Here's how to future-proof yourself so you can stay relevant in the next 10 years:
Become Permissionless
You live in the most permissionless time in history.
You future-proof yourself when you just do things without permission. You pursue something you deeply care about, learn new skills, build the project, package it up, try to sell it, and attract a tight knit tribe of people who share your energy.
You don't future-proof yourself by sticking with a skill set that was an asset then but is a liability now. A liability that allows someone else to determine your value, cap your income, and control your attention for most of your day.
You can learn any skill faster than anyone in the past.
You can find the knowledge you need to do almost anything.
You can do more as one person with less time, work, and money than an entire business could do in the past.
You don't need a degree.
You don't need a certification.
You need to be able to get results.
This is called permissionless leverage.
And it blows my mind that people still opt for the conventional path.
They'll go through 4 years of university, stack up miles of debt, and lock themselves into one area of study not because they have the experience to make that choice, but because it promises to give them a stable income rather than experimenting with their own path, error correcting for 1-2 years, and cultivating a mindset and skillset that allows them to earn as much as they want.
But now…
Now the power lies in the individual.
Now future success boils down to skill, agency, critical thinking, and a healthy relationship with fear, failure, and embarrassment.
And if you believe otherwise, read the last sentence over again, because a lack of belief in yourself signals that you have none of the above.
But that can change:
Become A Creator
The only real safety net in today's world is a body of work that can't be ignored.
Find something you deeply care about.
Obsess over it. Dissect it incessantly. Become an expert without care for credentials and degrees.
Make it your life's work.
Do it all in public.
From a spiritual perspective:
A creator is not a "personal brand."
A creator is the essence of your being.
Humans are tool builders. Deep generalists. Unlike animals who thrive in a specific niche, like a lion in the Savannah, humans create jackets for the cold and fans for the heat. Nature isn't the all-caring and peaceful entity we pin it as. It's brutal, dangerous, and doesn't care about your feelings. Through our desire to create, we have transformed the earth into a more hospitable place thanks to our accepted role as creator.
If happiness—or enjoyment—is the combination of progress being made and contribution to something greater than yourself, and both are accomplished by solving problems, for yourself and others, and problems are solved through creativity, then the only logical and fundamental aim for your future is to embody creativity by becoming a creator.
– Purpose & Profit
In other words, you find the intersection of purpose and profit by creating solutions to problems you deem interesting, passing on those solutions to contribute to the progress of humanity, and repeating the process when the next set of more complex problems arise.
From a cultural perspective:
Creators form the new meaning, education, and economic systems.
People scoff at "information products" when there has never been a more favorable way to pursue a low-cost interest-based education from people who have (mostly) practiced what they preach. You don't have to be Marcus Aurelius to have access to the best mathematician in the realm to learn from anymore. You can simply search on YouTube.
Trust isn't decreasing in religious institutions and formal education because the masses are "waking up," it's decreasing because there are more options.
Individuals can now find creators who have a similar worldview they can best learn from.
You aren't limited to the belief system of their parents.
You aren't limited to the education a static curriculum can provide.
You aren't limited to a job or career you hate because you have access to the resources that allow you to pursue your calling.
From a practical perspective:
Every business is a media business now.
From newspaper to radio to TV, you have access to the internet for fucks sake.
You don't need permission to write code, write tweets, write newsletters, write a book, record videos, record podcasts, reach out to potential clients, offer a digital freelance service, build a digital product, or pursue your life's work. You don't need permission to create and earn a living doing what you care about.
To start, create a storyline of the person you can help most.
Where they are now, where they want to be, and what the journey looks like to go from point A to point B. That's what attracts an audience: the potential for transformation. The mindset change, the skills they need to acquire, and steps they need to take. You are a clarity creator.
That's your brand mission – to help as many people as possible reach point B.
Your product is a streamlined system that helps them get from point A to point B. This can take the form of freelancing, coaching, or a digital product like a book, paid newsletter on Substack, course, cohort, small vibe-coded app, or anything else you've seen a creator sell.
Your content (that attracts the right people to you and your product) are the lessons, insights, opinions, and observations that people at point A resonate with.
Focus on what and why in your content.
Focus on how in your product.
If you don't know who you want to create for or what you want to create:
Create for yourself.
Because if everyone were to help the past version of themselves, knowing that everyone is slightly unique, and people evolve over time, there would be no such thing as saturation in the creator economy.
Become A Beginner
The most important thing you can do when the world is changing rapidly is learn.
But most people stop learning after graduation, and even then, one could argue that they didn't learn a thing, because learning is discovery, not memorization.
If you want to future-proof yourself, you must be willing to change what you do and how you do it.
You aren't passionate about a specific skill.
You aren't passionate about writing, design, or the rest.
And if you fall for the trap that those are your passions, you will go through a world of hurt when how we do those things change, especially as AI acceleration accelerates.
You are passionate about creation.
The act of turning dirt into gold with the creative ability of your mind.
You are passionate about how that creation helps another expand their sense of self.
Traditional education and hyperspecialization is a way to make people subservient to the dominant paradigm / system. Study the generalized principles of nature and be a deep generalist.
– Daniel Schmachtenberger
Whether this was intentional or not, it is an observable fact:
Schools were created to enslave the brightest minds by promising the prestige of specialization so they remained narrow minded and didn't overthrow the true rulers.
A Royal Historian—or well educated employee of the past—may be perceived by the nation as someone who is smart and valuable, but the pirates—high-agency entrepreneurs of the past—understood many things like geography, celestial navigation, the crew on their ship, the ship itself, economics, history, and science as those were the necessary tools to succeed in trade in dominion.
The rulers of the land were powerful, yes (moreso than the specialized historian, at least), but only as powerful as the resources the pirates allowed them to have for the price they determined.
To future-proof yourself, become a pirate of the digital landscape.
Learn how to learn.
Learn how to think.
Learn how to earn.
Learn how to lead.
Do all of the above through the act of creation.
Write, market, sell, design, build, and do everything in your power to cultivate and actualize a vision you deeply care about.
– Dan