Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It involves perceiving and connecting with their emotions, fostering understanding, and often responding with compassion and support. Mathematics is the language of patterns and relationships in the world. It’s about quantifying, measuring, and analyzing structures, numbers, and shapes to solve problems and understand the universe with precision and logic. My contention is that empathy is harder than math.
Math is a hard skill that can be learned through study, practice, and repetition. Empathy is a soft human skill that can only be developed through experience, reflection, and feedback. Math is objective and measurable. Empathy is subjective and variable. Both skillsets are beautiful and, at times, chaotic.
Note: I wholeheartedly reject the nomenclature that technical skills like numeracy, programming, or quantitative analysis are the hard skills of school and work. Sharing the feelings of others requires being in touch with – and possibly being in control of – myriad complex emotions and feelings, which is super hard.
Our complex, diverse, and interconnected world demands more than just technical competence. We need to be able to collaborate, communicate, and innovate with people who have different backgrounds, values, and opinions. We need to be able to solve problems that have no clear answers or algorithms. We need to be able to adapt to changing situations and expectations. We need to do all these things collaboratively with complex humans who yield complex, ever-changing emotions and there isn’t really an algorithm that can manage such scenarios.
The more we seek to understand and share with others, the more novel and interesting our ideas become. The more we lean into the vulnerable awkward superpower of empathy, the more healthy and meaningful connections we create.
Empathy is not a soft skill. It’s hard and almost impossible to master. That’s what makes it such an awesome superpower.