The Best Superpower you can Develop: Adaptability

One of the greatest things that you can do for yourself is to develop your skill of adapting to new situations. There will always be some sort of curveballs life throws your way on all fronts, and being able to adapt to each one is a skill that, as the title suggests, can become a bona fide superpower. Throughout my five years experience as a freelancer, and as someone who dropped out of high school then came back and finished it five years later, I’ve learned that this becoming ‘adaptable’ is arguably the most important thing you can do for yourself, short-term and long-term.

I’ll break this blog post into four parts about adaptability, framing it in general and through my perspective and experience:

Adaptability:

• As a freelancer

• As a student

• As an individual

• And, how to keep your adaptability flexible (and what that’s even supposed to mean)

I have added links to the websites, techniques, and other information mentioned where appropriate.

As a Freelancer

Freelancing is centred around being flexible and adaptable. Being able to adjust to new clients, new orders, new requests, and new schedules on the fly, every day is part of the routine. Every single client will have their own approach that you need to take. Every single order will have unique instructions or content. You’ll have to organise, reorganise, and reorganise your schedule frequently with clients requesting revisions, touching base about your progress, just getting in contact, and sending you more work. Some clients will be easy and painless to work with and they will meet you halfway or go most of the way to accommodate your schedule as you complete the work for them. Others will be extraordinarily difficult, forcing you to go out of your way to shift other work around and make time in your already bustling schedule to accommodate them. And there will be all the clients in between those two extremes.

Being able to set up a regular routine that gives you wiggle room to negotiate time and get some revisions done alongside your weekly, daily, and monthly orders is key. That takes time and effort, and a healthy spoonful of trial and error. You have to stay on top of your schedule and be able to change it as you go through your day and week. Finding the right scheduling system for you will make all the difference.

Do you work best with a physical planner, or a digital calendar? What means do you use to stay in touch with your clients? How much time do you spend per day or week on administrative work?

These are all questions that you should have on the back of your mind. Mind you, you don’t have to be chanting and reciting these while you sleep. Just remember to check on these occasionally. Because part of adaptability is not only creating and organising a system to respond to these, but reorganising and potentially changing your system.

Over the course of five years as a freelancer, I’ve gone through trial and error like you wouldn’t believe to get to the system that I have now. A combination of notion, todoist, physical sticky notes, and pure gusto (read: “Google Drive and OneDrive”). I have 5-6 main platforms through which clients contact me (email, phone number, etc), and 4-5 different platforms through which I get paid (PayPal, Wise, Bank Transfer, etc). It’s by no means ideal—everything is scattered and a bit all over the place. But, having organised and experienced each one of these platforms I can confidently say that I’m happy with where I am in terms of organisation.

That is, until it stops working for me. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have to switch to a new management program, or move to paper. I have the bare bones of the system that I know I need to work with, which I can transfer to different mediums and adapt. Having that makes sure that everything else falls into place, and getting a new client is no longer a “drop-everything and make sure I get that contract!”, but is now a streamline system that allows me to keep working on my current projects whilst also being in touch with a potential new client.

Price and timeline negotiation also falls under adaptability, and is pretty damn important as a freelancer, and for anyone else getting paid as well. Manage your own and your client’s project and expectations. Be firm with the prices you won’t go below. If you get a price above that, awesome. If you get an offer below that, is it truly worth it? I have taken on projects for pay below my ideal price range and have truly regretted it an innumerable amount of times. However, there were a few times where the work contents provided precious experience and allowed me to grow and find more clients or increase my future prices. The adaptability to be able to toe that line and find the goldilocks zone takes time to develop, but can be developed.

Most importantly, being adaptable as a freelancer means looking at yourself and measuring how you’re faring. Are you managing? Is it too much work? If yes, how much more can you manage healthily? What can you do to give yourself some space? There are many ‘maintenance’ questions that should also be on your mind, and a reminder to ask yourselves these never hurts. Avoiding burnout and staying healthy is what will keep you going and growing.

As a Student

Students are similar to freelancers in many ways, not the least of which is their core reliance on adaptability. Every lesson is different, every teacher is different, every test is different, and every assignment is different. Not only that, but whereas jobs—freelance or otherwise—have an initial learning curve that eventually evens out and comes back only with the occasional update, promotion, or transfer, students have a constant learning curve. That’s kind of the point, really. But within that learning curve, you can find and extract a routine. Create your own organisational ‘backbone’ that is both solid enough to maintain and flexible enough to adapt. The educational facility you are in will provide a general structure of its own, but you have to adapt to that. And in the case of many, many other people who continue to be students in their own time, there is no such structure. You have to build the structure, assign tasks, objectives, and more by yourself, for yourself.

Living and learning, or spending your entire life learning new things is a precious gift that many overlook because of the efforts it seems to require. It certainly does take effort and discipline to create a structure around which you consistently study towards a specific goal; but it doesn’t take all that much effort and ‘adaptability’ to study a little bit every day, keeping your mind stimulated and your knowledge and experience ever-growing.

To keep on studying, structured or not, enrolled or not, on your own or not, you’ll need adaptability. The ability to assess your own skill level at a given moment and evaluate where you are at, where you want to and need to be, and how to get there.

I, for one, studied very little in school. In fact, I hated studying down to my core. But, and this I learned through reflection and hindsight, I still loved learning. It was just a question of structure and motivation. Returning to complete my final year of high school at the age of twenty three, five years after having dropped out was one of the best experiences of my life. I not only had the motivation to go (get my diploma and pursue education in Japan), but I had some years of experience working, and actually studying for something I was passionate about: Japanese. The combination of studying for Japanese exams over the years (JLPT, Kanken, Goken, EJU) and the year in high school has shifted my perspective significantly, and I have noticed how significantly my efficiency in studying has been boosted ever since.

I remember being in high school (the first time around) and preparing for exams by going through my notes, and just copying them. I didn’t enjoy it, wasted a bunch of time trying to make my notes as neat as possible, and didn’t actually learn anything new or retain what I had ‘studied’.

Contrary to studying assigned syllabus content in school, I always enjoyed studying Japanese and could go on for hours ever since I started learning it. I now have daily minimum study goals, an organised study plan, and several goals that I strive towards, short-term, long-term, abstract, and more specific (Japanese learning guide coming at some point!). For something you’re interested in, it’s much easier to get moving and stay consistent. The challenge is how to carry those skills over to content that you’re not necessarily ‘impassioned’ about. This is where adaptability comes in. Start with motivation and continue with discipline.

Find the methods, techniques, and timelines that make the best use of your time. Copying notes is not really going to make you progress. Highlighting key terms, writing a resume of your notes and reframing them as a lesson? That will give you some progress as you actively think about the content. Doing practice questions. Spaced repetition of content. Learning by teaching (LdL). Second Brain. There are many study methods that are becoming increasingly popular online, and ample resources for you to try them. Take all of this with a grain of salt, though—what works for one person won’t necessarily work for the other. Some need a ledger full of techniques that they regularly cycle through to maintain interest and progress in studying. Others have a stack of paper, post-its, and a binder system that they have used for five years and will continue to use to great effect.

The main takeaway is that experimentation is key. Trial and error for various methods and learning approaches, layered upon a basic foundation of a routine for regularity, will get you far. You need the adaptability to build this for yourself, mould it to your constantly changing environment and ideal study space, and continue to look at yourself and your progress to evaluate it to see what to do next.

It takes time, but it is absolutely achievable. A little bit of change every day will make a bigger difference at the end of the year than a lot of stop-and-go ‘big overhauls’ that ultimately achieve little. I’m still constantly improving and growing as a student, and I still have a long ways to go. But thanks to my work experience and my high school experience, I have improved my adaptability, which I’ve been applying to my learning. And I cannot recommend it enough.

As an individual

I’ve covered adaptability as a freelancer and a student, but those are pretty specific cases. And adaptability is certainly not limited to either of those categories. Life will always throw curveballs your way, and being able to handle those will make a significant difference. It will change how long it takes you to get back up, and may even save you from getting knocked down in the first place.

Adaptability is going to be the backbone to setting a routine. To maintaining your physical and mental health. Establishing a work-life balance. Staying on top of things, and most importantly being able to handle them when you don’t.

As with every life skill, it takes time and experience to learn adaptability. But as I discussed in the student section, you can make your ‘learning’ more efficient. That covers gaining this new skill, too. It becomes key to reflect on events that happen and strategies you can take to avoid them happening or encourage them—without falling into the ‘what if’ or ‘I should have…’ spirals.

For example, over the past five years I’ve dropped sixty kilos in weight. I went from being morbidly obese and pre-diabetic, to exercising every single day, and doing 10KM races for fun (hopefully a triathlon in the coming years, too). The difference in mental state, approach, and discipline in regards to every day life is night and day to say the least. And it took 5 years of failing upward to get to a place where I kind of know what I’m doing and where I’m going with this. And that’s ok! I had to adapt to what was best for me at the time, starting with just going for walks and reducing my daily calorie intake month by month. Then, working out more actively. Eventually going to the gym. Watching my nutrition more. Creating a workout plan. And constantly updating where I was and where I was aiming for.

The most difficult part of the whole journey was patience; being able to be satisfied with myself at the present point in time and knowing that I can still improve. Now, let me put a disclaimer here and say that I still have a long ways to go in terms of how I approach my health, and I still have many, many moments of ‘weakness’ or falling back on old habits.

The difference is the adaptability and the set of tools I’ve gained from my experiences allow me to get back on the right path much quicker. If I get knocked down, I’ll get back up, learn from the experience, and get back up faster next time.

It’s a specific example, and it’s not applicable to all scenarios. The unexpected can happen in much more serious ways and genuine, insanely difficult-to-overcome events may suddenly drop one after the other. It’s not always going to be the same as having a clear goal of losing weight or getting healthier. But the core principle remains: adaptability that you develop over time will keep you moving forward no matter what.

Self-awareness, mindfulness, and bouncing back. You’ll be moving forward and growing more and more with each step before you know it. There’s no possible way to prepare for every single scenario out there. But it sure damn helps to prepare anyways.

Most important of all—keep your adaptability flexible

What’s that even supposed to mean?

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

There is such a thing as overcorrection, and sometimes the right answer is to keep on doing things exactly as you have been doing them, or dial back the sudden changes. Adaptability occasionally takes the shape of maintaining your old routine in a new environment.

As I’m guilty of to some extent in this blog post, over-saturating your brain with new-fangled neologisms and ‘revolutionary’ learning techniques or study habits or what have you runs the risk of having a contrary effect and actually causing you to fall back into old habits or find new, unfavourable ones. As with acquiring adaptability, moderating it requires reflection and awareness. Are you overcorrecting? Are you taking on too much in terms of new approaches and methods? Are you actually applying the techniques properly and seeing their results, or just trying things out and immediately throwing them away?

Another trap many (including myself) are wont to fall for is putting all of the effort into planning. By the time you have to carry out your plan or implement your new routine, you’re out of steam. You’ve used up your motivational burst, and haven’t built any of the discipline needed to continue. The best strategy for coping with this that I have used across the board is “just start”. Occam’s razor. Especially for yourself, especially for tasks and changes that take copious trial and error, planning will be convoluted. So just start, and plan along the way. Make your plan flexible. You’ll develop that ‘backbone’ of a plan that I mentioned earlier as you go along, and all of the extra little bits will show up along the way.

Sometimes, what we think is “self-improvement” or adaptability is not actually improving us. We are blinded by overplanning or shiny new techniques or stationary, and forget to actually improve along the way. So keeping your adaptability flexible and in check is always a good idea. It’ll be more sustainable in the long run.

To Summarise - Reflect, Adapt, Moderate, and Repeat!

Developing a certain degree of mindfulness and regular reflection on your progress and current state is at the core of adaptability. Without it, you won’t know what to change, how to change it, or whether it’s working. Reflection then allows you to determine the path that you take, set your goals, and evaluate along the way. Learning to look into yourself objectively and subjectively takes time, but makes everything that much easier to approach in life.

Adaptability will develop over time and with experience, but the more self-aware you are as you go through life, the quicker you will acquire it, and the quicker you will grow. Your efficiency in tackling tasks and adapting your routine will allow you to progress in all areas of life with surprising speed. And the best part is, there’s always something that you can keep improving. Life is an adventure. Expect the unexpected, and enjoy both when you can.

Finally, moderation and evaluation. Know when to step back and take a breather from self-improvement. It can be exhausting to constantly push yourself, and the best sign of you ‘adapting’ is knowing when to hit pause and dial it down.

In the end, adaptability is a broad term. It covers a lot, but there are clear fundamental principles to it. The best part about it is you can learn it and you can always develop it further and further. Take it from me—it’s the best skill that I have acquired and worked on. It’s changed my perspective and approach to so many aspects of my life: professional, academic, and personal. It is one of my consistent goals. I certainly hope I was able to share a bit of it with you.

You live and you learn. It’s a gift!