In this episode, we discuss the importance of making your skils a compliment to technology and your environment.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe where I combine financial planning with self-development coaching for Latino professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about the importance of making technology and the current work environment a compliment to your skills, not a substitute. I got this idea from economics. In economics, you learn how different items are affected by the price of another item. Jelly is a compliment of peanut butter because if you buy peanut butter you’re also likely to buy jelly because of the two complement each other and make an even better sandwich when the two are put together. You could also say that bread is a compliment of peanut butter and jelly. So the compliment chain can go pretty deep.
A substitute happens when the price changes where you’re either getting a more luxury item because you make more money and you can afford it or a productivity change happens where getting that item is not as bad. The same thing happens when you’re making less money and need to downgrade or something because more expensive. A good example is candles and light bulbs. Back in the day you literately had to work all day in order to enjoy a candle 300 years ago. And once electricity became more and more efficient and cheaper, eventually people switch to light bulbs for lighting their homes. They are substitutes since light bulbs are easier to manage and require less work and you don’t need to light 10 candles every time you want some light out when it is dark.
So when you think of yourself and your skills, you need to make your skill complementary to technological advances and your work environment, don’t be a substitute for those things. I work as a financial planner and what I have to know today is much different than what I had to know 5, 10, 15, 20, and 30 years ago. The internet and technology have changed the profession of financial planning tremendously. Back in the day, you could have paid a hundred dollars to do a trade on the stock market and you had to buy a lot at one time. Now with apps like robin hood, you can buy one stock without any transaction cost. There are some trade-offs with Robin Hood compared to other brokerage platforms, but compared to 30 years ago, the overall landscape is a lot better.
Back in the day before the internet, you had to go to a broker to get information about different mutual funds, stocks, and bonds but now you can get all that information on the internet if you know what you’re doing. So as a financial planner, I had to upgrade my skills in terms of what I know now. I can’t just know how investment works, I also have to know how life insurance works, how long term care insurance works, disability insurance, how different retirement plans work, how use debt as a tool to run a business, how trusts work, how taxes work, and a bunch of other stuff.
So I can use that information along with the technology that is available to make me a much better financial advisor that can make better recommendations to my clients. If I didn’t upgrade my skills or refused to learn new skills, then I wouldn’t have lasted in the profession very long. I’m able to use technology that is available to run my own practice by doing everything virtually, which would have been impossible ten years ago and definitely 20 years ago. I’m able to make the technology a compliment to my skills so that together, we are more productive.
Think of yourself as a cyborg, you’re using technology to make yourself better and stronger as a worker. This requires us to be continuous students. We should spend a portion of every day, learning how we can leverage technology to make us more efficient at work to a point. You can definitely overdo technology because if you have to keep track of 20 different technologies, then you’re just spreading yourself too thin. You need to know which things you should get better at and which ones you should delegate to other people.
The world is moving at a fast pace but you don’t need to know how to computer program to survive this new future, you just need to learn how to manage your resources and have experts do what they are good at. Right now, computers can’t take over the human connection that I have. They can’t console someone when they lose a loved one, they can get excited when someone tells you that they are pregnant, they can’t help you get over your emotional ties to money without seeming cold, they can’t tell you a joke to make you smile without being prompted.
There are a lot of things that we can offer as humans that technology can’t offer, but we have to make sure we know emotional intelligence, know how to communicate, how to deal with conflict, and how to manage ourselves and others in order to be a complement to technology, instead of a substitute.
I hear stories of people trying to hang on to the past but are not doing much to change their future. This can be hard because what people learned 30 years ago is so much different than what is taught today. Someone who went to high school in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s had typewriters where you couldn’t make the same mistakes as you could do with a computer. Plus you could work somewhere and not really be around computers that much and you were fine until things weren’t fine anymore. If you look at the textile industry, a lot of those jobs went overseas because it was cheaper for business, which then made it cheaper for the consumer. I buy $5 t-shirts from the GAP and the quality is much better then what I would have gotten as a kid. So if you were a textile worker, then you became a substitute.
There is a term in economics called creative destruction, where we have technological advances that change industries where they are not as labor-intensive. There are still manufacturing jobs in America but they require you to be a lot more technical than back in the day on an assembly line. What to do with those workers is outside my pay grade right now, but what I’m trying to do for myself is not end up in a situation like that. I can’t do anything to change their outcome but what I can do is try to warn others so they don’t have the same fate.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode, to summarize it, work hard to be a complementary to your environment and not a substitute. If you can be a compliment to your environment, you can be more productive, have a higher salary, and more job security. If you’re a substitute, then you will lose all that security and might have to depend on disability social security, which is getting harder and harder for folks to get on. So start working on yourself and you also have to remember that 85% of your success will come from soft skills and not your technical skills, so your ability to communicate, the ability to handle conflict, your ability to manage folks, and your ability to listen. So if you had to work on something, I would focus on those skills first.
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