“That Bulgarian understands everything…”

is a famous Bulgarian proverb

In our latitude, we like to fix our cars ourselves. We can paint and drill. Leveling walls with cement plaster is not a difficult challenge, as long as you have the time. We act like doctors and pharmacists and are responsible for diagnoses. You don't need a mobile app with exercises to train like a Marine.

Women don't know how to change a light bulb or manage a budget. They don't need practice to cook tastier than the menu in a 5-star restaurant. While they keep everything in order in the house and raise children, build careers, learn new technologies and organize mass family events. And they are always beautiful.

We all understand football and politics, military strategy, civil engineering, and urban planning.

We are not waiting for someone to change our economic climate. We are building our own prosperity without worrying about whether it is in white or gray. We are not interested in what the Economic Council or the World Organization dictates. And the topic of global warming somehow cannot excite us that much... we have experienced both the flood and the ice age and a bunch of other cataclysms.

Some time ago I heard that some people were worried about whether the poles of the globe would flip and were stocking up on canned goods and hand grenades.

We cheerfully mock the dark side of our special existence - we say that the Bulgarian "is most careful not to catch a cold and not to get sick", as if the American or the Chinese are not careful...

"The Bulgarian does not value his work" and "The wolf has a thick neck because he does his work himself" are sentences carved on a stone surface in our vast life.

Ivan Hadzhiyski conducted a study nearly 100 years ago on our modest thriftiness. This trait does not motivate us in any particular way to develop a wide range of specific knowledge. Where, in order to save, where, in order not to be disappointed, we face the unknown, we are ready to learn and quickly grasp.

While we enjoy making fun of this our superpower, the perception of something different, more modern, more Western, if you will, never really sticks in our national character. And that's okay.

Go tell your business investors, your project sponsor, or your CEO that you need more money for additional professional services. The counter question is always, “What did you do first before you asked for approval for more expenses?”

This is where, Bulgarian, you start to stand out. You didn't wait for someone else to complete the task for you or show you the solution. You spontaneously discovered the ways, you saw the risks, you invested the time. You watched, you read, you understood. You came in on time and on budget. You nailed the result. You delivered the job. Because your door is thick and you bravely accepted to play the roles that are absent from your job description.

In the article we will go into depth on the topics:

• Where exactly is the traditional education system broken?

• The one skill to develop to tackle any project

• The method for learning new things that's so effective it almost seems illegal

The New Era of the Generalist

The public 'education system' has instilled in most of us the belief that you will live well if you specialize. Only for years to pass and you remain disappointed, unhappy, and tied to this system.

Recently, the topic of the Generalist has been gaining popularity on the web. It doesn't matter if you are a Project Manager, an entrepreneur, or a person who has just started to realize himself, the need to acquire comprehensive knowledge is inevitable.

A significant increase in freelance professions in recent years has motivated all people to take control of their lives - not to start another 9-to-5 job, but in the hope that they will have multiplied added value.

Sam Altman and his friends made a bet on who would be the first solo billionaire entrepreneur (true story). And no wonder - we can already see how AI tools bring a 10x increase in speed and capabilities.

Since ancient times, technology has always created professions and eliminated professions. The need for a set of skills and knowledge is also ancient. Folklore is like that because it is always relevant - the ancient proverb "A Bulgarian understands everything" is more necessary than ever to cope in the new economy.

In one of his books, Robert Heinlein (I don't know if the man has Bulgarian roots) says it in the best possible way:

In Bulgaria, we love to get excited about whether a man is good in the kitchen and to mock the Bulgarian's deep knowledge of football strategy. If a man has to be able to slaughter a pig and plan an invasion, that means, yes - we can cook and there is nothing wrong with proudly displaying our ancient military instincts in a civilized way by analyzing the team why the national football team beats Luxembourg by 300 points.

The era of global communism (or workers' socialism), which began in 1871 in Germany and was dangerously cemented in 1889 with the introduction of the pension system, is long over. It's time to stop living in the past and eradicate the delusion that a narrow profession will provide you with enough money, good health, and a three-room apartment.

It was easy in school - you had clearly defined instructions on what to do. And why should we judge the diverse knowledge that is offered to us - even though most of us don't remember it, it has developed our way of thinking.

The problem is the embedded slave consciousness.

And apparently everyone is susceptible to this without exception, otherwise God would not have touched on the topic of freedom in the Bible from the very beginning. In the first book - Genesis - you are created, you receive instructions, you have your ups and downs, sometimes you prosper and sometimes you fight for survival. Immediately after that, in the second book - Exodus - you become cramped (Egypt from Hebrew - "Mizraim" = cramped place). Indeed, God led the Israelites to Egypt to save them from hunger - there is paid work (as slaves). But even before sending them, he had prophesied that the time would come to lead them out of there. And he did - he had to lead them for 40 years through the desert, so that their slave consciousness would die. When this happened, the promised land came - a place of abundance, where all they had to do was step forward and conquer.

A quote from Devon Ericksen, a man with 20 years of experience as a software engineer who recently changed careers and became a writer:

It couldn't have sounded better...

Somehow, we can reduce the concept of the generalist to ONE SINGLE SKILL to explore.

What is the one skill you need to succeed

It is shocking to think that the term is missing in Bulgarian.

And it is so fundamental to success in any field. Moreover, awareness of this necessary skill will also contribute to success in different social scopes - personal, team, organizational and societal success.

I mean, in the West they have a term, while we not only don't learn it in school, we don't even know what to call it. So while it's starting to become part of the culture and collective consciousness there, here in Bulgaria we'll have to implement it.

Nothing.

Agency

• the ability to decide what direction to pursue and proactively take action to pursue it.

• In Bulgarian, we can give it interpretations such as independence, initiative, and ability to act, but that's all we get.

According to the English dictionary, agency means:

• The capacity to act independently and make free choices -

• The power or means to achieve a result

• Action or intervention leading to a certain effect

• The feeling of control over one's actions or environment

In his interview with Dan Coe, Devon Ericksen continues the argument by defining Agency in a wonderfully understandable way, as only a veteran software engineer turned writer can.

Okay, how to develop and apply this skill?

For me, a cycle of 40, 60, or 90 days works especially well, in which I set myself the task of pursuing a given goal with persistence.

• I bet you will set aside focused time each day or X days a week where you will work on pursuing the goal

• I stick a simple calendar in my notebook - every day I check off that I have met the daily quota

Knowing that somewhere along the way I will make mistakes, and I will have to analyze the feedback I receive, thinking that you just need to mark off X number of more days of work until the end of the plan, calms me down to the necessary level so that I don't fall into despair after another failed attempt.

I am passionate about the ambition to master the skill and this practice of application, to the point that I will soon be passing it on in an understandable form to my children (8 and 3 years old today). I think this is the most important thing you should teach them.

In the last year, the practice has yielded unique results - in about 50 days, the knowledge developed in software architecture is at the same level as the previous 3 years. This is just one example.

Here we come to the 3rd point of the point - what are the techniques to learn new things - you inevitably have to learn new things along the way to achieve your goal - and to master them intensively and permanently.

This applies both generally to any goal and specifically to Project Management - where you are always responsible for dealing with the unknown - meaning you are the one who has to connect the dots and solve the equation. And you need new knowledge and understanding at every stage.

Weapons in the battle for your own mind

From a psychological perspective, we could write a whole book about the battles in your mind, dealing with learned helplessness, and how to bounce back every time something doesn't work out.

For now, we have defined the main skill to apply in this battle.

Somehow we can also lay out specific techniques for learning new things. Just understanding that such science is available will give you the initial fuel to do much more than you thought you could.

Solomon said:

1. Deep work

This is not the first time I have mentioned the influence that Cal Newport's book, "Deep Work," has had on me.

After reading a number of his other works, I am convinced that applying the practices he brings out is a competitive advantage that will help you stand out and build security in your life.

Cal's thesis begins like this:

The basic principle is:

• Every day at the same time, in the same setting, without distractions - no phones, emails, social networks and any notifications - focused work for 1 to 4 hours on your main project

if you're wondering how to implement this time into your daily life, you'll find a number of examples and suggestions in the book

There will be many unknowns and many new things to learn in your project - your brain will handle any of them, as long as you give it the right environment.

2. More practical knowledge on how to learn new things

This is where our other friend, Andrew Huberman, comes in to help.

There is a significant difference in how the brain works in people under 25 years old and it occurs over 25 years old.

It also influences your previous experience with cognitive tasks.

So Andrew, as always, you systematize the techniques in a super practical way:

• If you are under 25, your brain tends to passively and effortlessly absorb any new information (new thinking and motor skills). In other words, you can learn to do something new much faster

• While if you are over 25 (I am 36 today) - scientific research proves that regular and systematized practice is necessary to reach a level that someone younger can reach 10 times faster.

It sounds a bit disappointing, but it's not. From personal experience, I can say that no matter how hopeless it may seem at first, with each passing day, the charge of motivation increases and leads not to linear, but to exponential progress. (Something like the accumulation effect).

That is, as the repetitions increase, the internal reward you give increases, simply because you managed to be consistent one more time and one more time.

Which in turn increases your desire to exert yourself again - just so your brain can experience this reward (it's an addiction), which in turn brings a stronger new level of mastery of the skill/knowledge.

The important thing to know is that the adult brain works in cycles - in almost all cases from 60 to 90 minutes. There are about 10-15 minutes in which you purposefully have to enter focus mode. Then about 60 in which you are focused. And finally come the most important 10-30 minutes in which you get tired and start making mistakes. That's when it's most important to keep going - in that moment of anger in which you get hungry, you crave something, you want to open your phone... And then congratulate yourself every time that you went through the period of frustration and didn't give up.

The beautiful thing here, as Andrew reveals, is that when you put the last bit into a skill, the brain registers a developmental mode that increases the capacity to learn all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with that specific one.

NB: For the most desperate, there is a way to hankesh:

• When you are faced with a strong emotional dilemma, age doesn't matter - you are able to learn something new significantly faster than anyone - Andrew gives a very good example, but I will give my own - if you are painfully convinced that you want a life with more freedom and opportunities - you can learn to program in 3 months instead of 3 years

View the entire article:

3. How to make new knowledge and skills last

Everything said so far has connected these into a single question -

"What exactly do you need to learn?"

And the answer is simply wonderful:

Neither you nor I will know,

nor will you learn anything unless you understand the following:

• At school, the teacher defined for us what to study, and this was expected to lead to successful projects.

• In life - you define the projects first, then your subconscious registers the information you need to absorb.

In other words, if you just start some courses without having a clear project to build on - you will fall into "tutorial hell" and may never build anything meaningful. You will add information that you will quickly forget.

Therefore, you must first define what you want to be, to achieve, and focus on it.

Your mind starts to register piece by piece of the puzzle from every possible source. Two people can read the same book and understand it in a completely different way. They're playing a different game.

The super interesting Dan Coe to me talks about the importance of the project often before the training begins:

To get your brain to invest cognitive energy, you have to convince it that it makes sense, otherwise its natural self-preservation mechanisms will keep you from burning calories.

If you start asking yourself:

“Okay, Mitak, what project should I start building, I have no idea”

The same Dan gives a very practical answer:

Write down on a sheet everything that

• you hate being

• you can't stand it right now

• you are afraid of becoming in the future.

When you know what you don't want to be, it's much easier to find what you do want to be.

If you think you know what you don't want, you may not. Unfortunately, many of our goals and perceptions are imposed on us by someone else, perhaps someone we don't want to disappoint because we love them. Or simply by society.

But you have to take responsibility for your own life.

The entire material from Dan:

It's not too late to start something new, and with the right techniques, you can learn everything you need to achieve it.

And it's good to know a lot of things!

Thank you.

Dimitar

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