Pascal

One thing I keep telling younger friends and colleagues is to develop depth in something. Chase global opportunities. Apply for the fellowships. Go to the conferences. Build your network. Travel if you get the opportunity. Put yourself in rooms where you can meet people and see what is possible. All of these things can change your life. But somewhere along the way, make sure you are actually becoming very good at something. Know something deeply. Develop a skill people can trust you with. Become the person who understands a subject beyond what can be picked up from a few articles or a weekend workshop. Because opportunities can give you access, but access eventually exposes your level of competence. You can get into the room through a fellowship. You can meet important people at a conference. You can build an impressive LinkedIn profile. You can collect certificates from some of the best institutions in the world. Eventually, somebody will ask you to do the work. Write the paper. Analyse the data. Lead the project. Edit the story. Build the product. Explain the problem. Manage the team. Advise the organisation. And at that point, there is nowhere to hide. This is why I worry sometimes when I see young people becoming very good at chasing opportunities without spending enough time developing the competence those opportunities are supposed to accelerate. Your twenties and thirties are a great time to explore. Try different things. Move across fields. Discover what interests you. I certainly do not believe everyone needs to spend their entire career doing one thing. But exploration should still leave you with accumulated knowledge and ability. If you have worked in climate for five years, you should understand climate issues much better than someone who arrived yesterday. If you have covered elections for years, you should know the history, institutions, data, actors and debates around elections. If you work in AI, go beyond knowing the latest tools. Understand how the technology works, the policy debates, the business models, the limitations and the important questions in the field. If you are a journalist, learn to report and write exceptionally well. Whatever it is, go deep enough that people can depend on what you know and what you can do. And depth takes time. It comes from reading. Practice. Repetition. Failure. Working with people better than you. Being corrected. Doing difficult assignments. Staying with a problem long enough to understand the things that are invisible from the surface. Global opportunities are valuable. Networks matter. Visibility can help. I have benefited enormously from all three. But none of them makes competence obsolete. If anything, the more access you get, the more important competence becomes. Because getting into the room is one thing. Having something valuable to contribute when you get there is another. Competence will never go out of fashion. #YouWillNotFail