really want to make a change in your life and build something – DO IT. Stop talking about it. What’s 4 hours a night anyway? Stop sitting on the couch watching crap TV and do something of value.

    Anyway, that’s what I think anyway.

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