Humans Are Underrated - Geoff Colvin

Follow your passion, study it assiduously, and as you pursue it, strive in addition to become more intensely human. Doing so will improve your material well-being as the economy evolves, and it will bring you a richer, fuller life.

The key to differentiation lies entirely in the most deeply human realms of social interaction: understanding an irrational client, forming the emotional bonds needed to persuade that client to act rationally, rendering the sensing, feeling judgments that clients insist on getting from a human being.

As the two large technology trends of our era combine, as technology takes over more of our work while simultaneously changing us and the way we relate to one another, the people who master the human abilities that are fading all around us will be the most valuable people in our world.

There are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve not because computers couldn’t eventually solve them, but because in real life, and especially in organizational life, we keep changing our conception of what the problem is and what our goals are

the meaning of great performance has changed. It used to be that you had to be good at being machinelike. Now, increasingly, you have to be good at being a person. Great performance requires us to be intensely human beings.

Empathy is the foundation of all the other abilities that increasingly make people valuable as technology advances.