The most important soft skill you'll learn this decade
Is something more and more people keep forgetting how to do.
Do not adjust your TV set (if you get that reference, don’t forget to take your magnesium pills today), this really is Lateral Thinking back in action.
As some of you might noticed, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. I’d love to blame it on time, but it was mostly lack of inspiration - I wanted to bring something new to this format and I didn’t quit find something I liked, so I slowly but surely put it on pause.
Recently, I was reminded that consistency beats creativity on almost any given day, so without too much thought, I just decided to jump back into it.
That being said and given today’s topic, we’ll keep it short and sweet.
As usual, let’s start off with a brain teaser. Shoutout to Lateral Cast, a show very dear to me.
A duelist on his way to a duel buys an item from a clerk. The clerk, knowing where the man was heading, asks: “Isn’t that a bit pessimistic?”.
“Not at all”, replies the man.
What was the item?
As usual, one potential answer at the end.
TL;DR. Too long, didn’t read.
Or, simply put, summarization. You’d think it’s easy, but if you’ve ever had the challenge of summarizing a story or a complicated plot, you quickly realized it takes skill and preparation.
You also need to truly understand the subject in order to efficiently exclude irrelevant information.
In advertising, that’s the role of strategic planners. They weed out information that isn’t relevant to the brief and only keep the essential in. It’s why a brief is called a brief.
A good summary should provide insights, not just a shortened version of the same text.
A great summary provides both insights and context so the reader can apply learnings to their own needs.
Most summaries, including AI ones, don’t provide that. The only way, currently, to get a great summary is to combine human experts with AI summaries. Even then, you need to have a pretty good grasp of connected topics so you really understand how everything fits together.
It’s easy to fall prey to a simple explanation - in business, the “all you need is a great product” line is one of the most misleading rhetorics you can come across. In reality, you need a great product, good distribution, a decent pricing strategy and in most cases enough cash flow to sustain the business. But that’s not an interesting enough answer to go viral. Unfortunately, its success rate is much higher than “just build a great product and people will come”.
That being said, if there’s one soft skill you decide to go all in on, make that skill summarization. To get started, you need to keep three things in mind:
Information selection - when talking to experts on a topic, they will very often deep dive too much on a topic and give you information that’s too specific. You need to learn how to cherry pick what’s relevant to your audience and keep out the rest
Context - no story is devoid of context. When summarizing something, you can often share a lot of information by providing historical nuances and issues surrounding the topic
Insight - the reason most people want summaries is that they want to get to the “interesting” part as fast as possible. An insight is usually an observation that links multiple topics in a unique way. In order to get a true insight, you need to have fundamental knowledge of these topics, otherwise the topics simply won’t connect for you (or your audience)
And finally, an example - if I were to summarize why this skill will be essential in the future, it would look something like this:
We’re already in an age where we are producing more content than ever. AI will accelerate that by 100x.
We no longer find value in information itself, but in how well it is structured and how fast it manages to get its point across.
The challenge is to find information that is factually accurate and also manages to provide insights into why certain things are happening. For the foreseeable future, this skill will be human-driven.
I’ve provided context, shared some insights on why this is relevant and also cherry picked which information I share in order to not make it too complicated. Could I have made it longer? Of course. But for the purpose of this example, this is the perfect length.
Have any questions, tips or tricks on summarization? Do let me know, I want to take this on as a recurring topic, so I’m curious what you think about it.
Answer: The man bought a one way ticket at the train station. It was not a pessimistic purchase because he is expecting to take the return ticket from his dead opponent.