Welcome to Skill Bearings

Skill Bearings digs into your past experiences and skills to examine what got you to be where you are now, so you can understand where you want to go.

This is the first release of our overall personal learning and development navigation system.

As with all navigation systems, it is made up of three main components:

  • Orienteering - Determining your current location and direction
  • Route Finding - Finding the best path to your destination
  • Resource Guide - Understanding what is available to you at a given location

Currently, we are building Orienteering and seeking a small design partner group to test it.

We're looking for lifelong trackers/organizers of data and multidisciplinary generalists who:

  • Love organizing information and data
  • Seek to track their skill progress
  • Want to build a personal learning curriculum
  • See learning is an interconnected system
  • Don't fit under a single, narrow job title
  • Don't solve singular, narrow problems
  • Jump across fields

If you are ready to give dimension to your story, sign up to be a design partner.

If you need more context, learn about how it works.

Example Profiles

Founders

Historical Figures

  • Ada Lovelace
    Ada Lovelace established her historic trajectory through an unconventional childhood education heavily focused on mathematics and logic, designed intentionally to suppress her inherited romantic imagination. Guided early on by the mentorship of Mary Somerville, she gained entry into the highest scientific echelons of Victorian England. Her career peaked during her intense collaboration with Charles Babbage, where she transformed from a technical translator into a premier computing visionary. Her primary legacy rests on her conceptualization of the Analytical Engine's software layer, establishing foundational paradigms for theoretical computability and machine architecture before dying prematurely at age thirty-six.
  • Alan Turing
    A visionary mathematician, logician, and master cryptanalyst whose cross-functional breakthroughs laid the structural bedrock for the modern digital era. Driven by an intrinsic need to define the exact limits of mechanical calculation and solve existential wartime threats, he successfully pioneered the theoretical architecture of the Universal Turing Machine, engineered the electromechanical Bombe to systematically crack the German Naval Enigma cipher, and established the definitive baseline criteria for modern artificial intelligence. His extraordinary developmental trajectory, evolving from non-traditional childhood tinkering into expert-level execution across digital circuit design, information theory, and mathematical biology modeling, validated the real-world capabilities of general-purpose electronic computing and permanently altered the course of human history.
  • Alexander von Humboldt
    The ultimate scientific disruptor of the 19th century and a visionary polymath who fundamentally re-engineered how humanity understands the natural world. Moving seamlessly from a meticulous Prussian mining administrator to a daring global explorer, Humboldt rejected the siloed, rigid academic traditions of his era. Instead, he pioneered Systems Thinking, collecting massive, instrument-driven datasets across continents to prove that the Earth is a single, interconnected living web where climate, geography, and biology continuously interact. As the founding father of Field Biogeography and modern Climatology, his legendary expeditions through the Americas and his late-career synthesis in Kosmos set the global standard for empirical data acquisition and ecological modeling. His career remains a masterclass in multi-disciplinary excellence, bridging the gap between hyper-precise physical science and holistic global conservation.
  • Claude Shannon
    A visionary mathematician and electrical engineer widely revered as the "father of information theory" for fundamentally defining the mathematical limits of digital communication, data compression, and data transmission. Pioneering MIT master's thesis bridged Boolean algebra and electrical relays, single-handedly establishing the theoretical framework for all modern digital computing and switching architecture. Throughout prolific career at Bell Labs and MIT, seamlessly balanced monumental breakthroughs in wartime cryptography and telecommunications with a playful, lifelong passion for early artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and novelty mechanical prototyping.
  • Hedy Lamarr
    Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Hedy's analytical mind was sparked during childhood walks with her father, leading her to independently disassemble and examine physical machinery like clocks and music boxes. After transitioning to an internationally recognized acting career, she used her private time between movie takes to pursue rigorous engineering experiments resourced by industrial partners like Howard Hughes. Her crowning achievement came during World War II when, alongside composer George Antheil, she invented a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum communication system to prevent the jamming of radio-controlled torpedoes. Though long overlooked by contemporary military authorities, her architectural design serves as a foundational milestone for modern wireless infrastructure, including Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth technology.
  • Hildegard of Bingen
    Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath who began her monastic career as a religious recluse at Disibodenberg, near Staudernheim in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Her ultimate accomplishments include founding two independent, self-sustaining convents, publishing a monumental trilogy of visionary theology, composing a vast corpus of sacred music, and authoring authoritative scientific encyclopedias on natural healing. Her path was defined by a rare combination of meticulous day-to-day administrative grit and high-stakes strategic battles against church authorities to maintain her community's artistic and financial autonomy. She is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
  • Leonardo da Vinci
    Stands as history’s ultimate High Renaissance polymath, a visionary who refused to see any boundary between the beauty of art and the rigor of science. While universally celebrated for defining Western art with masterpieces like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, where he pioneered techniques like sfumato to capture hauntingly lifelike human psychology, his genius stretched far beyond the canvas. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Leonardo filled thousands of journal pages with revolutionary empirical studies in human anatomy, fluid dynamics, and mechanical flight, conceptualizing inventions centuries before the technology existed to build them. From his early days as a Florentine apprentice to his final years as a revered royal advisor in France, he lived not just as a painter, but as a timeless symbol of pure, unadulterated human curiosity.
  • Mary Somerville
    Mary Somerville began her career operating under the social constraints of her time. She received only a single year of formal schooling at age 10, where she struggled under rigid and uninspired teaching methods. Driven by immense personal curiosity, she began a lifelong journey of self-education, covertly mastering Latin, Greek, geometry, and algebra all while maintaining the polite baseline expectations of a Georgian lady. Her breakthrough came with her brilliant analytical translation of Laplace's work into accessible English, which launched her into global prominence, established her as an authority in physical sciences, and inspired the coining of the term scientist. Somerville College at Oxford is named after her, and upon her death the Morning Post said "Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science".