How to future-proof yourself (in 6-12 months)
Time is running out to start learning these 2 skills.
There are 2 skills you must start developing before it is too late.
No matter your current situation, life problems, or excuses.
I say this because I’ve started to notice something.
People my age are starting to panic (I’m 22 btw).
They’re all saying the same thing.
Most college degrees are now worthless.
The risk of choosing one specific field to become highly specialized in, is now perhaps the biggest (and most expensive) risk any 18 year old has ever had to make in history.
Because the uncertainty over what, and therefore who, AI will replace... it is staggering.
The only two skills worth your time in the next 6-12 months are learning how to learn and learning how to write.
Now.
I do not mean highlighting books or taking notes.
Not even building a second brain (yeah yeah come at me).
Definitely not writing the type of essays you were told to write in school.
If any of that standard advice worked, we would all be future-proofing ourselves with that advice... and you wouldn’t have clicked on this newsletter.
There is now zero demand for average.
Because things have changed.
The multitude of AI apps and slop-content that will be forgotten faster, and in greater lump-sums at a time, is increasing.
Faster than we can make sense of it.
But those are just the career-level consequences that most people only seem to be worried about at the minute.
There is something more fundamental at stake.
Every time you outsource your thinking to a tool that doesn’t actually know anything, you get a little less human. And the less human you are, the more replaceable you become.
Not because AI is smarter than you, because heck, it might be smarter than all of us.
The real problem is this - you are far more replaceable, when you stop using the only thing AI cannot replicate.
Your unique knowledge.
Your experience and your perspective.
Your ability to synthesize and connect profound ideas like no one else can.
The understanding you have of being you.
In this newsletter, I want to give you 5 profound ideas to think about.
To show you exactly why most of what you call learning isn’t actually learning at all, and why writing by hand will become the most valuable and sought-after human skill in response to the new wave of infinite average.
Then I want to give you the two free resources that will actually change that.
And I’ve created them in a way so that all you have to do with them is take action.
Idea I - Most of what you call learning isn’t learning
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. - Epictetus
If your behaviour has not changed, then you haven’t learned anything.
I know this is going to annoy a certain crowd of people.
Is highlighting books not an example of active reading? What about taking tons of notes? What about the hours spent on YouTube watching tutorial after tutorial until 3am?
Sorry to burst your bubble but none of this means you are learning.
Rather, it gives you the feeling of learning.
There is a reason why this feels so productive.
Most people optimize their lives for the feeling of something, and wonder why nothing in their life ever changes. Because they avoid the one thing that actually drives change which is discomfort.
What is that discomfort, really?
It’s encoding. That’s what it is.
Think about how early morning sunlight connects to your circadian rhythm, which connects to your nervous system, which connects to your emotional regulation, which connects to how you show up to your work and your family every single day. That chain isn’t memorized line by line. It can’t be. You understand the relationships between each part and then you can’t unlearn it, because it directly impacts how you live.
Learning is thinking.
That is it, so I’ll see you in next week’s Profound Ideas newsletter...
But seriously.
It is the type of thinking that makes connections automatically. Between what you already know and what you are trying to understand. Between concepts that don’t seem related. Between an idea from a philosophy book and a decision you have to make tomorrow. If you aren’t making those connections, you aren’t thinking. And if you aren’t thinking, you aren’t learning. And if you aren’t learning, you are not changing.
You don’t read a book to consume information. You read so you can think. You study so you can think. You learn a new skill so you can think, about applying your current skills in a more effective way compared to last week.
Why does thinking matter at all?
If you are not encoding information that means you have nothing new inside your brain to retrieve. If you have nothing new to retrieve, you have nothing new to think about. If you have nothing new to think about, you cannot change your behaviour... and we are back to the first line of this section defining what real learning looks like, beneath the profound Epictetus quote.
Learning is always made out to be a consumption problem.
It is not.
Really, it is a thinking problem.
And now with AI being able to generate infinite, perfect-sounding information on demand - mostly in the form of long-form content (just call it long-form writing, the word content sounds cringe to me).
Now, that feeling of learning is completely free and endlessly available. And in greater amount if you choose a $20 dollar monthly subscription to ChatGPT.
Most people won’t have a clue that it’s going on, or that it is happening to them.
Soon, feeling educated and being capable will have nothing to do with each other, and most people will not notice.
So if consumption is NOT what learning is, and the feeling of being productive does not always equal progress, what the hell is then?
That is what the next section is about.
Idea II - Learning is making connections
There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. - David Deutsch
There is nothing that would make you more competent and therefore dangerous than the ability to explain something.
I know, it sounds nuts.
What about an explanation that makes it so powerful?
It is far from something like a simple communication tool, which it is. Explanations are how the brain forges unbreakable connections between what you already know and what you are trying to understand.
Explanations are how we think, which is important to understand.
Let me give you the two types of explanations, which will make this look a lot clearer:
Good explanations are hard to vary. They hold up against scrutiny, stress-testing, and even questioning by Socrates himself.
Bad explanations collapse the moment someone leans against them. Like a wall made out of marshmallows.
Most of what people have stored inside their memory as ‘knowledge’ is bad explanations that have been never stress-tested.
Imagine showing up to a party and none of your friends are there.
Your explanation in response to that experience might be “I have to hide until my friends arrive” or “I get to make new friends until my other friends arrive.” See how an explanation can determine how you perceive the world around you, and therefore every outcome of your life?
Here is what’s even crazier.
Explanations are free.
Explanations require no tools.
Explanations don’t cost anything.
You don’t need a degree or permission to create one.
Heck, you’re building an explanation of what I am saying right now as you are reading this! Isn’t that crazy?
Your speed of learning will always be determined by how quickly you can forge connections.
It has never been about how much you can consume, as we talked about in our last section.
The actual solution is to create explanations, because that is how you manifest those connections you have made.
It is such a cliche, but if you can’t explain it to a child you don’t understand it well enough.
So how does this connect to the big picture?
This is why AI cannot learn in any meaningful sense. It generates and predicts.
It does not explain from experience.
It has no real behaviour to change.
And it has no life that its explanations must hold up against.
So if learning is thinking, and thinking is making connections, and if connections are forged through explanations, what now?
How do you start building your own explanations in the most efficient, high-leverage way possible?
We’ve gone over our first future-proof skill, which is learning.
Now let’s talk about writing.
Idea III - You need to start writing
Writing is how you test whether you actually know something or just feel like you do.
I don’t like how a lot of people treat writing as a way of tracking and storing what you have learned.
That is backwards to me, for too many reasons that I have already spoken about tons in the past.
Most people would rather believe in false illusions than take on the courage needed to face reality as it is.
Truth, responsibility, all that yadada that I can talk about another day.
I cannot think of a more dangerous way to be living than by being blinded by the illusion of understanding.
Why is this so damn dangerous?
Well, you can only feel it. You can’t really see it.
You feel competent.
You feel informed.
And the minute someone asks you to explain something on paper... you’re cooked.
This is what writing forces.
You just cannot hide vague thinking behind the feeling of understanding when you are staring at a blank page. Not even Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT and giving it your ideas to organize them for you.
Writing by hand, analog-style especially, it makes every gap and weakness in your explanations become visible. Writing is a stress-test. Back to the Deutsch quote we mentioned earlier, writing is how you find out whether your ideas, your beliefs, your arguments, and your thinking is either hard to vary, or built like a wall of marshmallows.
Why?
Because writing forces you to produce an encoded explanation by retrieving it from your memory.
If there is nothing to retrieve, the gaps will show.
If there is a lack of sense-making or organization of information, the quality of your encoding will show.
Every single time you write something you are doing something extremely high-leverage.
Yes, writing is incredibly time intensive.
Especially when teaching yourself in the beginning (since you are basically teaching yourself how to think).
And it doesn’t matter if you are writing just so you can build a body of work online that people can explore, or to build an audience (which is a bit of a dirty word online, but remember, an audience is a byproduct of high-quality writing, and that is the bottom line).
Every time you write an idea into existence, that is feedback.
A sentence.
A cluster of sentences or a paragraph.
An essay section like this one.
A whole Profound Ideas newsletter.
It’s feedback of your thinking. Your unique web of knowledge being manifested.
Like, c’mon, that’s just crazy.
It is literally a piece of you being manifested or built into existence. Most things people call dull or normal are actually incredible profound when you think about them...
Write no matter what. Write every day. For an audience or for yourself. It doesn’t matter. Just write. If not, you will never learn how profound your ideas truly are.
You can see that writing is the ultimate skill for exposing where your thinking has gaps that need filling, and ideas that need stress-testing.
So to recap, or to synthesize some profound ideas in real-time here, we could say that writing is the mechanism of learning, and not so much the reward of it (while it still is).
It is how the first two sections of this newsletter become real in your own life rather than just some profound ideas you consumed and forgot within a week... because you never acted on them.
Which means, the question is no longer whether you should write.
It is how.
Idea IV - How to become irreplaceable
Stop calling yourself a generalist, start calling yourself a synthesist.
There is a difference between knowing a lot of things, versus seeing how everything connects.
Generalists know a lot.
But synthesists can see the invisible patterns and connections between all domains and disciplines of knowledge. Connections most people skip over, or cannot see at all.
And although the distinction between “generalist” and “synthesist” might seem subtle, they are both entirely different ways of moving through the world.
The synthesist is the only identity worth building right now.
If anything, it is essential.
Why?
The world has been producing nothing but specialists at a mass scale for the last 200 years. We are beginning to suffer the consequences.
Trying to get along with people you disagree with is a dead skill.
Nobody can talk to each other. Nobody can see the whole big picture. Business-minded people can’t get along with artists. Economists can’t speak to biologists. Philosophers can’t speak to engineers.
Everyone is extraordinarily deep in one tunnel, one skill, one domain of mastery... and blind to all the rest.
Here is what this means:
The most valuable person in any room, will be the person who can walk between every tunnel.
The person who can connect what the neuroscientist knows.... to what the Stoic philosopher figured out 2000 years ago... to what that one experience taught them when they were 19... the person who reads widely, thinks carefully, and writes it all down until the connections become visible (to themselves first, and then to share those insights with the world).
That person cannot be replicated.
How could they?
AI actually makes this idea even more true.
AI can retrieve information across every field of knowledge faster than any human alive. It can summarize, compare, and generate connections between ideas at a scale that should terrify you if you think information retrieval is your edge. Think pure memorization, a skill which AI has made as dead as a Dodo bird.
AI can’t synthesize from a life it has never lived.
It has no experience of failing publicly and rebuilding. It has no version of itself that was told something that fucked it up at age 12 and spent a decade living in a high-cortisol state of mind since. It has no skin in the game. The connections it makes are statistical, based on data. AI has information, not knowledge. You have knowledge, not information. Those are not the same thing, and they never will be.
Your synthesis is unreplaceable because it comes from a life only you have lived.
Your learn to synthesize ideas through learning itself. And writing is what makes that process permanent and public, to either yourself or a group of readers. Every piece of writing is a node in your unique web of knowledge made visible. Every section of every newsletter, article, or essay is a connection that could only have been made by you, in this order, from this one life.
Do that for 6-12 months are you will have a body of work, a body that represents your mind and thinking, that no AI and no specialist can touch.
This is what future-proof actually means. Not a skill that survives long enough before the next disruption, because who knows what that will be. No one.
I am talking about a person who cannot be substituted. Because there is no substitute for a mind that has learned how to learn, and a body of work that only one person on earth could have built.
So how do you build both of those things, deliberately, starting now?
Idea V - How to future-proof yourself
The argument I have made in this newsletter, that writing is how you find out what you actually think, it happened to me while I wrote this.
What you have just read is proof.
I chose my topic last Saturday, and went on a walk and wrote down everything I could think of.
Then, I wrote one section per day... and that was it.
I would get all my ideas the day before while on walks, so sitting down and writing was just about writing, not idea generation.
I also went into this with almost too basic of an outline. But the walks and the ideas I wrote outside of my morning writing time were what fleshed it out across an entire week.
It meant instead of having a finalized outline within 2 days, I could build it out section by section across a week (once I had my key points outlined at least).
If this Profound Ideas newsletter has changed how you think about learning, or how you think about writing, or even made you realize for the first time that the two are the same thing, that is why I do this, and that means a lot to me. Genuinely.
Let’s get you doing something now.
It is easy to sit around learning all day. It’s doing and living your life that’s the hard part. And there is no better place to be than under pressure from a challenge you chose to take on.
Here is what I recommend you do to get you started in the right direction, before I give you 2 free resources to help you with implementing these principles:
Write before you feel ready. The page is where you get ready. Not the course, not the research phase, not the second brain you’ve been building for three months. The page.
2-4 needle-moving tasks per day. 15-90 minutes each. Ordered from highest creative demand to lowest. This is not a productivity hack. It is how you protect the cognitive energy that both learning and writing require. Everything else fits around those tasks or it does not fit at all.
One piece of writing per week minimum. About something you are genuinely trying to understand, not something you already know. An essay, a newsletter, a long-form post. It doesn’t matter. Write no matter what. Make sure you genuinely feel interested about your topic, too. It has to be a problem you care about solving, because if not, you are shooting yourself in the foot from the very start.
Create the thing you want to see exist in the world. Solve your own problems first. Then share that solution. That is the only ethical way to build something worth building, and the only way to build something that lasts and truly helps.
Now.
Where do you put all of this?
I would say Substack.
It is a platform that prioritizes long-form thinking, and the people on here are lovely.
You could also try X. Even YouTube (read your writing to a camera).
Just pick one.
Publish something before the end of this week.
I have a lot of messages from you guys I am yet to respond to, but feel free to send me on what you have written! My apologies for being selfish, I avoid my phone like it’s the plague for the majority of my day. If I can’t think to a high quality, then my ideas will suffer, and so will my writing and creations for you guys.
The 2 free resources to help you out with this:
If you want a structured way to turn all of this into a 30-day project-based learning plan helping you achieve one needle-moving outcome per day - download that here.
If you want to learn how to write, download this free mini-course that teaches how I write my weekly newsletter.
Check out my Guide To Profound Reading and my Profound Self-Education Guide if you already feel comfortable with writing, but struggle with the learning side of things.
Learn to think. Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to identify problems. Learn to set greater goals. Learn how to learn. Learn anything and everything that allows your mind to expand and adapt to any situation.
That is how you become irreplaceable.
You absolute legend.
- Craig :)
“There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.”
“Writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.”
- Paul Graham
Okay this is actually proof of your argument. I’ve had these thoughts for so long but you articulated it in a way I couldn’t. Writing really does something to your brain!