When I started university, Google was barely known (everybody used Yahoo!). There was no YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and of course no Instagram or TikTok. There were no iPhones or iPads. Mobile phones barely had any access to the Internet; only the most advanced ones had WAP (If you've never heard of it, no worries, no one ever used it!) Laptops were as thick as bricks. Very few people knew what WiFi even was. In Italy, where I lived, most people didn’t even have Internet access at home. Social media was a weird, mysterious place. Mobile apps were uncharted territory. The iPod had just launched, and most people, including myself, went around carrying huge, sketchy CD players.
A few years later, when I was about to graduate, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and the research area referred to as AI were absolutely niche. I majored in Artificial Intelligence, but if anyone had told me autonomous vehicles would become a real thing in the next decade, I’d definitely have called them nuts. So would most "experts" in the area.
As recently as just five years ago, Large Language Models and GPTs were completely unknown to the vast majority of people, and it remained so until OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. To this day, what these models are capable of doing is still totally surprising, even for very influential professors and researchers in the field. Nobody saw it coming.
If this trend tells us anything, it’s that we have absolutely no clue what the world is going to look like in the next 5 to 10 years.
So the question is: how can we stay relevant in such a rapidly evolving space?
Filtering
First of all, realise and make peace with the fact that it’s humanly impossible (and even silly, in a way) to try and stay up-to-date with every single technology trend that comes out. You will miss out on some of them, that’s for sure. Secondly, if your plan is to shift from a technical career to more of a managerial position, your focus should switch from a depth-first approach to a breadth-first approach. You have to become quick at grasping the impact, implications, and main pros and cons of technology innovations without necessarily having to deep dive into every single one of them. You have to be aggressive at filtering out what is not relevant to you. Noise is typically very high in this space, and your time is finite. Look for those very few topics you actually want to explore further because you see some potential.
Reasoning by First Principles
You have a couple of very useful tools in your arsenal that can help you with that preliminary filtering. The most powerful one is first principles reasoning. No matter how complicated a new technology might look or feel, breaking it down into basic concepts and fundamental principles can help grasp the underlying complexity, implications, and areas of application.
Make Smart Questions (…and Listen Carefully)
The second tool in your arsenal is questions. Ask questions and, most importantly, carefully listen to the answers. Who should you be asking questions to? Successful people surround themselves with talented individuals. Having the right people around is fundamental to staying relevant. As a leader, be sure to build a team of passionate individuals who are willing to share their knowledge and experience.
Lifelong Learning
Once you’ve got an understanding of the most relevant trends in your space, don’t refrain from doing deep dives into specific subjects. This is where having a technical background becomes a differentiating factor. This is where, especially in IT, having a background in STEM comes in handy. Having skills in maths, physics, engineering, and programming becomes a tremendous accelerator. You basically fly at 3x speed through technical stuff. This allows you to explore topics with the limited time you have. So my suggestion is: if you have a technical background, never fail to exercise that mental muscle. Try and practice your maths and engineering skills regularly. Do programming once in a while, make experiments, and build PoCs. That is crucial to staying relevant.
Finally, in a world in accelerated motion, the only thing that stays constant is change. So, more than ever before, the only way to stay relevant is to embrace the lifelong learning culture.
See you along the way!
Have a nice week! 😊👋
Cheers,
Fusco.