The Autodidact and the Talent Stack
The Autodidact
Autodidact, n. A self-taught person.
What do Frank Lloyd Wright, Batman, Da Vinci, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, Brandi Carlile, and Kató Lomb have in common with each other and with anyone who's ever watched a YouTube video "How to Change/Fix/Make _____?"
The Talent Stack
Scott Adams talks about the Talent Stack in his excellent book, How to Fail at Almost Eerything and Still Win Big.
If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it. Anyway, he talks about how to be successful, career-wise, we all need to have a stack of talents. For example, my talent stack so far includes a lot of biological skills, writing, and some statistics.
Things I want to add to my talent stack
- Animation. I found Pencil2D online, which is a free animation program. Now, to teach myself how to use it.
- Bitcoin mining. Well, maybe not, since the electricity used probably isn't worth it, and I'd have to buy a really powerful computer. But I do need to educate myself on the blockchain and digital currencies in general. I feel I have a large hole in my knowledge regarding the blockchain.
- App development. I have a few wild and crazy ideas of apps, but have no idea how to develop them.
- Video editing. I can make a very basic, very blah video, but don't have the skills to make beautiful, engaging videos.
- More statistics. I know a lot of statistical analyses, but that just means I know how much I don't know!
- Latin. I took one semester in undergrad, but want to learn more because it's a language I love.
- Economic literacy. I want to read Hayek, von Mises, Marx, Bastiat, Sun Tzu, Adam Smith, Orwell, Rothbard, Ron Paul. Whew, that's quite a list!
- Illustration/Art. I have ideas for children's books, and although consider myself a writer, I would at least like to be able to do mock-ups.
- Public Speaking. You'd think I'd be good at this since I was a teacher for 10 years, but I'm actually not a very good public speaker! People say I'm funny and engaging, but I still stumble over my words, lose my train of thought, and can't remember any salient points when on the spot.
- Persuasion. I have been studying cognitive biases, which I believe are the keystone to persuasion. Scott Adams talks a lot about persuasion in his book I plugged above, and this article has a beautiful codex of biases.
- Writing. Yes, I already consider this one of my skills, but I want to hone it. I've been working on it everyday, and feel that steemit has helped me be more consistent in practicing my writing. By the way, my favorite book on writing is Strunk and White's Elements of Style.
If you have any resources in the form of books, YouTube videos, blogs, or steemit posts on these topics, I would be thrilled if you shared them.
All uncredited images taken from Pixabay.
Bitcoin mining at this point is not worth it. Mining some other currency might work though. Bitcoin is so dominated by huge actors you can dedicate a machine in your house and join part of a pool and likely not even come close to covering your electricity cost, and it is slow.
The cool thing here about steem is we are effectively mining it just by using the platform, which is pretty revolutionary.
Yes the last few articles I've read on Bitcoin have basically said what you just did. I still wouldn't mind understanding the theory behind it all.
Steemit does seem quite revolutionary. I sometimes wonder to myself how the state of digital currencies would be if reddit had a similar payout system/currency (or twitter or facebook, to get really hyperbolic).