Jeff Bezos’ Question Worth Asking

Jeff Bezos mentioned he often received this question:

“What’s going to change in the next 10 years?”

Bezos, however, said that the more important question is this:

I thought about this as it relates to building a career in consulting, other major companies, or finally making the leap and starting your own business.

Your career or business foundation must be built upon things that do not change. If you are going to invest a lot of time and effort into acquiring a skill, it needs to be something with longevity.

There are certain things that used to be important that are no longer important.

If we look at running your own business, a few years ago, you could grow relatively fast with social media ads. Now, the ads have become extremely hard to run profitably. One of my friends spent $100,000 on Facebook ads before giving up on it.

A few years ago, certain tricks allowed you to sell more books if you are an author. Those tricks since then stopped working.

My father used to do computer programming on paper. How useful is this skill today?

As a consultant, you had to have the skill to navigate your car using a paper map, while driving, to get to your client’s remote factory or other meeting destination. I have so many memories of driving to remote places to meet clients and having to refer to the paper map with “millions” of tiny lines for various roads.

Now we have GPS, and that skill is utterly useless.

What skills can you develop that will still be highly relevant 10 or even 20, 30, 40 years from now?

It’s important to ask yourself these questions because otherwise, you may be developing skills that will become obsolete while you still have a lot of life left to live.

The ability to think, the ability to write, and the ability to speak will still be relevant.

For example, you may not be using Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn in 10 years to give updates on your career achievements or updates for our clients. But there will be some way you can utilize those 3 skills to build your brand.

All the fundamental and advanced problem-solving skills we teach on StrategyTraining.com will still be relevant.

From time to time, I receive messages from new members saying that they will not watch The Consulting Offer, Season 1, with Felix, which we recommend at the early stages of the case interview preparation process, because they say it is too old.

Are those people who in school were asking to only study from a math book written that year, no matter if there was a 100 times better math book that was published a few years ago?

Where is logic there?

Do they think the fundamental problem-solving skills needed for consulting have changed?

They are still the same as they were when Marvin Bower was roaming the halls of McKinsey and Bill Matassoni was leading McKinsey’s key initiatives.

The success of businesses will still be based upon the company’s ability to bring value, if possible exciting new and maybe even unexpected value, for clients.

This will not change.

For example, what is not going to change for Amazon in 10 years is that customers will still want low prices, fast delivery, and a vast selection of products.

So consider for yourself what will not change in 10 years in your field of work. How should this alter what skills you are focusing on developing?