Dear Friend,

WHAT'S YOUR RANGE?

The Pension Letter That Made Me Laugh

Last year I turned 50 and a few weeks ago, I received a letter from my state insurance company with a pension prediction. Not something I was expecting to receive so young, or so I thought. It was a strange feeling because I recalled when I was young and looking at people aged 50+ and thinking: "ancient fossils." And here I am, officially considered an ancient fossil by my country and yet, I don't feel senior at all. I feel exactly like I did at 25, with some exceptions; my body gets tired quicker, it does what bodies do; the exterior is a bit warn out and I'm fine with that. I don't want to look 25. I've been there and done that.

What I still have and what hasn't dated and didn't come with an expiry date printed is my sense of integrity, my drive, my love for animals and people, sense of adventure, loving sweets and a lot of other things, and not to forget, my ever-expanding skillset.

Where I Learned Not to Lean on the Walls

I never really relied on external structures to hold me up, no employers, no institution, no state. To be honest, I never really fully trusted them either, I guess a clear legacy of a child growing up in communism or another failed state. The intended support feels nice to have, but I never built my sense of security on top of them. I have always known that these things can come and go depending on factors beyond my control.

I learned that from my father. He lived through World War II as a child, and what he passed down to me, without ever sitting me down to "teach" it in any formal way, was that: rely on your brain and your skills, not a structure outside of you. Those can be taken away from you at any moment, but not what you have within you.

I think a good psychiatrist might call it a generational trauma response, and they might not be wrong. But honestly, who doesn't have some version of that running quietly in the background? We all inherited something from our parents and grandparents, shaped by whatever they had to survive. Mine just happened to look like an unusually durable form of self-reliance, and I guess a distrust of authorities. Just to mention a few.

You Don't Need To Be a Top Specialist

For years, the advice I have been hearing was to pick a lane and go deep. Specialise. Become the expert in one narrow thing, and that expertise would be your security. I may have even believed it for a while, but got bored with it quickly. So instead, I kept building range, different domains: languages, human rights, humanitarian law, yoga, coaching, gardening, vegan cooking, house maintenance, safeguarding, investigations, financial literacy, to name a few I use almost daily. Not because I had to, but because I was curious and because I wanted to be self-reliant. And I know you have a wide range of them too!

I recently came across something that put language to what I'd been living by instinct. It turns out this isn't just my private philosophy, it's something a number of serious books on success and performance have independently arrived at. The clearest version of it is in David Epstein's (a different Epstein) Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World. His argument, backed by research across sports, science, art, and business, is that in most fields especially the complex, unpredictable ones, generalists outperform specialists, not despite their breadth, but because of it.

The author opens the book with two athletes. Tiger Woods had a golf club in his hands almost before he could walk, pushed early into total specialisation. Roger Federer, on the other hand, swam, skied, skateboarded, played half a dozen sports before he ever committed to tennis. Woods became the story everyone tells about early mastery. Federer's path, the wider, slower, more meandering one is actually closer to how most elite performers get there, once you look past the most famous outliers.

So, What's Your Range?

Maybe you have had the same attitude towards building your skillset, or maybe you have become a top specialist in one domain, or maybe you have deliberately cultivated some skills whilst others were created by necessity. And I bet you have so many skills that you are taking for granted or don't even consider skills. Looking into the future, anyone can guess that job markets already now require flexibility and agility. Some labour experts now project that today's young people will go through as many as 7 different employers in their working lives. Whatever the motivation, having a wide range of skillsets will better prepare you for the future to come.

With love and gratitude, Viki 🌿

If you'd like an honest look at your own range, what skills you're already carrying, where the gaps are, and how well-equipped you really are for what's coming, get in touch. I'd love to help you map them out.