Whether you’re a fresh graduate, looking for a job, in mid-career, or are contemplating your performance in life or retirement—and whether it’s time to make that big move, or you’re just interested in making your current situation a little bit better—”Architecting Your Future” is your dynamic road map to building a joyful, fulfilling life that always holds the possibility of surprise, and a growth plan for your life to live and achieve it.
Now is the best time to architect your future. “Future of Work” is here. It will be driven by technology and technology causes economic transformation, which creates exponential growth opportunities. For around 1000 years, the economy relied on land production for human sustenance and growth. The first steam engines appeared in the 18th century, in three centuries of economic growth and innovation, machines eliminated many farming jobs while creating new jobs and opportunities. Rapid growth and significant innovation created for the special century, 1870–1970, machine economy, which created the next generation of a chain reaction of innovation and new job opportunities. Since 1970 to till date, globalization and technological innovation created “glorious decades of computer and communications era”. Today’s conversations began about the “Digital Disruption”, “Digipreneur” and “Future of work”. The computer chips and communication speed expended the services sector. Emerging economies such as China took over manufacturing and India took over the services sector. Global technology is favouring people who work with their technical skills, minds and collaborate, rewarding those who work with their hearts but not the uneducated or unskilled. Globalization with technology progressing together and are transforming the world.
“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction for architecting your future.”
Architecting your future is both art and science—a short-term goal is science; a long-term goal is art and the most interesting part is that we need to apply both in the digital era.
Too early to stagnate—a recent survey done in Singapore by the Ministry of Manpower finds an astonishing discovery. Survey finds that the career is getting stagnated at age of 48—this is 14 years earlier than statutory retirement age of 62. Too young to lead—the earliest age to get a leadership role is at age of 34–36. There are 2 billion people are under the age of 20 in the year 2020. This situation gives a significant opportunity for everyone to architect their future.
“The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.”
Larry Lessig, MIT Researcher
Now, we need to decide: how we want to architect and design our life to live it better. This is not the finish line that matter but starting the journey, early. An architect always look for an opportunity to the defined purpose with a clear vision and with strong reasons!
Assessment: As an architect, you need to assess and discover; before, you are plotting the future, and you are visualizing, realizing, and knowing and loving yourself, to be ready for the future. Constructing, motivating, and playing are sources of energy. Hope, you will apply this new way of continued learning and discovering. Build the talent stack platform within you, set priorities for your purpose, set goals, and grow in your journey to make your life more meaningful. Now you have a method and a framework of “UEDIC” Understanding, Exploring, Developing, Implementing, and Confirming to learn the skills that you will need in order to think, design, prototype, and achieve your future goals. All of the goals that you set for yourself should make you think—“What person must I become to accomplish my goal? And what truly matters to me in order to have “4Self-CDEF” an ongoing adventure with architecting my future?”
“TSP”- Talent stack platform: I am sure these methods, tools, and insights will help you continue to evolve, grow, and expand your horizontal skills and vertical development to support your “TSP”—talent stack platform. With every step of your defining process, you are crafting a path that will keep sparking your visualization and inspiring you to be motivated to have a brighter future and a more meaningful life-scale, career-scale and dream-scale. You can sense, feel, and think so much more. Technology continues to disrupt industries and organizations and provides an opportunity as well as forcing our careers to get disrupted. TSP is the way to continue developing multiple talents to be ahead personally and professionally.
“Digipreneur”- Digital with Entrepreneur mindset and “Globtech”: Global technologist radically changing the future of work and the way we architect our future. Global freelancer skilled workers from Poland, USA, India, China, Philippines and Thailand performing white-collar jobs in domains such as accounting, programming, services, support, and are fractions of a European or US workforce. Freelance works are exploding and along with the non-English speaking country. The organization “upwork.com” have an enrolled freelancer count of 14 million skilled workers across 100 nations and growing exponentially.
Dual Deep Competency: You have to become more creative to learn in the future. A creative life is what an architect likes. A creative life is a life of new beginnings, and as you explore your visualization and digital entrepreneur skills, you will unlock new achievements and learning capabilities, and become a creative digital person. Creativity becomes the stuff in your life so that you can compete with anyone and plan an alternative to be a successor. It is how you have to think. It is what you see in front of you, what you have visualized in your mind, and what you have seen in your heart. It is how you express your feelings. It is how you make your life decisions.
It is what you see in front of you, what you have visualized in your mind, and what you have seen in your heart.
4SELF-CDEF: Your meaningful life-scale and your purpose are shaped by your values and balanced by self-confidence with determination. Further self-realization, reflection, hunger to do well in your dream-scale enhances the shape. These pull you through the toughest moments, big or small, in the digital era.
ELP: Energy link with performance—more energy, more money and more competency lead to more success. Energy is always considered as a source of inputs to provide positive thinking, feeling and behaviour to build a habit to support output as a performance. Physiology with emotion—electromagnetic motion in your physical body produce as a positive result to maintain your leadership energy.
Fast and Curious: IBM researcher has predicted that the world’s information will be doubling in every 24 hours in the near future. Fast and curious people learn faster to develop skills and competency. Be curious to get ahead in the digital era. To build your inner circle for transforming your future recommend with “DC-OT-OS-OF-2L”—dual competency, one technology, one specialty, one function, and two languages for architecting your future in the digital era.
Circle of Influence: Your circle of influencer and your associations will lead to a better future. Either you get influenced, or let others get influenced by you. The positive association always pay you back and give you a positive result. Two major laws to apply. First is “life is like the seasons; it changes. If you want to get the benefits, you need to change”. Second law is the law of harvesting: “you always reap what you sow… you always reap more than what you sow”. So, investing holistically either in the circle of influence or developing your digital skills and mindset both gives significant values and return.
Seven disruptive technologies for transformative future: These technologies are the Internet of things, and the Internet of everything (IOT/IOE); artificial intelligence and machine intelligence; 3D printing; AR/VR; cybersecurity and security; blockchain; and 5G. You need to apply your methodology of “UEDIC”—Understanding, Exploring, Developing, Implementing, and Confirming—to move forward and architect your future by becoming a digipreneur in the digital era.
“AYF”- Architecting Your Future Manifesto: Hopefully, you have realized just how simple architecting your future and achieving your goals can be if you set your mind to have a successful future. Setting goals properly does not have to be the most difficult thing that you can do; because, it can be very stimulating. If you build your manifesto, challenge yourself right, and set time aside to set your goals, you can and will complete them successfully. You have learned that procrastination is your enemy when you are trying to achieve something in your life, and you have learned that goals can be set for just about every aspect of your life, including family, relationships, finances, career, health/fitness, etc. Why should you waste your time dreaming and hoping for a better life when you can go and get one right now? You do not need to know anything other than what you have learned here, on your way to a better future. Get yourself on the right track, and start setting your goals today.
In summary, we have above 10 Outlier habits which make us a highly effective way of “Architecting our Future”. We have learned which can be applied every day to make our life extraordinary and become a high performer in the digital era.