Recent posts on this site have focused on the idea that the future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. Many economists believe that America’s (if not the entire globe’s) long-term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human capital. We have been developing the notion that the wide tool box is an approach that students can take to learning skills and developing a mind-set that broadens their perspective for perceiving new opportunities regardless of the field or career that they pursue. The wide tool box approach to preparing oneself provides for a wide-ranging apprenticeship in your twenties that expands possibilities as you get older. This approach offers a way to avoid the rigid, singular path of digesting a college major and attempting to replicate the career paths of prior generations. Paraphrasing Louis Pasteur’s famous quote “Chance favors a prepared mind;” I would state that perceiving opportunity in a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment favors a prepared mind.      

A recent graduate of Yale who majored in engineering is emblematic of an engineer with a wide tool box skill-set. Although he planned to major in engineering he took two art classes during his freshman year. He concentrated in mechanical engineering because, at the time, he thought that it was the broadest engineering sub-field. It would allow him to create bio-medical apparatus and electrical devices. He viewed mechanical engineering as the core of engineering. It would allow him to acquire electrical engineering knowledge and material science knowledge, which would enable him to understand how things worked and why things break.

As a part of his self-directed apprenticeship he was a member of Yale’s chapter of Design for America (“DFA”). DFA is a way for people with different backgrounds to learn design thinking; and design solutions to problems in the New Haven community. In DFA he learned how to define a problem, and how to design a contextualized solution. This type of experiential learning is hard to get from the typical classroom.

Currently, he is a co-founder of a start-up that is developing a bio-medical device which is being field tested in clinical trials. Interestingly, he is the only member of the three person team that majored in engineering. The other co-founders majored in political science and art, further demonstrating how the early adopters of the wide tool box approach are using their skill-set. Another aspect of the wide tool box is a hunger for knowledge, a curiosity that drives learning on one’s own. He is self-teaching himself coding so that his team has the in-house coding expertise which is needed to design the analytics interface that they want to offer doctors and their patients who use the bio-medical device.

If you think of your career as a building that will be built-out in multiple phases, as the mechanical engineer discussed above does, the wide tool box contains the instruments that you will need to construct a solid foundation for your career and your intellectual life. An alternative way to think about this process is that during college, and perhaps in high school, you are creating a self-directed apprenticeship. In Mastery, Robert Greene offers the following guidance about acquiring the wide tool box skill-set:

The model goes like this: You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery and making things that are of the highest quality. You avoid the trap of following one set career path, you are not sure where this will all lead, but you are taking full advantage of the openness of information, all of the knowledge about skills at our disposal.

In the vein of a hacker, “You are the programmer of this wide-ranging apprenticeship, within the loose constraints of your personal interests,” Greene wrote. In addition to the resources available at the university, the Internet can be seen as one big MOOC (Massive Open Outline Course). The intent is to establish oneself as an active learner rather than as a passive learner: you are proactively assembling abstract, as well as experiential knowledge. And through the filter of the wide tool box you are able to synthesize information and data, in order to make connections, recognize trends and uncover opportunities that are not visible to others.