Future You Memo No. 3
But first, some numbers
31% - Baby formula out-of-stock rates soar from 11% in November 2021 to 31% in April. *
40 years - Inflation is at a 40-year high.
60-69 - Average age of CEO, university faculty, and Congressman / Senator.
The Variable Value of Higher Ed
“Higher education is a racket that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class,” said Bill Mahr.
The comedian put a fine point on America’s growing frustration with steady price increases and the perception of a declining return on investment from postsecondary studies.
Exacerbating the frustration has been the gradual increase in degree requirements for jobs that don’t really need them. And as degrees became more expensive and widely sought, they became a weaker proxy for a bundle of skills.
"Higher education is not worth the cost to students anymore." Nearly two-thirds of respondents to a New America survey agreed with this statement, up from just under half in the first such survey last August. Survey respondents think they are paying too much—even the ones that find value in higher education.
Continue reading at Forbes
4 Steps to Helping Choose a Direction
An Impact/Effort matrix is a quick, effective way for individuals and teams to group ideas into four easy-to-recognize quadrants and spotlight clusters of high-priority ideas, making it easier to make a decision and take action.
Step 1: Write each idea on a separate sticky note or virtual whiteboard. Divide your page into four equal quadrants with a horizontal axis (Effort) and a vertical axis (Impact). Label the ends of each axis High and Low.
Step 2: Consider what a High Effort activity looks like—for your team, for this project—in terms of time, money, people, skills, and other resources. In contrast, what does a Low Effort activity look like?
Step 3: Consider what a High Impact activity looks like—for your problem statement and stakeholders—in terms of making the most progress toward a solution. In contrast, what does a Low Impact activity look like?
Step 4: One by one, pick ideas from the bunch and consider:
Is it High or Low Effort?
Is it High or Low Impact?
Read more Overlap Associates
Valuing Your Humanity in a Digital World
To futureproof your job against robots and AI, you should learn how to code, brush up on your math skills and crack open an engineering textbook, right? Wrong. In this surprisingly comforting talk, tech journalist Kevin Roose makes the case that rather than trying to compete with the machines, we should instead focus on what makes us uniquely human. - TED
Kevin Roose is the author of Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. His book took me just 2 hours to read and I’ve recommended it often in the past year.
Till next week…
To understand is to perceive patterns. - Isaiah Berlin