Increasing your skills baseline in 2020 and advance the human race!
Where will your skills finish this year?
As we enter the first full working week of 2020, it is very easy for the good intentions and visions we had on New Year’s day to evaporate amongst all the daily whirlwind tasks.
In the last week we saw reports that Google is working to bring solutions whereby machines can read breast cancer screenings better than humans, and soon we may have more accurate diagnostics that change the life outcomes for many. This is only possible by layering new knowledge on pre-existing knowledge, creating a staircase of capability.
When one of my children were very young, they joined me in my office where I was doing some work. So I sat them in front of the PC, keyboard and mouse, assuming they would happily browse the web as they were already familiar with using the web on the iPad. Next minute I see them swiping on the screen, saying “the web isn’t working”. So this is a clear way of telling me I’m “old school”. Yes, it is true I started using computers before mice were common and did see the magic rodents on Macintosh before using them on Windows 3.1 but my childrens first interaction was with a computer without a mouse!
Learning Ladder
The point is, that our children learn using our knowledge as a baseline, they don’t revert to zero each time and learn everything from scratch. Likewise, the Google solution that can help detect anomalies that may be life threatening, is not based on 2020 knowledge, but rather on an accumulation of knowledge built up over time. Call this evolution of learning, or learning ladder, or just incremental learning, but the point is we all have a responsibility to learn each year, not only for ourselves, but for our families and for the next generation.
No Excuse
The good news is, learning is so accessible now. Whether you are learning how to make the perfect cappuccino art on YouTube, or something more structured such as how to get your company ISO27001 certified on Pluralsight, time doesn’t stand still and neither should our learning. Go ahead and use this link to sign up for a trial of Pluralsight and learn something cool and new, and add to your already existing baseline of knowledge, you will experience the joy of learning, and advancing the human race.