Before you take me too literally and ask how we’re supposed to turn on/off new skills or ideas, know that I’m making a metaphor out of feature flagging.
Though I suppose in the not-too-distant future, we’ll one day be able to literally “feature flag” our abilities.
Back to present reality, the point I’m making is this:
Feature flagging is an approach used by many to greatly reduce the risk of a new feature to negatively impact up or down stream workflows. It’s also used to allow users control over what features they want active or inactive without needing backend/technical support.
How we translate this to new skills and ideas is by taking its spiritual purpose in mind: introduce new things into low-risk environments.
By introducing new skills or ideas into low-risk environments, we can evaluate how something may fare in a real-world scenario with minimized lasting impact, if any at all. One of my favorite examples of this is when practicing new communication skills: practice and put them to the test at places where your current social (or professional) circle is not.
By doing so, you can practice and communicate however which way you choose without being peer pressured to communicate how your peers expect you to.
Until we arrive at a future where we can literally turn on and off our abilities, that’s about as close as we can get to being able to:
Feature flag new skills or ideas.