Bet In What Doesn't Change

When we are going about on our lives, every long-term decision we make is a form of bet.

For example, when we choose to specialize in a particular field for higher education, we are betting that this field will stay relevant after the next 5 years after we graduate, and that the job market in the future will grant us good opportunities.

We have to make these choices based on incomplete information. No one knows what the world will look like 5 years from now. If someone tells you they do, they are lying. The best that anyone can do is to forecast and estimate how things will look like based on information we can have now.

The most basic forecasting strategy you can do is to expect that the future will be just like the present. That often does work! For example, when I chose to start studying Computer Engineering in 2015, the job market for I.T. was good. When I graduated by 2019, the job market was still good. Right now, it remains good. It worked out so far.

That may have been the luck of the draw, but what was truly so fortunate was the fact that it remains true that there is high demand for precise analytical thinking and timely problem-solving. The specific job being Web-based Interfaces and networked computer software just happens to be an application of this deeper underlying fact.

I'm still betting that in the coming years computing platforms and the Internet will remain core to how society is shaped and how businesses operate.

I think there's a gold rush to finding “The Next Computer” or even “The Next Internet”. Whatever that may be, it will have to solve some of the very core problems that society and businesses needed to be solved for centuries: communication, entertainment, exchange of goods and services, decision-making, and so on.

So what are you betting on?