Looking Back on 2021, Paving the Road for 2022

Looking Back on 2021, Paving the Road for 2022

The Things that Kept me Awake at Night While Thinking about 2021

2021 was not an easy year. For most, it was an exhausting year that continued with the stress and anxiety related to COVID-19. According to New York Times and WSJ analyses, more people died of Covid-19 in 2021 than in 2020, both in the U.S. and worldwide. We saw several natural disasters around the world aggravated by climate change. We saw growing unemployment and upheaval in the job market. Then we saw the flip side with corporations losing employees at an astonishing pace in what is called "The Great Resignation."

Amidst all this, the invention and mass-production of vaccines against COVID-19 happened more quickly than any prior vaccine in the history of humankind. In fact, the word "vax" has been declared the word of the year by Oxford.

What I learned from 2021

The past was imperfect, and so is the present. And the future will be too. What we are left with are lessons to learn from.

 Here are some of the key lessons I learned this year.

 1. The degree of unpredictability reached a new level

2021 revealed the ripple effects of the Coronavirus pandemic. The uncertainty of new variants and the rise of deadly, localized outbreaks are signaling that the fight against the pandemic is far from over. Open your newspapers today to see the damage coming from Omicron.

Millions lost their jobs or had to face pay cuts due to the pandemic. Several voluntarily quit or changed their career plans. Harvard Economist Lawrence Katz says that he has not seen a quit rate this high in the U.S. since the 2000s. This uncertainty in our daily lives intensified the paranoia and feeling of insecurity within all of us.

We tried to expand our world by getting vaccinated, started traveling and meeting family, but the fact is that nothing seems close to the "normal" that seemed so familiar before March 2020.

2 - Remote work is a double-edged sword

The workforce is writing new rules of engagement as the economy re-opens. Though working from home in pajamas proved to be a dream come true for many, it came with real challenges in managing personal and work life.

The pandemic forced millions of workers around the world to stay in and work from wherever they were. It was incredibly challenging for some to get things done, network, and deliver.

Others moved to a new location to re-start their lives, and many are re-thinking if they really want to go back to a 9-to-5 job, which takes a mental, emotional, and physical toll on them. The issues of engagement, diversity, and inclusion have come to the forefront.

3 - Being an influencer and making easy money online is an illusion for 99.99%

In the past year, our lives went almost 100 percent online. We begin to see more people starting online businesses, whether because they lost their traditional jobs or because they quit them to seek a fortune. Is that a wild-goose chase?

Let's see the data. Out of 37M YouTube channels, only 0.2% have more than 1000 subscribers. If we analyze the top ones, only 0.002% have more than 10M subscribers.

We find similar success rates for Instagram and any other social media channel.

It is easy to get in, but it is extremely difficult to get noticed. How do you separate yourself from the crowd and transform your digital presence into a reliable business?

It does not matter if the world is online or real. Becoming successful and progressing requires an outstanding plan and tons of effort. Even these 0.002% channels on YouTube were built with an incredible amount of actual work.

There is no secret sauce for that.

 

4 - Traditional incumbent companies are bleeding

Large and traditionally stable companies struggle to manage their supply chain, compete against disruptive business models, hire new talents and develop long-term relationships with them.

All these aspects that made them great and influential in the past are now their worst enemy.

Their size and legacy structure (tech, real state, employees) became a massive obstacle to competing. For example, we can see what is happening in the financial sector where digital banks like Nubank are now the most valuable banks in Latin America, surpassing traditional banks that have been in this business for decades.

We can see the same pattern in several other areas.

5 - We are all in a permanent state of transformation

We once believed that we needed to change: adapt and then stabilize…

Now there is no stability. It is a permanent state of transformation where your ability to work in solid deliverables that produce relevant outcomes become your primary target. Recently, the CEO of Netflix said in an interview for Thinkers50: "It is not about how hard you work. It is about how smart you work."

Looking forward to 2022

I know that providing advice is not easy and even less reliable nowadays. However, if I could offer one piece of advice to all of us, including myself, I would say: become more adaptable and resilient.

The pace of disruption only tends to increase. We must enhance our ability to reinvent ourselves and our business, to work in a more fluid structure, and to execute projects that deliver proper outcomes and benefits.

We must, even more, help those who are struggling to reinvent themselves. It is irrelevant to be the only one with adaptability in a world of inequalities.

This adaptability will become the only key to making our work and our society relevant in the future.

Let's welcome 2022 with all the flexibility and adaptability to really thrive and succeed.

Happy Holidays!

Ricardo

PS: You can also listen to the related podcast episode on Spotify by using the link below.


Anastasya Drendel

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

1y

Hi Ricardo, It's very interesting! I will be happy to connect.

Roberto NAVAS Pinheiro

Product Manager @ Rabobank Brasil | Data & Analytics Implementations

2y

Ricardo Viana Vargas thank you for all your contribution. Keep posting as much as you can! Your contribution is highly valuable to our of us! Happy 2022 year!

Ricardo Viana Vargas, I thank you for your great contributions to humanity in a broad sense. I was listening one of "5 minutes podcast" and realised the amazing metrics it has for sticking with what is shared by you: in few words, it's perfect. Happy New 2022, for you and your loved ones..

Per Eriksson

Lokalstrateg Socialförvaltningen Kiruna kommun SBR Byggingenjör

2y

Ricardo Viana Vargas well written, very good thoughts happy New Year from Giron/Kiruna Sweden

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