Although you might have started blogging for passion and not for accolades, you might have lost motivation along the way because you didn’t get enough accolades or even traffic; regardless of what happened or will happen, if you don’t give in and quit, you can be able to develop enough strength to continue blogging for passion—not for accolades—and end up getting more than you ever dreamed of. Blogging for passion will determine the course of your blogging or online publishing work and longevity which will help to establish your online legacy—the end product of your passion! Blogging for passion is what differentiates someone who creates something meaningful and memorable, from someone who just gives up because they weren’t able to get enough or any accolades. (Featured Image Credit: Pixabay.com.)

Blog for Passion, Not for Accolades—Motivation & Environment

Brand yourself by helping people; in due time, any help you give will be reciprocated. Each person’s reputation or brand originates from the attributes, skills or talents they exhibit or radiate over a considerable period of time. A brand is who you are and the parts of yourself or your identity that people remember—the part of yourself that has been revealed to your audience. Have the best interest of people at the back of your mind, and practice giving. Always remember: “give and it shall be given unto you…and running over shall men give into your bosom”. As you continue to give something valuable, you will continue to build trust; with trust comes more opportunities to share your product and brand yourself. (Featured Image Credit: Pixabay.com.)

The Best Way to Brand Yourself is to be Yourself—Motivation & Environment

If blogging is your dream, why won’t you do what it takes to be a blogger? Why won’t you be determined enough to blog, or write, or summon some determination into your fingers, brain, and whole being so that you can really be the blogger you want to be? Although blogging takes time and isn’t easy, it will be worth doing it if you really love it. Anything that requires determination is not for the faint-hearted. And anything that requires determination will require you to “hang in there” while you are creating a brand that resonates. This article discusses what it really takes to be a blogger. (Featured Image Credit: Pixabay.com.)

What is Really Takes to be a Blogger—Motivation & Environment

Laura Mulvey works in the Mosaic editorial team, as part of a communications graduate scheme at Wellcome. She studied International Political Communication, which has made her mildly suspicious of everything.

The lab is quietly bustling with scientists intent on their work. One gestures to an item on her bench – a yellow container, about the size of a novel. It’s almost full to the brim with used plastic pipette tips – the disposable attachments that stop pipettes being cross-contaminated. She stares down at it, despondently. “And this is just from today.”

Laura Mulvey works in the Mosaic editorial team, as part of a communications graduate scheme at Wellcome. She studied International Political Communication, which has made her mildly suspicious of everything.

This article is republished from Mosaic Science under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here

We cannot evade all obstacles. If not today, then certainly in the future, one obstacle or another will appear in direct or indirect opposition to our plans. The obstacles may even threaten the foundation of the things we’ve erected or succeeded in putting in place. Fortunately, we will always have a chance to study obstacles, adapt ourselves to them, and use them to develop higher, become wiser, and even succeed where people have failed. (Featured Image Credit: Pixabay.com.)

Obstacles are Opportunities to Become Better, Stronger, and Successful—Motivation & Environment

Lisa Kay Solomon is the Chair of Transformational Practices and Leadership at Singularity University a global community of smart, passionate, action-oriented leaders.

Alida Draudt and Julia Rose West are not only co-authors, business partners, and best of friends, but most importantly, they have differing points of view—which is ideal for two budding Silicon Valley futurists.

Alida currently works as a futurist and design strategist at Capital One, and Julia is a design strategist and user experience manager at Ancestry.com.

In their recently published book, What the Foresight, they describe the mindset, practices and tools leaders need to explore multiple futures, identify their preferred future, and then take steps to create it. In their view, the future’s complexity requires looking at it from multiple viewpoints and angles.

Their favorite time period to explore is 10 to 15 years out—close enough to the present to draw connections, but far enough out to innovate and challenge assumptions about what is understood to be true today.

The most challenging and maybe most important aspect of foresight is connecting future scenarios—both those we aim for and those we’d rather avoid—to actionable steps which can be taken today.

I recently connected with Alida and Julia. Read on to find out how to think more like a futurist, the connection between foresight and design, and why MadLibs is the secret to seeing the future more clearly and building the world we want.

Lisa Kay Solomon: What specific skills help you think like a futurist?

Alida Draudt: Important skills to hone for futurists are systems thinking, challenging assumptions, and examining levels of zoom.

Futurists cannot think solely about one aspect of a system—we have to think about all the potential causes and effects. Challenging assumptions means breaking from how most people see “the future”—the expected trajectory—to create interesting and stimulating future scenarios. We question present assumptions to see what other possibilities might be out there.

Finally, levels of zoom requires thinking both about the big picture—societal changes, megatrends, movements—as much as about the tactical level. Being able to switch between these two modes of thinking means looking into how the world in 10 years may be generally shaped and then translating that into specific tangible stories to help make it make sense in the present.

Julia Rose West: A futurist needs empathy. This is the ability to understand what motivates humans biologically and sociologically—to identify the pressures, desires, and emotions that affect people and societies. These deeper forces of the human condition are like continental plates. They underlie all possible futures.

Futurists also need to be good researchers and to work well with others. I can’t emphasize the importance and necessity for collaboration enough.

LKS: You both work as futurists and design strategists in your respective companies, Capital One and Ancestry.com. How does the discipline of foresight differ from the discipline of design? How are they similar? 

AD: In both foresight and design, you start by understanding the present landscape, articulating assumptions and values. Once a baseline is created, you go wide, exploring many possible ideas. Then one idea is identified from your exploration, broken down to its components, and prototyped.

Foresight and design differ, however, in two key ways. The first is time period. Design tends to look at around a two-year (plus or minus a year) manufacturing and launch cycle. Foresight is about going out further, looking at uncertainties beyond the typical business cycle and then translating that into the present.

The second difference is in direction of process. Design tends to look from the present forward, articulating consumer needs as they are observed today, and then creating products, offerings, or services which anticipate those needs.

Foresight is the opposite. While still leveraging current trends as an information base, foresight also jumps into the future to articulate how an entire world, industry, or swath of society may behave. Then it works backward to the present to articulate key milestones on the way to that future. In other words, design is inside-out, foresight is outside-in thinking. By blending the two modes, we can integrate foresight and design to create more strategic offerings in the present.

JRW: Both design and foresight aim to solve a problem. Also, great design aims to solve the needs of not only the present but of the future… in some ways it can define the future and the future needs and desires of users.

The biggest difference between design and foresight is the impact of design is almost immediate. With foresight, we are asking our participants to wait for the outcome. It is not the immediate gratification we are familiar with in design.

LKS: Can you share a concrete example of a foresight project you’ve done and how it’s help shape a strategic decision?

JRW: I recently researched a “Future of Family History” talk I gave in Salt Lake City last month. Initially, I had some assumptions about the topic. After I went through the foresight process of research, consulting our executives, and tapping external experts—I realized the four possible futures discovered were far more interesting and exciting than I could have ever envisioned without this rigor.

By having these conversations about the future, changing people’s assumptions, and socializing possible futures, I believe we have effectively changed the future. The next steps are always the most challenging… evaluating the possibilities, selecting a direction, and creating applied steps to get there.

LKS: In your new book, What the Foresight, you present a very accessible overview to the practice and tools of foresight. Can you share one of your favorite techniques in the book and why you think it’s so effective?

AD: We use and love all the tools and techniques included in What the Foresight. It’s difficult to choose just one, but one I love is the Alternative Futures MadLibs.

The Alternative Futures method uniquely provides archetypes for four different futures to explore—growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. We distilled each archetype into a MadLib format to help people explore a world 20 years in the future. The futures are sometimes daunting places to think about, but by using a familiar format like MadLibs, users can imagine wildly different worlds fairly easily. As a technique of exploration, this is one of our favorites.

LKS: What is your hope for the future of foresight? 

AD: We are both working to integrate foresight into our companies, in mindset and practice. This is more necessary now than ever given the rapidity of change in all industries. We hope the foresight mindset is integrated into all levels of our community, from CEOs to elementary school teachers and students.

It will take methodical and intentional action to integrate, but if we can all get better at foresight—particularly from a young age—we will be better able to consider a wide variety of possible futures and design toward optimal futures.

JRW: Foresight takes time and dedication and is a hard sell. Most people have a difficult time seeing the benefits of and exploring the long view.

In America, and especially in business, we love the growth scenario and as long as business is booming, we can hardly imagine a future otherwise. But this is the most important time to begin exploring other possible futures and innovating.

Strategic foresight is not just about waiting 10 years to see the outcome; there are present steps that can be taken for immediate application.

I hope we begin to build regular foresight exploration into our business cycles. Similar to product cycles, once a product is launched we don’t wash our hands of it and say we’re finished, we continue to do releases and updates.

The same should be true for foresight—the updating of possible futures, roadmaps, and screening for unattractive ones on a regular cadence.

Lisa Kay Solomon is the Chair of Transformational Practices and Leadership at Singularity University a global community of smart, passionate, action-oriented leaders.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Raya Bidshahri is the Founder & CEO of Awecademy, an online platform that gives young minds the opportunity to learn, connect and contribute to human progress.

We live in a world of accelerating change. New industries are constantly being born and old ones are becoming obsolete. A report by the World Economic Forum reveals that almost 65 percent of the jobs elementary school students will be doing in the future do not even exist yet. Both the workforce and our knowledge base are rapidly evolving.

Combined with the effects of technological automation on the workforce, this leaves us with a crucial question: What are the skills future generations will need?

Education expert Tony Wagner has spent a lifetime trying to answer this very question. Through investigating the education sector, interviewing industry leaders and studying the global workforce at large, Wagner has identified seven survival skills of the future. These are skills and mindsets young people absolutely need in order to meet their full potential.

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

We spend so much time teaching students how to answer questions that we often neglect to teach them how to ask them. Asking questions—and asking good ones—is a foundation of critical thinking. Before you can solve a problem, you must be able to critically analyze and question what is causing it. This is why critical thinking and problem solving are coupled together.

Wagner notes the workforce today is organized very differently than it was a few years ago. What we are seeing are diverse teams working on specific problems, as opposed to specific specialties. Your manager doesn’t have all the answers and solutions—you have to work to find them.

Above all, this skill set builds the very foundation of innovation. We have to have the ability to question the status quo and criticize it before we can innovate and prescribe an alternative.

2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence

One of the major trends today is the rise of the contingent workforce. In the next five years, non-permanent and remote workers are expected to make up 40 percent of the average company’s total workforce. We are even seeing a greater percentage of full-time employees working on the cloud. Multinational corporations are having their teams of employees collaborate at different offices across the planet.

Technology has allowed work and collaboration to transcend geographical boundaries, and that’s truly exciting. However, collaboration across digital networks and with individuals from radically different backgrounds is something our youth needs to be prepared for. According to a New Horizons report on education, we should see an increasing focus on global online collaboration, where “digital tools are used to support interactions around curricular objectives and promote intercultural understanding.”

Within these contexts, leadership among a team is no longer about commanding with top-down authority, but rather about leading by influence. Ultimately, as Wagner points out, “It’s about how citizens make change today in their local communities—by trying to influence diverse groups and then creating alliances of groups who work together toward a common goal.”

3. Agility and Adaptability

We live in a VUCA (Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. Hence, It’s important to be able to adapt and re-define one’s strategy.

In their book, “Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World,” Richard Paul & Dillion Beach note how traditionally our education and work mindset has been designed for routine and fixed procedure. “We learned how to do something once, and then we did it over and over. Learning meant becoming habituated,” they write. “But what is it to learn to continually re-learn? To be comfortable with perpetual re-learning?”

In the post-industrial era, the impact of technology has meant we have to be agile and adaptive to unpredictable consequences of disruption. We may have to learn skills and mindsets on demand and set aside ones that are no longer required.

4. Initiative and Entrepreneurship

Traditionally, initiative has been something students show in spite of or in addition to their schoolwork. For most students, developing a sense of initiative and entrepreneurial skills has often been part of their extracurricular activities.  With an emphasis on short-term tests and knowledge, most curricula have not been designed to inspire doers and innovators.

Are we teaching our youth to lead? Are we encouraging them to take initiative? Are we empowering them to solve global challenges? Throughout his research, Wagner has found that even in corporate settings, business leaders are struggling to find employees who consistently “seek out new opportunities, ideas and strategies for improvement.”

5. Effective Oral and Written Communication

A study by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills showed that about 89 percent of employer respondents report high school graduate entrants as “deficient” in communication.

Clear communication isn’t just a matter of proper use of language and grammar. In many ways, communicating clearly is an extension of thinking clearly. Can you present your argument persuasively? Can you inspire others with passion? Can you concisely capture the highlights of what you are trying to say? Can you promote yourself or a product?

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson has famously said “Communication is the most important skill any leader can possess.” Like many, he has noted it is a skill that can be learned and consequently used to open many opportunities.

6. Assessing and Analyzing Information

We now live in the information age. Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. As this infographic shows, this would fill 10 million Blu-ray disks.

While our access to information has dramatically increased, so has our access to misinformation. While navigating the digital world, very few students have been taught how to assess the source and evaluate the content of the information they access. Moreover, this information is continuously evolving as we update our knowledge base faster than ever before.

Furthermore, in the age of fake news, an active and informed citizen will have to be able to assess information from many different sources through a critical lens.

7. Curiosity and Imagination

Curiosity is a powerful driver of new knowledge and innovation. It is by channeling a child-like sense of awe and wonder about the world that we can truly imagine something even better. It takes powerful imagination to envision breakthroughs and then go about executing them. It is the reason Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

We consistently spoon-feed students with information instead of empowering them to ask questions and seek answers. Inquisitiveness and thinking outside the box need to be treated with the same level of importance the school system gives to physics or math.

Transforming the Future of Education

There is a stark contrast between these seven survival skills of the future and the focus of education today. Instead of teaching students to answer questions, we should teach them to ask them. Instead of preparing them for college, we should prepare them for life.

Beyond creating better employees, we must aim to create better leaders and innovators.  Doing so will not only radically transform the future of education and the workforce, it will also transform the world we live in.

Raya Bidshahri is the Founder & CEO of Awecademy, an online platform that gives young minds the opportunity to learn, connect and contribute to human progress.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Andrew Taggart is a practical philosopher and entrepreneur. He is a faculty member at the Banff Centre in Canada, where he trains creative leaders, and at Kaospilot in Denmark, where he trains social entrepreneurs.

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else—the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated—would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.

And how, in this world of total work, would people think and sound and act? Everywhere they looked, they would see the pre-employed, employed, post-employed, underemployed and unemployed, and there would be no one uncounted in this census. Everywhere they would laud and love work, wishing each other the very best for a productive day, opening their eyes to tasks and closing them only to sleep. Everywhere an ethos of hard work would be championed as the means by which success is to be achieved, laziness being deemed the gravest sin. Everywhere among content-providers, knowledge-brokers, collaboration architects and heads of new divisions would be heard ceaseless chatter about workflows and deltas, about plans and benchmarks, about scaling up, monetization and growth.

In this world, eating, excreting, resting, having sex, exercising, meditating and commuting—closely monitored and ever-optimized—would all be conducive to good health, which would, in turn, be put in the service of being more and more productive. No one would drink too much, some would microdose on psychedelics to enhance their work performance, and everyone would live indefinitely long. Off in corners, rumors would occasionally circulate about death or suicide from overwork, but such faintly sweet susurrus would rightly be regarded as no more than local manifestations of the spirit of total work, for some even as a praiseworthy way of taking work to its logical limit in ultimate sacrifice. In all corners of the world, therefore, people would act in order to complete total work’s deepest longing: to see itself fully manifest.

This world, it turns out, is not a work of science fiction; it is unmistakably close to our own.

‘Total work’, a term coined by the German philosopher Josef Pieper just after the Second World War in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), is the process by which human beings are transformed into workers and nothing else. By this means, work will ultimately become total, I argue, when it is the centre around which all of human life turns; when everything else is put in its service; when leisure, festivity and play come to resemble and then become work; when there remains no further dimension to life beyond work; when humans fully believe that we were born only to work; and when other ways of life, existing before total work won out, disappear completely from cultural memory.

We are on the verge of total work’s realization. Each day I speak with people for whom work has come to control their lives, making their world into a task, their thoughts an unspoken burden.

For unlike someone devoted to the life of contemplation, a total worker takes herself to be primordially an agent standing before the world, which is construed as an endless set of tasks extending into the indeterminate future. Following this taskification of the world, she sees time as a scarce resource to be used prudently, is always concerned with what is to be done, and is often anxious both about whether this is the right thing to do now and about there always being more to do. Crucially, the attitude of the total worker is not grasped best in cases of overwork, but rather in the everyday way in which he is single-mindedly focused on tasks to be completed, with productivity, effectiveness and efficiency to be enhanced. How? Through the modes of effective planning, skillful prioritizing and timely delegation. The total worker, in brief, is a figure of ceaseless, tensed, busied activity: a figure, whose main affliction is a deep existential restlessness fixated on producing the useful.

What is so disturbing about total work is not just that it causes needless human suffering but also that it eradicates the forms of playful contemplation concerned with our asking, pondering and answering the most basic questions of existence. To see how it causes needless human suffering, consider the illuminating phenomenology of total work as it shows up in the daily awareness of two imaginary conversation partners. There is, to begin with, constant tension, an overarching sense of pressure associated with the thought that there’s something that needs to be done, always something I’m supposed to be doing right now. As the second conversation partner puts it, there is concomitantly the looming question: Is this the best use of my time? Time, an enemy, a scarcity, reveals the agent’s limited powers of action, the pain of harrying, unanswerable opportunity costs.

Together, thoughts of the not yet but supposed to be done, the should have been done already, the could be something more productive I should be doing, and the ever-awaiting next thing to do conspire as enemies to harass the agent who is, by default, always behind in the incomplete now. Secondly, one feels guilt whenever he is not as productive as possible. Guilt, in this case, is an expression of a failure to keep up or keep on top of things, with tasks overflowing because of presumed neglect or relative idleness. Finally, the constant, haranguing impulse to get things done implies that it’s empirically impossible, from within this mode of being, to experience things completely. ‘My being,’ the first man concludes, ‘is an onus,’ which is to say an endless cycle of unsatisfactoriness.

The burden character of total work, then, is defined by ceaseless, restless, agitated activity, anxiety about the future, a sense of life being overwhelming, nagging thoughts about missed opportunities, and guilt connected to the possibility of laziness. Hence, the taskification of the world is correlated with the burden character of total work. In short, total work necessarily causes dukkha, a Buddhist term referring to the unsatisfactory nature of a life filled with suffering.

In addition to causing dukkha, total work bars access to higher levels of reality. For what is lost in the world of total work is art’s revelation of the beautiful, religion’s glimpse of eternity, love’s unalloyed joy, and philosophy’s sense of wonderment. All of these require silence, stillness, a wholehearted willingness to simply apprehend. If meaning, understood as the ludic interaction of finitude and infinity, is precisely what transcends, here and now, the ken of our preoccupations and mundane tasks, enabling us to have a direct experience with what is greater than ourselves, then what is lost in a world of total work is the very possibility of our experiencing meaning. What is lost is seeking why we’re here.

Andrew Taggart is a practical philosopher and entrepreneur. He is a faculty member at the Banff Centre in Canada, where he trains creative leaders, and at Kaospilot in Denmark, where he trains social entrepreneurs.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Raya Bidshahri is the Founder & CEO of Awecademy, an online platform that gives young minds the opportunity to learn, connect and contribute to human progress.

We’ve all read the headlines: the robots are coming, and they will take our jobs. In fact, up to 45 percent of tasks workers perform can be automated using current technology, let alone future forecasts.

However, there is a side of this story that is often overlooked: while emerging technologies will destroy many jobs, they will also create many new ones. In fact, over half of the jobs current middle school students will be doing in the future do not even exist today. Widespread innovation is continuing to give birth to exciting new industries, all of which are sources of new jobs.

More often than not, we have used our imaginations to envision dystopian futures where we submit to robots that leave us feeling jobless and purposeless. But we can also imagine an exciting parallel future in which technology has created even more opportunities for the workforce.

So, what are some of the most exciting emerging jobs and industries?

The Imagination and Creativity Sector

Technological trends are giving rise to what many thought leaders refer to as the “imagination economy.” This is defined as “an economy where intuitive and creative thinking create economic value, after logical and rational thinking have been outsourced to other economies.” Unsurprisingly, humans continue to outdo machines when it comes to innovating and pushing intellectual, imaginative, and creative boundaries, making jobs involving these skills the hardest to automate.

Examples of roles in the creativity sector of the near future include 3D printing fashion designer, VR experience designer, organ designers, and augmented reality architects. These jobs will be driven by the rise of novel creative tools such as 3D printing and virtual reality, among existing digital tools.

What is notable about such roles is that at their very core, they are multidisciplinary. Many of them are examples of STEAM skills in which the ‘A’ stands for the arts, in its broadest definition (including liberal and fine arts along with humanities). For instance, a VR experience designer will have to combine expertise from both the arts and technology to create immersive VR worlds. Hence, it is also a strong case for bringing more STEAM learning into traditional education.

Neuroscience, Enhancement, and Bioengineering

As our capacity for genetic engineering and neuro-engineering advances, demand for jobs in the sector will grow. The latest season of Black Mirror explored a world where people have the power to upload their consciousness onto machines, merge their minds with other minds, record others’ memories, and even track what others are thinking, feeling, and doing.

Many innovators and researchers are pushing to make such capabilities possible.

Early last year, Elon Musk unveiled Neuralink, a company whose goal is to merge the human mind with AI through a “neural lace.” We’ve already connected two brains via the internet, allowing one brain to communicate with another. Various research teams have been able to develop mechanisms for “reading minds” or reconstructing memories of individuals via devices. We’re also seeing continuous advancements in gene therapy and genetic engineering. The list goes on.

Examples of roles in this sector include thought hacker, neuro-implant technician, neuro-augmentation specialists, and neuro-robotic engineers.

Technology Ethics, Philosophy, and Policy

Technology is an immensely powerful tool, and one that gives rise to a myriad of novel social, ethical, and moral issues. By itself, technology is not inherently good or evil; it all comes down to how we choose to use it as a society.

As we see the emergence of increasingly immersive tech, such as virtual reality, brain-machine implants, and the Internet of Things, there will be a growing demand for professionals who can ask the right questions about these new tools and set appropriate ethical guidelines for a wide range of complex scenarios. This can occur at a company level, government level, or even at a personal level, such as by providing guidance to individuals looking for ethical consultation.

Examples of roles under this emerging area include cognitive enhancement consultant, genetic modification ethicist, digital detective, privacy guardian, technology law-maker, and much more. This is an area that will be of utmost importance to our species if we are to ensure that we optimize the benefits of technology and minimize its harm.

Sustainable Future and Renewable Energy

Some of the biggest challenges in today’s world also serve as the biggest market opportunities. As climate change becomes a growing threat to our species, we are faced with significant decisions. Many cities are integrating multiple solutions that involve sustainable infrastructure, cleaner transportation, and renewable energy sources.

As a result, the growing demand for renewable energy and clean solutions has already created many jobs, with more to come. For instance, the solar and wind industries were the primary engines of job creation (PDF) in the US renewable energy sector, which employed around 777,000 people in 2016.

Examples of roles to come include smart city planner, clean grid architect, zero-consumption home designer, energy-use consultant, and many more.

Future of Transportation

Many fear that the rise of autonomous vehicles will put millions of people out of jobs, and this is a fair concern. Yet, while innovation in the transportation sector will displace many jobs, the rise of innovative vehicles such as self-driving cars, electrics cars, drones, and hyperloop are representative of new sectors with demand for many novel positions.

Examples of roles in this area include construction teams, hyperloop common center operations, traffic flow analyzers, and driverless operating system engineers.

Forecasting even further into the future, another exciting demand will be in the area of interplanetary space pilots. Just recently, Virgin Galactic’s passenger-carrying spaceship VSS Unity completed its seventh unpowered glider test flight. SpaceX has also announced an Interplanetary Transport System. In fact, as humanity strives to become an interplanetary—and possibly an intergalactic species—this opens up a world of exciting jobs and opportunities that we’ve only ever seen in science fiction.

Moving Towards Jobs With Purpose and Meaning

The broad examples outlined above are among many emerging jobs and industries. Now more than ever, we need to equip our young minds with the 21st-century survival skills that will prepare them for such roles in an ever-changing workforce.

One of the most powerful implications of current trends is that “work” will become more meaningful as we are left to perform jobs requiring more creativity, intellectual pursuits, and human interaction, potentially leading many of us happier than we are today.

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute found that the hardest activities to automate in the short term are those involving expertise in decision-making, planning, human interaction, or creative work. Unsurprisingly, humans continue to outdo machines when it comes to innovating and pushing intellectual and creative boundaries. These kinds of roles also tend to be more exciting and fulfilling.

Ultimately, our goal should be to create a society where work is motivated by passion, creativity, and a desire to contribute to the future of our species. It is exciting that most of these predicted jobs of the future align with this goal. After all, the purpose of “work” should be to contribute to ongoing personal or human progress, whether technological, intellectual, or creative.

Raya Bidshahri is the Founder & CEO of Awecademy, an online platform that gives young minds the opportunity to learn, connect and contribute to human progress.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.