To Languish or Not to Languish

Who do I believe?  Those that forecast a gulf of a gap between lost jobs and new jobs developing due to technologies that will automate white collar as well as blue collar jobs, or the odd economist whose model (crystal ball) points to a net gain in jobs due to new technologies.

What do my own eyes tell me about a world where only parasites offer personal branding as our one and only salvation, and it is if we entertain the rise of a dog-eat-dog society that makes the words "rat race" look like a benevolent memory of the good old days.

Yes, I know that some people have dined very well off the plate of personal branding and have had their cake and ate it, even if in retrospective some of us do not see them as paragons of virtue and I say "some" because there are always those with their head up some place else.

I have never said that personal branding does not work because I have provided three examples of men whose personal brands helped them accomplish what they really had set out to do and only one of them ended up in prison.  What I am saying is that personal branding merely sets us up for a dog-eat-dog world, so we cannot be critical of these people if survival is what blinds us.

The world of work does require far more competent leaders than the world of personal branding ends up providing and to that degree we can either resort to continuing defining what is bullshit in this world or we can start asking much more fundamental questions regarding how we personally will navigate the potential of living in an economy where a personal brand is insufficient, where we will have jobs that are well below our capability and languish in sub-optimal choices as policy makers figure out how to make up the difference. 

Policy makers are not rolling out initiatives to improve our personal brand, they are seriously thinking through offering basic income as a means of bridging the gap between new jobs that may be slow to rise, while existing jobs are being extinguished through automation and machine learning.

I am not against personal brand as a philosophy and talking heads who market their philosophy to us does help them make money, but it does not teach us how to navigate the new world of work.  Only people who have made their money on selling their personal brand care for it and that is easy to do,  just Google image someone who advocates personal brand and one will find a narcissistic like page of photo's of that person and not a person like Eric Schmidt who knew what he was doing and knew how to partner with the brightest minds on this planet. 

We are not Eric Schmidt, nor are we Jack Ma or whatever great name that sits at the top of any organization.  The future of work is my business in the long-term for the simple reason that the two most important focal points of my vision for the road ahead needs me to learn and get better and smarter at long-term thinking.  I don't have to negate short-term thinking in order to embrace long-term thinking but I can push aside short-term thinkers and those who keep our mindsets in the short-term - and we all know when we are living in short-term thinking environments, we tend to use the knee-reflex of describing things in terms of "BS". 

I have provided three examples of the BS that personal branding has produced, but to get our own head out of the sand, all we have to do is is envisage the future for own work - and that future requires us to think.  I am not responsible for other people not thinking, my response is to engage thinking and learning about the nature of work, so that I am not blind sided by the future and languish or continue to languish.