7 Skills of a Geek, or the Wrongly Called "soft skills"

Imagine you had to design a team to boost your company's digital strategy. Who would be your perfect companion on that new journey? Communication experts, graphic designers, web and mobile developers, digital analysts, traditional sales or marketing teams, Business Intelligence professionals?

The answer is probably not exact, and I would take a little of each of the above with me. And maybe I would leave one of them in the fridge. I prefer to make a "salad of skills" rather than a list of professional competencies (hard skills). And I find it easier to start from emotions as the triggers that lead to change management. I prefer people who have the following "soft" skills close at hand:

1- Curiosity. What I value most in any professional capable of creating a digital strategy is curiosity. The rest is learned. Curiosity is an engine of change. All of us who have worked in digital have had moments of epiphany in which we discovered how many mistakes we had made, and that led us to keep searching. They are capable of losing sleep because there is something they have not managed to understand, something they have discovered that does not add up. And they keep searching.

2 - Passion. Most of the people I admire have this emotion close at hand. And if curiosity led them to read and keep learning for the simple sake of discovering that treasure they know is hidden in some blog, tweet or video, passion dresses the previous emotion and makes you create a moment of glory out of a sleepless night. Only the woman or the man who knows that losing track of time happens only when you are doing something you love can come up with that idea. If you want to know more about digital, you have to be passionate about the medium. If you want to learn just to stay up to date, the effort will feel like a burden.

3- Generosity. They're the kind of women and men who already know that someone as capable and as curious as they are has led them to share their discovery. And perhaps that is the virtue of a good "geek": they have leaned on other people's learning at some point in their search, and now they know that it is out of the act of sharing that Wikipedia has created one of the greatest sources of knowledge on this planet. We are all able to look up a good practice in digital because someone had the generosity to share it.

If you are afraid to share your learnings for fear of revealing the secret of your success, you have not yet learned that the essence of fortune in this digital era,

lies in the abundance of sharing and not in the scarcity of keeping.

4 - Instinct. A good digital professional has the nose to spot a brilliant detail in a landing page or in a button. She gets excited when she discovers how someone has managed to fit into a single gesture all the information needed to keep browsing on a mobile device. She would sign up on any unsecured site just to test whether what a display promises is true or not. And she knows how to draw from every moment of curiosity the learning she will try out on her own site tomorrow. Let's admit that we have all copied. And that's what makes a trend take off.

5 - Courage. To own up that you got it wrong. To admit that you need help with something you have not mastered. To be the first to want to try. To break with the traditional ways of working along a specialist assembly line. To bring in a new tool and start from scratch on a new learning curve. To admit that however much you think you know, the user proves you right or wrong in fewer than 250 interactions. To push a project through, knowing that the first version is not perfect. And there will be time to improve it. And successive iterations will improve the initial version. Courage to spend more time creating than reporting on what has been created.

6 - Perseverance. How many times have you found yourself writing for nobody? We have all been through the stretch of losing hours of sleep over a post that barely 10 people had read a week later. And it's no big deal. It will be 100, and then 1k. Everything comes, and if it does not come, you drop it and rethink it. To reach 1 million visits, you have to go through many weeks of thousands. And it is from persevering that you reach Gladwell's 10,000 hours.

And that is when you discover that there is no longer any way to retrace the learning path behind you, and that is when your intuition dictates the way. And the method is no longer so easy to write down, and what IS clear is that your curiosity, your passion, your generosity, your instinct, your courage and your perseverance are the ingredients of that path. And the method? There will be time to write the method; right now we have to keep learning.

And the ability to learn would perhaps be the seventh ingredient of the method.

Appendix [October 2018]:

This post was published more than two and a half years ago. And it feels like yesterday.

Here is the list of skills that the World Economic Forum publishes in its report The Future of Jobs, and for the first time Emotional Intelligence (passion, generosity, instinct) and Cognitive Flexibility (curiosity) appear among the skills recommended for 2020. That is good news. And maybe we will have to forget about "geeks" and "non-geeks".

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