Soft Skills, Hard Skills, and the Problem of the Magic Briefcase

If you've never heard of soft skills, congratulations - it looks like you've finally crawled from under the rock you've been living under since 2002!? Get cozy because I'm gonna tell you a tale of skills and softness, and also what these things do to our comfort zone.

As of this writing, soft skills have long become an inherent attribute of a modern, reasonable person. They are now mentioned in job descriptions for top companies worldwide, Google-esque interview video guides, and almost everywhere we turn. Does this sound familiar: "Dude, first and foremost, we care about your soft skills - your hard skills will come with time."

Despite this, no universities taught us the difference between those two, so the concept might have gone over the head for a lot of people.

So what is the difference?

The consensus I often hear in the developers' circle is that hard skills are all about how you code and what you know. And soft skills are about your communication, conveying your thoughts, empathy, understanding people, and all that stuff. This is surface level, of course, when in actuality, it's not that simple.

If it were that easy, a ton of people would quickly improve their soft skills, pass behavioral interviews at Amazon or Meta, and there'd be no issue to talk about at all. But if you go deeper, everything gets more complicated. That is why big tech companies are pouring a ton of effort (no way to do this otherwise) into finding people who are really good with soft skills.?

The problem is that soft skills can't be felt, passed on, or even quickly and clearly described, no matter how hard everyone tries to do so.? Wikipedia identifies four key soft skills of the future: creativity, communication, cooperation, and critical thinking.? At the same time, some researchers say that there are over 87(!) of them. They can generally be classified into seven main categories, including the all-present general communication skills, as well as leadership, influence, interpersonal communication, personal skills, and also creative and professional skills. In addition, all that is also subjective because they are linked to other people's opinions.

For instance, Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the book Sapiens, says in this TikTok video that soft skills are all about mental flexibility, with a big question of whether humans even have it.

To sum up, soft skills aren't about communication and planning per se. Well, not entirely.? It's about you as a whole, your mind and psyche. It's about the development of the neural network inside your meat bag (body, that is). It's about the neural network's ability to find an approach to any task without getting stuck on specifics because it understands what's at the core. Soft skills are about your mental models, neuro-cognitive flexibility, maturity, and growth. This is precisely why these skills are considered soft, liquid, and flexible - they can navigate any life challenge in its specifics and find a solution to virtually any problem.

Oh, by the way, one of the soft skills on the radar of any next-level employer is effective thinking.

Let's go a bit deeper into understanding the difference between hard and soft skills. According to some studies (I did my research), hard skills are professional skills that are needed for a specific profession. Say, the ability to handle a shovel.? Soft skills, on the other hand, are non-professional. They are not dependent on any specific job but greatly help in career advancement if well-developed. They often relate to communication, leadership, and in general, something linked to working with oneself and others. To be clear - when I talk about career advancement, I mean real growth in a company, associated with the individual's usefulness, which translates into real profit.? In short, no bullshit.

So why are hard skills not as important to an employer as soft ones? The answer is simple: hard skills are easier to acquire.? Again, why is that?? Let's figure it out.

• People who cultivate hard skills look outward. That is, they approach life looking for some specific tools, believing in the existence of some magic briefcase. Supposedly, all the answers to their questions are there - they just need to open it. It's like a set of handy screwdrivers, algorithms, and skills that they just need to grab and use to solve problems and tasks.

• People who cultivate soft skills, on the other hand, look inward - into themselves. They understand that there is no magic briefcase on the outside.? In other words, there's no one to save them. The magic briefcase is themselves - their mind, their psyche, and their nervous system. They are confident and believe in developing their own human potential.? This realization alone is actually quite rare.? And - yes - these rare people are the real machines for achieving goals.? That's why employers are always on the lookout for them.

Many people fall into the trap of a "hard skill" mentality. For example, a shitload of courses and trainings give a promise of some specific algorithmic tool for solving work and life issues. They preach that when something happens, people should follow a set sequence of actions, one step after another, no skipping, and everything will be hanky-dory. Look around, I'm sure you have at least one friend who underwent some sort of personal growth course, complete with a list of obligatory sets of strategies in the end. And now they use these sets to duct tape all their life problems, annoying the fuck out of everyone around in the process.

By developing soft skills (over-professional skills, scientifically speaking), we ourselves become the tool, aka the magic pill.

The difference between developing hard and soft skills is that when developing the former, you don't change much about yourself.? Your perception stays the same, just like your general actions, and so your personality remains unchanged. The only difference is that now you know how to package your code with Docker.? But if you genuinely develop soft skills, then both you and your perception change, transforming into a new personality.? It's painful, takes a long time, and is quite ambiguous a process. To top it off, there's no test in the end to tell you if it worked.

That's the first problem. It's not just that we don't get why we need these damn soft skills in the context of our work. But we also don't realize we're already a part of the BANI world model.? Everything is nonlinear and ambiguous, and constantly changing here.? Bam! It's pandemic. Bam, bam!! The war is here. Bam, bam, bam!!! The damn FTX crashed. And that's just January, so to say.? In short, without developed soft skills, we're truly fucked, because soft skills make people flexible in a world that keeps changing. And that's a quote from someone important.?

In other words, really gaining soft skills and removing obstructions can only happen when you start believing in yourself and stop running in the delirious search of a magic briefcase that solves everything.

The magic briefcase is you. That's what smart people in decent companies are trying to gauge during your job interviews. They want to find out how you feel about yourself, whether you can use yourself to solve problems, or whether you're on the lookout for some tools besides those inside you. They're studying you to see whether you're still looking for the magic briefcase or if you've already realized that the briefcase is you.

By the way, if you've taken some special course and are now upset that it was practically useless, perhaps this was all about you and the soft skills. If you really want to constantly look for tools, it's a good idea to take a break and ponder for a moment - do you really see yourself as the same tool that needs other tools?? How ‘bout seeing yourself as an infinitely effective free potential that can be a legend at anything???

The second problem is that developing soft skills is difficult and requires a lifetime of effort.? I've noticed that the further we go, the less trendy it becomes to make an effort at all.? I'm not talking about the kind of effort where you work like a robot for 12 hours straight. Just think how mega hard and difficult it was the last time you had to do something like studying or learning.? Did you want to jump ship?? Maybe you felt sick of immersing yourself in the material or thought it wasn't for you. Like, why the fuck did I sign up for this? Oh, my back itches. Ah, I feel sleepy. Did you jump ship then, or did you overcome and persevere??

Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about this - our minds are evolutionarily wired to be lazy and use as little energy as possible.? The brain is our most resource-intensive organ, and it's not that simple to shift it into a high resource-burning mode. It was initially designed by nature as a means of survival. After all, we still wear the same space suits that were prepped for survival in a very hostile environment with minimal food and maximum dangers. Therefore, when there is little obvious threat around, the brain shifts into energy-saving mode and primarily works automatically.? That's the basic meaning of all this shit about the comfort zone and why we need to get out of it.

Hint: I read in The Power of Habit that the brain's strive to form automatisms and habits is also due to practicality. Smaller heads - easier passage into the world - fewer deaths during childbirth.

It's essential to understand this point so that we have the motivation to avoid the trendy concept of "resistance."? We fall for our resistance when getting soft skills simply because we don't understand where they come from.? We believe that if there is resistance, then what we are doing is not for us.? But now, knowing about the modes of the psyche and understanding the reasons for resistance, all we need to do is wait a while without bailing out when we are learning something new.? The mind rebels initially but later surrenders - it needs time to give in.? Of course, there's no point in waiting for the switch to flip until your eyes turn red. The point is to not bail out and gently push yourself forward until the resistance goes away and interest is born in its place.

Remember - if it feels shitty when getting skills or learning, it means the brain is restructuring and is working at total capacity.? Here is a simple analogy. Your muscles hurt, and you feel pain after a workout at the gym. Same happens with your psyche - after an upgrade.? But for some reason, we're okay with sore muscles in the first case but not with yawning and wanting to skip a difficult lesson on soft skills. In general, we've unlearned to carefully assess any discomfort, which, like effort, is also going out of style.

On the whole, the mainstream popular science and podcasts foster infantilism and tenderness. They say that discomfort is bad and that what we need to do is to get rid of it; stop devaluing our feelings.? But not a lot of people mention that discomfort is actually essential for growth, especially when we're talking about increasing the capacity of our personality in terms of soft skills.

At this point, let me tell you how I see the actions of a hard-skill-thinking person. Let's call him Tom.

Let’s say Tom faces a problem, and of course, deep down, he knows nothing about soft skills.? He feels discomfort - the problem is icky, unpleasant, and outside of his comprehension. But it needs a solution.? So Tom goes through all his acquired knowledge and skills, as well as instructions and manuals. He reaches into his magic briefcase for a magic hammer but, alas, doesn't find the right one.? He Googles long and hard but doesn't find anything that can work either.? The conclusion Tom reaches is that the problem cannot be solved, so he pushes it away as far as possible.? What our hero fails to understand is that by relying too much on his tools, he is losing any faith in himself, his potential, and his creative infinity, or rather, the opportunity for creative problem-solving.

And now let's take a look at Alice, a person who is more into soft skills.

Alice faces the same problem as Tom.? She feels discomfort, but she knows that her powerful name aside, she is also a magic briefcase incarnate. She knows that, above all, discomfort and fear are just boundaries. And boundaries can be expanded. Alice does not give up. Instead, she gently and tactfully keeps his discomfort close by without making any sudden moves or becoming disappointed.? What she does is not back down, standing her ground and letting her psyche and brain switch from sleeping into the go-the-fuck-all-out work mode.

Alice knows well that investing in her own mind and soft skills crafting will bring much more benefits than searching for some tools.? A supercharged, flexible, and effective mind will either figure something out without any tools at all or find a solution very quickly.? Alice is our legend.

Any curious reader may have already noted that this text is also not a magic tool. Thus if Tom is reading this, I'm sure he is already a little disappointed.? At the same time, my salutations go to Alice. I hope my conclusions made her mind just a tad more flexible.? Never give up, Alice.

PS: While writing this piece, I found out that skills science goes much deeper than initially thought. Soft skills are followed by meta-skills like mindfulness, focus, reflection, flexibility, resilience, flow state, and creativity.? And that is some next-level shit (which can’t be reached without mastering soft skills), but this is precisely why we must start paying attention to them right now.