Turning Skills Into Dumb Luck
Skills and Mindset for the Times of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
by
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Every day, we digest different inputs, like air or water, process them internally, and output the processed intake. Ideas are one of these “emissions,” we become attached to them because our ideas represent us.
Just imagine seeing yourself in a mirror and having no idea whom you see or what you ‘see.’ Your eyes see, but your mind can’t explain anything to you; it can tell you that this is you.
Or imagine you discover that your parents are not yours. Even though the news doesn’t affect your physical existence, ‘a part of you’ now goes missing because some ideas you had about yourself are now lost.
We don’t like throwing out our ideas because we don’t like having empty slots. We need to fill them, so we need to find new ideas since they deserve to be a part of our identity and then accept them. However, this is a lot of work, and humans don’t like putting in extra effort.
If we are the ones who come up with an idea that doesn’t fit, the situation can be more difficult because many of us treat them like our babies.
Love of our own ideas causes major problems, even when our attachment to them is comical or tragic. Remember pictures of mass executions? The victims were called “liberals” or “conservatives,” but they had one thing in common: they sacrificed their lives for their ideas. Even a threat to our lives is often less important than our dedication to ideas.
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About the Book
Life can start feeling like a game in which only the lucky ones score the most points and are entitled to succeed.
That’s not the case. In the game of life, your skills can be converted into luck.
Based on over 20 years of research and experience, Turning Skills into Dumb Luck will be a miracle drug for you. One that, as in the movie Limitless, allows you to take actions and calculate outcomes at an unnatural speed.
This book will teach you how to build and leverage three distinct skillsets for success:
Winning career battles
Anticipating and avoiding mistakes
Building and capitalizing on resilience & adaptability
In place of clichés like “work hard,” “follow your passions” and “think outside the box,” this book will offer pragmatic, actionable roadmaps to supercharge yourself for promotions, clean your path from conflicts, and decipher and leverage seemingly cryptic messages from upper management. And remaining a good person through it all.
About the Author
Simon Vine started working at the age of eighteen in the erstwhile USSR for a state-owned project company and is now working as a venture capitalist involved in various philanthropic projects. Between these two stages, the author had a long and successful career working with different American, French, Swiss, and Russian financial institutions, which led him to be appointed as the head of an investment bank. Putting it another way, in his entire career, he marched through different political systems, national habits, subindustries, and levels of management and endured a host of challenges and struggles, particularly with the need to adopt new strategies during the transition. However, the most difficult challenge was to learn from mistakes and come to terms with failures; to become a better version of himself by bringing a much-needed change. This process, as a rule, takes time, and that is why many people don’t have it in them to refine these skills. They don’t change themselves, and indulge in stagnation. Simon Vine believes the change in one’s personality is sparked through various natural and circumstantial means. The insights have been arranged beautifully in the book, which makes its tone zesty and simple to understand rather than philosophical in nature. Vine’s life and career show how bookish values of decency and hard work are treated in the workplace as weaknesses. As experienced by the author firsthand, all his major promotions, along with his reputation, came from handling tough challenges, reinventing himself, and taking huge risks. In this book, therefore, the author has chosen to share his pivotal moments and his deep understanding of how to advance in the workplace with less effort and fewer risks.