2025: The Year of the Soft skills

It’s time to grow beyond the graphs and invest in the skills that make us truly irreplaceable.

For most of my life, I’ve operated like a human calculator — plugging in inputs, applying a fixed set of rules, and trusting the (hopefully) deterministic outputs. This highly analytical mindset has been my guiding compass in areas such as Software Development, Physics, Finance, and Data Analytics throughout my professional and even private life.

It would be dishonest to say this approach hasn't been successful. These disciplines are my comfort zone. Almost every problem has a law or rule I can rely on for certainty. And in that certainty lies security.

But here’s the thing: my world of logical precision leaves little mental real estate for emotions or human connection. You’re constantly flirting with burnout by trying to fit every situation into a perfectly explainable, repeatable framework.

I’d be lying if I claimed not to recognize the potential pitfalls of this way of thinking. Yet understanding something and truly internalizing it are two very different things. And, in my case, it took a single YouTube lecture to spark a small quarter-life crisis.

A few weeks ago, I revisited the concept of Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) valuations. I grasp the math, but I’ve never found a practical mental framework to estimate future cash flows or choose the right discount rates. It was a puzzle I wanted to solve purely for the sake of solving it, not for any practical gains.

My search led me to Aswath Damodaran’s lectures on company valuation. He’s a phenomenal teacher by the way. In one of the opening lectures, he explains how it would be very challenging for him to teach the concepts of company valuations to Engineers. Their number- and truth-driven minds get hung up on explaining every single detail and connection in their quest for the "absolute truth".

I perfectly understood his point intellectually. But emotionally, I didn't want to. Here was someone essentially telling me, through my screen, that he wouldn’t be able to teach me something because of the way I think about problems.

Yet I knew he was right, because the mere fact that I was watching his lecture was proving his point. I was there solely to find "the truth". A recipe I could just pull out whenever I would need it.

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, that moment led me to reassess how I approach some things in life in general.

Maybe it’s time to move beyond the hyper-analytical worldview and start embracing the intangible. So, in 2025, I’m making a deliberate investment in strengthening my softskills and communication abilities. This growth feels essential — not just as a personal evolution but also as a hedge against the rising influence of large language models (LLMs).

While I still firmly believe Software Developers aren’t disappearing anytime soon, I’d prefer to stay one compelling story (or charming smile) ahead of something like Devin.ai.

Here’s to growth beyond numbers and technology for 2025.