61. The multi-passionate advantage in an AI world

As someone who's spent her whole life feeling like a misfit for having too many interests and not enough specialization, I'm inviting you to reconsider everything you've been told about what makes you valuable — because the world is about to need your kind of brain more than ever.

Listen to hear more about:

• What a $380 billion AI company actually looks for when they hire 
• Why the strange, non-linear path that made you feel like you don't fit anywhere might be the exact thing that makes you an industry inventor
• The difference between knowledge that machines can replicate and the kind of thinking that people can feel 
• How to stop hiding your multidisciplinary brain and start building a body of work before the world catches up to you

If you've ever been told you're too much, too eclectic, too hard to pin down — this episode is your permission slip to stop shrinking and start treating those cross-pollinating connections as exactly what they are: the raw material for a future that hasn't been invented yet.

Transcript

Hello my friends. You are listening to Liberatory Business and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

You know, when I scroll online, lately I have been seeing things that are very strange and also very encouraging, and it's sent me down a whole thought spiral. What I've been seeing is people saying that some of the most valuable skills that are gonna be needed in the future aren't from STEM fields. It's not necessarily science or technology or engineering or math. It's actually the humanities.

And that made me stop, because you know what I am? I'm a humanities person. I love the humanities. I'm a humanities major. I've literally never heard anyone say the world needs more humanities-trained people except for humanities professors who need students to register for their classes and humanities-focused colleges who want students to enroll, you know?

But these things weren't being said by professors or university departments. They were being said by big tech executives, business leaders.

What a $380 billion AI company actually looks for

For example, Daniela Amodei is the co-founder and president of Anthropic — one of the most important AI companies in the world right now. They make Claude, they're valued at $380 billion at the time of me recording this. I just checked, and Daniela Amodei's degree is in English literature. Not computer science, not engineering — literature.

And she was just on ABC News a few weeks ago saying — and I'm paraphrasing — what she thinks is that studying the humanities is gonna become more important than ever, not less, because AI models are already really good at STEM. What they're not good at is understanding what makes us human, understanding what consciousness is, understanding history, understanding critical thinking, the ability to interact skillfully and ethically with other people.

Anthropic has a philosopher named Amanda Askell. She has a PhD in philosophy from NYU and her job is essentially to teach their AI how to be ethical, how to use reason well, how to have good judgment. They have another team member, Jackson Kernion, whose PhD is in philosophy of mind from Berkeley. His dissertation was about the nature of consciousness. There are people with humanities doctorates doing some of the most consequential work in technology right now.

And when Daniela Amodei was asked what Anthropic actually looks for when they hire, she didn't say coding skills. She said, we're looking for great communicators. We're looking for people with excellent emotional intelligence. We're looking for people who are kind, compassionate, curious, and want to help others. And this is a $380 billion AI company.

The brain you actually cultivated

I know it's just one company, but the more I thought about it, the more I kind of began to well up with pride over the brain that I did cultivate. How the nature of work has changed, even just in my lifetime of 40 years. And I could see with sudden clarity how so much of what they were saying is true. All the ways that I personally felt a little inadequate or like a misfit, like the odd one out — that's exactly what's prepared me so well for this time in history.

Because here's what happens to me constantly. I'll have a thought, I'll share it online, and I often get so many kind responses from people who tell me that my ideas are thought-provoking, original, and just different. Not recycled from the same old stuff online. And I think that's exactly why so many people come into my world, stay, buy from me, tell their friends about me.

And the fact is that that doesn't happen because I'm so special or because I'm so much smarter than everybody else. I'm really not. But I'm observing the same trend across different kinds of people who are like me. And there's something that we have in common, and that is having a multidisciplinary, cross-pollinating brain that draws from multiple areas of study.

So just as an example, let me tell you a little bit about where I'm coming from. Today I'm a business coach, but my background made me a little bit different from what the mold of that is supposed to look like. For one thing, I was brought up in a very Confucian, East Asian culture. From day one of my life, it's shaped how I think about relationships, authority, duty, community. That's the earliest layer of formation that I received as a child.

I spent a part of my childhood and adolescence in the US, and in high school I fell in love with philosophy. My starter drug was Plato and Aristotle, and that led me into continental philosophy. I almost went to grad school for theology and didn't end up staying for theology school. The graduate school that I actually did complete was in social science. I have published epidemiology research. I am a history buff. I'm a geopolitics buff. I've written articles on international relations for major media outlets. I have read literature from every continent. I have studied thinkers from every continent. I also come from a long line of Buddhist teachers, and that's something that has been a reverberating echo in my life and my family conversations.

So all of that was my intellectual formation before I started coaching for one day. Before I started having thoughts about business from the first day. If there's a reason that my writing and ideas are original and innovative, that's why — because I am writing from an incredibly rich soil of decades of wide-ranging study outside of "business" and "personal development." Because let's face it, so many people in these worlds are drawing from the same five books from the same ten podcasts.

Why specialized knowledge isn't the edge it used to be

Specialized knowledge used to be a competitive edge — you know, knowing a lot about one thing, having expertise in one thing. But not anymore, or at least not in the same way. Because anybody can feed an AI a prompt for a marketing plan, a financial model, a piece of code. That knowledge isn't worth what it used to be. The value of that just went down a lot.

Now the value lives in the ability to think across different domains, to draw connections between fields that seem like they have nothing to do with each other.

I can read a geopolitical shift and see what changes that might mean for your brand positioning, because I know enough history to recognize patterns. I can see when certain patterns of international trade are going to change consumer sentiment in a specific region well before the conventional marketing experts catch up. I can pull from my understanding of Buddhist philosophy — that I arrived at through decades of study — to come up with a different framework on how to approach the question of uncertainty in entrepreneurship.

And that kind of ability is going to be increasingly at a premium, because look — machines, like AI, can try to replicate this kind of thinking, but they ultimately can't do it in a convincing way. The person on the receiving end can feel when an idea was forged through genuine intellectual and emotional struggle. A machine can produce something that looks like the same insight, but people are gonna sense that something is missing.

The future belongs to the people who don't fit the mold

And another reason why those of us who have never quite fit in an existing mold are gonna be at a greater advantage in the future is that the future is going to be dominated by industries that have not even been invented yet.

The World Economic Forum has estimated that 65% of children entering primary school today are gonna end up working in job types that don't currently exist. Not slightly different versions of today's jobs, but entirely new categories of work that people can't even imagine yet. And if you look even just a little bit backwards, this has already been happening over and over. Ten years ago, there were no AI ethicists. Just 20 years ago, the words "social media manager" was a string of words that didn't make any sense to anybody. The entire influencer economy, which is now a multi-billion dollar industry, did not exist until very recently.

So here's the question — who is gonna invent these new industries? It's not the specialist.

Invention requires you to see a connection between two things that seem to have no relationship to each other. It requires you to pull from philosophy and economics and cultural observation and technology and history and art and music and spirituality and synthesize that into something that no one's ever synthesized before. That is what the multidisciplinary mind does.

Again, if you're anything like me, you probably spent a lot of your life feeling like you don't fit in anywhere. You've probably been told you're too much in this domain and not enough in another domain. Too many interests, too hard to pin down. Everyone's telling you to niche down, pick a lane, and you just can't.

And that feeling of not fitting in might be a sign that you are an industry inventor — or at least one of the leaders of brand new industries. You don't fit into existing categories because you're not meant for them. You are meant to create new ones. You are built for the future.

Okay, so what do I actually do with this?

Okay, so that all sounds great, Simone, but what do I actually do with this awareness? Well, I do have a few suggestions. I want you to leave this episode feeling energized and clear and ready to take on the world, because let me tell you, the world needs you.

Stop apologizing for your breadth. Stop trying to make yourself narrower so you'll become more legible to a market that itself is about to be completely reorganized. You don't have to contort yourself to fit a mold that is about to become obsolete. The market is gonna come to you. It's already starting to. But look, when multidisciplinary thinking becomes valued — and that becomes something that the entire world already agrees on — you better be there with a track record of how you think. A body of work that teaches the world, "Hey, this is what multidisciplinary thinking looks like, and here's what mine is." That day is coming. You better be ready. So stop apologizing for who you are and start owning it.

Start documenting your connections. And I mean this very practically. When you have one of those moments — you know what I'm talking about — you're reading about one thing, and suddenly you see its relationship to something totally different. Write it down. Don't sit on it. Don't second-guess yourself. Don't tell yourself, "Oh, that doesn't make sense to anybody else." These moments of connection are the gifts of your intellect, the gifts of your creativity. They're the blessings that you bestow upon the rest of humanity. That is how your ancestors are using your mind to improve the world. They're the raw material for new industries, new frameworks, new offerings that are going to come out of your mind. So start treating them like they're valuable, because they are.

Find your people. One of the hardest things about being a multidisciplinary associative thinker in a specialist-dominated world is the loneliness. I have felt that a lot in the past, but I'm here to tell you, you are not doomed to a life of loneliness. But it is easier to feel doomed to a life of loneliness when you're trying to fit into rooms that weren't built for you.

So stop trying to go into those rooms. Stop looking inside those rooms from the outside with longing, yearning for their approval and inclusion. Instead, find the people who light up when you make a connection between different things that don't seem to be related. People who get excited when you explain a marketing problem through the lens of environmental engineering. People who immediately see why a passage that you love from Mark Twain is relevant to their product launch. People who send you a voice note at two in the morning because they realize that something from their theology degree applies to their client's rebrand. And these people are like, "Oh my God, you're so brilliant. I've never thought about it that way. That is so valuable." Instead of looking at you like you have three heads. Those people exist. I know because those people are in my world, they're listening to me. They're in your world too, and they are waiting for you to start owning your ideas.

Start building in public. Share those connections that you see. Write about the intersections that shouldn't go together in theory. Publish the thoughts that feel too eclectic, too "all over the place," too unusual, too hard to categorize. Share it when it feels like no one around you gets it. Share it even if you sometimes get misunderstood. Share it when it feels like there is no point and you are just shouting into the void. Share it. Share it, and never stop sharing it — because there are people who will find you, but only if you've been consistently building a body of work publicly because you believe in your ideas before anyone else did. Because the only way to build a critical mass of supporters is by showing up with consistency, even when it felt like there was no point, no fanfare. People who need your brain can't find you if you're hiding it. And let me tell you right now — being inconsistent is a form of hiding. No hiding.

And finally, trust yourself. Trust the way you've been formed. Trust the path that led you here. Whatever strange, non-linear, impossible-to-explain path brought you here wasn't random. There was no detour. Everything that you've been through has been preparing you for the unique impact the world is waiting for.

So I hope you're feeling energized to believe in yourself. Go out there and share the blessings of your mind with the world, because nothing short of that is going to be enough to answer the brand new challenges and complexities that the coming world is going to bring us.

Alright, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.