- Modern Life Skills
- Posts
- You can just do things
Modern Life Skills are a collection of:
Mindsets/Mental Models
In-Demand Life Skills
Career Advice
This is Cool (a peek into what’s coming next with emerging technologies and sciences)
You’ll see some, or all of those sections represented in every newsletter through examples of what they look like on display in the real world.
If you’re reading this in the browser, you can use the Table of Contents to skip around.
Table of Contents
WHAT I’M BUILDING
Creating with Cursor
Remember the bouncing DVD screensaver? And how epic it was when it finally hit the corner?
I thought it would be fun to recreate that for use within google slides as a screensaver slide when you're waiting for everyone to get settled in.
This was my first project using a tool called Cursor. It’s an IDE, which is a tool where software develops write their code.
But this IDE is one of many now that have some AI baked in. In this case, it essentially allows you to speak/type in natural language, and then turns your prompt into code.
Aka Vibe Coding.
You need some patience, and a figure it out mindset if you’re coming at this from a place of little to no coding background like myself, but it’s veryyy figure out-able. Especially with all of the Youtube videos about it out there.
This is the specific video I used to get ramped up.
I stayed away from things like authentication (getting people to sign up and storing their log in info) and payments for now, but those will come on future projects.
Here’s the link to my DVD Logo Gif Generator tool to check out for yourself.
That DVD logo project on Cursor took some time to get going. Mostly because it was my first time using the product, and I made a lot of rookie mistakes.
This next project below was a breeze comparitively. I did it all within Gemini; Google’s LLM.
Gemini 2.5 is pretty powerful. I saw a post online about someone taking a pdf and turning it into a quiz, so I did the same thing.
The Conference Board of Canada is constantly releasing these super through, and detailed 30+ page reports on the economy, or labour predictions, or skill gap analysis, etc.
It’s content isn’t intended for a high school audience, but what if it was?
It’s not realistic to get our student or staff community to consistently read these verbose reports. I don’t even want to read most of them. Summarization alone might get a few more eyeballs, but isn’t very engaging and can leave out important context.
So I decided to make a quiz out of it.
Using Gemini 2.5 Pro, I uploaded the 30 page March Skills Gap report and asked it to come up with 15 multiple choice questions out of it, in language a high school student could understand.
Once I was happy with the questions, I clicked the Canvas button which allows for Gemini to write code, and asked it to turn those questions into an interactive quiz.
I was worried that someone could just rip through the quiz and not learn anything. The quiz was meant to replace the report, so it should teach along the way.
That’s when I asked Gemini to add the information to the right of the question, using additional context from the report. These appear after you answer the question.
I also asked Gemini to add a loading bar at the bottom that lasted 10 seconds after answering the question, so you had some time to take in that new information before skipping ahead.
This whole process was accomplished in 20 minutes, while watching Netflix with my wife. Super simple prompts, which created a shareable quiz that now lives online.
Very few students would ever read that 30+ page report, but it’s not a stretch to get them to complete this quiz.
If I were to spend more time on this (which I’m not), I might:
set it up with spaced repetition logic so that incorrect answers reappear later in the quiz until you get them all correct
create some type of login or leaderboard to store results in a dashboard
It’s so much easier to create things now than it ever has been. Actually wild when you stop to zoom out and think about it.
Don’t let not having an idea hold you back. These projects don’t have to be immediately useful. No one was asking for a bouncing dvd logo generator.
But it was interesting and fun for me, so it kept me engaged. And as a result, I learned how to use that tool, which will now make it that much easier for me to bring real ideas to life when it makes sense.
I’m going to explore Lovable next; another popular text to code tool. This one isn’t as powerful as a Cursor, but is a lot more beginner friendly. Stay tuned.
THIS IS COOL
Shoot Your Shot
I love this story so much. It’s a great example that showcases how you can create your own outcomes in the world.
Do yourself a favour and watch the 1 min video below. And if you’re an educator reading this, play it for your students, and then have a discussion about it.
Julia is university right now. And she wanted to intern at Shopify.
But Shopify doesn’t have internships for marketing.
This is where 99% of most people would stop; assume that’s just the way it goes, and look for something else. But clearly, Julia understood that at the end of the day, a lot of life is a game that can be played.
And in like most games, rules are flexible - if you believe they are.
It’s not a guarantee that you can bend the rules, and even if you can, that you will be successful. But unless it defies the laws of physics, technically, it’s possible.
That’s a mindset. That’s a choice.
When faced with a problem, ask your brain, “Does this defy the laws of physics?” — it will reply with “No” — and begin generating ludicrous ways this could be possible.
Asking your brain this question wipes your mental whiteboard around the problem and knocks on the door of your sleeping creativity.
If your problem doesn’t defy the laws of physics, it’s not an unsolvable problem — regardless of what other people say.
If you watched the video, you’ll realize she didn’t just make a video and ask for an internship. That likely wouldn’t work.
She had displayed high standards in the quality of the video itself, but also her projects she highlighted. These projects are evidence.
Don’t just rely on school projects to fill out your portfolio of past projects you can speak to. Doing things on your own because you wanted to shows a level of initiative that will serve as an important predictor, and differentiator.
It will also produce a much better response to an interview question asking you why you chose to work on that project, rather than “because my teacher assigned it”.
She had participated in communities like Socratica, and created her own. Community is a big part of marketing in 2025, so speaking to relevant experience, in an extremely targeted way - this video was clearly made for Shopify and no one else - is what got her a conversation.
And clearly, she knew how to use social media to her advantage, another key skill in marketing today. She displayed that.
This was a story that social media was happy to share. How could you not be excited about somebody going after what they wanted? Especially early in their career, people want to help you.
The amount of support I saw her receive on LinkedIn and Twitter was one of those “faith in humanity” restored moments.
I think part of the excitement around this of it also is because examples like Julias are so rare today.
By and far, people are still coached to create a resume/cover letter and hope for the best. That was a problem before AI, but now it’s even worse. It’s easier than ever to mass apply - recruiters are struggling to keep up, making it next to impossible to stand out.
You want to get their attention? Make their life easier. Make it obvious that they should say yes to you.
Even if the job doesn’t already exist.
What are you waiting for?
Shoot your shot.
LIFE SKILL
Start Small
This quote is living rent free inside of my head.
The analogy I used to use when coaching high school students when starting to work on some admittedly big projects, was to not focus on staring at the top of Everest; just focus on that first peak. Start small.
But I like the simplicity of this one even better.
If something feels too hard to start, it just means that the first step isn’t small enough.
This video is 48 seconds long. Give it a watch and then share it with someone you know who could benefit from hearing those words right now.
MINDSET
You’re Competing With Yourself
A lot of people don’t get started because they’re worried about competition. That’s the wrong mindset for a lot of reasons.
One of them being consistency alone will allow you to outcompete almost everyone else.
Don’t worry about what is outside of your control.
Worry about you showing up today.
People tell themselves all kinds of lies (mainly to protect their ego).
Yesterday I heard one such lie.
Someone said to me: “it’s hard to succeed, it’s soooo competitive nowadays.”
Is it?
Yea, sure, a lot of people want things. But they are mostly unserious people.
Imagine 1,000 people - who all want the same thing as you.
Here’s what your competition actually looks like:
CAREER ADVICE
The Proof Economy
Below are a couple screenshots from an article Anand wrote introducing the concept of the proof economy. The full article is worth a read.
Whether you agree or not, it’s an important perspective to consider.
And this is coming from the president and cofounder of CB Insights, valued at a couple billion dollars last time I checked.
He talks a lot about what he wants to see happen in education, and has even committed to creating a school to solve some of those problems himself.
Have an idea for a modern life skill you think young people should be learning? Hit reply and let me know. I’ll add it to the list.
✌️ Damian