Success Quote by Robert Sternberg

Adapt or get erased: Sternberg’s line lands less like gentle career advice and more like a warning label on modern life. As an educator and psychologist who’s spent decades studying intelligence beyond test scores, he’s not praising “creativity” as a cute personality trait. He’s arguing it’s becoming a survival skill, because the economy is steadily reallocating routine work to software, automation, and cheaper labor markets.

The phrasing is doing quiet rhetorical work. “Very rapidly changing environment” borrows the language of evolution and business-school disruption, smuggling in the idea that stability is a nostalgic fantasy. “Think creatively” isn’t about artsy self-expression; it’s the capacity to reframe problems, learn fast, and recombine skills when the old playbook stops paying rent. Then comes the hard edge: “you lose big.” That bluntness punctures the comforting myth that diligence alone guarantees security.

The subtext is also a critique of how society sorts people. “Very few jobs…left” implies not just technological change, but an institutional failure: schools and workplaces still reward compliance and standardized performance while claiming they want innovation. Sternberg is pointing at the mismatch between what we measure (scores, credentials, narrow competence) and what the labor market increasingly demands (adaptability, judgment, creative problem-solving).

Context matters: coming from an educator, it’s implicitly a call to redesign learning. If students are trained to follow instructions in a world that keeps rewriting them, they’re being prepared for jobs that are already disappearing.