A Career Hackers’ Classic, read the full post here.
Skills can give you an unfair advantage in life. And the best part is, no one is born with them.
You learn and equip yourself with the skills as you go through life. Skills help you succeed.
The secret to achieving what you want is that you need to add more skills. And these are the best to add to your stack:
The ability to evoke emotion in others
Probably the most influential skill one can learn is to be able to evoke an emotion in a person. This is also one of the most successful marketing strategies businesses use.
Emotions are powerful forces that make people relate to your story more and can lead people to make crazy decisions.
So harness the ability to evoke emotions in others.
The ability to persuade
Persuasion might sound like manipulation but it is very different.
Persuasion is about learning to think clearly, convey arguments, acquire facts, and influence others to consider your ideas.
Learn honest persuasion. (Start by writing online daily.)
The ability to turn your back on the drama
Living in the internet era attracts drama every once in a while.
But you become powerful if you learn to turn your back on it.
The way to get tough skin is to practice non-reactivity.
When you feel like responding to drama, stop yourself. Or sleep on it and the hate itch will be gone when you wake up.
This skill amplifies your reputation and shows self-control too.
Jumping in the mud and fighting with inconsiderate pigs only drags you down to their level.
A healthy reputation is what forms the conversations about you behind closed doors. These conversations generate opportunities.
The ability to keep going when you feel like giving up
The human experience is filled with rejection, failures, tragedies, and events that will make you want to give up.
But the most successful people are not the wealthiest, smartest, or most courageous. They are stupidly patient. And a little stubborn too. When it makes logical sense to quit, they double down.
The ability to transform ‘Harvard professor’ concepts into simple ones
What great writers do, is take complicated concepts that are unlikely to be understood easily by most people and make them simple.
Piling on the mountain of complexity is easy, but being disciplined about what ideas you share to explain a topic, and to heavily simplify all of them is hard. Simplify it to the level of 5th graders. And if you can do it, you are in for making loads of money.
The ability to invest
There are two types of people in life:
- Traders– Focused on short-term wins and check their stats daily. They trade time for money, status, and attention.
- Investors– Focused on the long-term. They make a series of small bets. They diversify their risk. They’re patient.
You see the difference. Investors get wealthy in life over the long term. Traders eventually become bankrupt in life. Upgrade from traders to investors mindset. Investing in skills, financial assets, relationships, a healthy career, and family has the highest payoffs.
The ability to stay optimistic when the world is burning
If you’re living in America, where one day you feel it’s the greatest country in the world and the other days it feels like the whole system is on fire and nobody cares, and you can be optimistic and look beyond those moments at the enormous prosperity that follows, then you are the real winner.
Optimism is a skill that makes everything better. The world isn’t the problem. It’s how you choose to see it that creates or destroys it.
The ability to think on your feet
Corporate culture teaches us to overanalyze, and over plan everything.
The ability to think on your feet is rare. It creates speed. And speed is often the deciding factor, not strategy, of what opportunities succeed or fail. Operate in this zone of genius to beat the average, slow donkey overthinking every little thing (and lighting great opportunities on fire as a result).
A powerful excerpt from the blog:
It’s easy to pile on a mountain of complexity. To have zero filters or curation. What’s hard is to be disciplined about what ideas you share to explain a topic, and to heavily simplify all of them.
Read the full post here.
Tim Dennig Aussie Blogger with 500M+ views — Writer for CNBC & Business Insider. Inspiring the world through Personal Development and Entrepreneurship.
