Three Essential Skills For Todays World

lot of people are turned off by learning. And if you don't find learning one of the most exciting things in the world, then the whole game, everything else will fall apart. But it has to be something that excites you. I've said to many people that live in world where knowledge and skills are the most important thing. That's the goal that you are after more than money. You want to develop knowledge and skills. And so this person asks, "What would be the three or so skills that are the most essential moving forward in the 21st century?" And you know, it's not like specific skills that I'm going to talk about like coding or, you know, mastering AI or going to some business strategy because think that's not really what the spirit of the question is. In general, there are certain kind of personal skills that you want to develop. Okay. So, number one, and this is something that have in my book, Mastery, you must see being social and getting along with people and cooperating and knowing how to work with people as skill. It's not something you were born with. It's not something that some people are good, bad, or bad at. Like anything, it is skill that you develop. being social and knowing how to work with people and knowing how to be sensitive to their energy. And in this skill, what it is is you're able to pay attention to people and see who they are as an individual and see what their particular needs are, what they're missing in life, and you're able to supply that. You're able to enter their spirit. You don't offend them unnecessarily. You know how to work with them, right? you know how to properly criticize them if that's necessary. Because if you don't understand that being social is skill, if you don't develop it, you could be the greatest at whatever you could do. You could be even the greatest athlete in the world, but you're going to be offending your teammates. You can be offending the people that you work with and all of your knowledge and your other skills are going to be completely neutralized by how bad you are in dealing with people. And so when you look at social as skill, what that means is you have to be spending time with people. You got to get out of your phone. You got to get out of your office. You got to get out of all of your virtuality. You have to be around people. You have to interact more. That's the only way that you will become social. And if you find yourself, you know, alone lot. And and have found that difficult. You have to force yourself out there. You have to force yourself to go to clubs, to go to bars, to hang out with people. So developing social skills is incredibly important, but it's not the only thing, right? So another skill that's extremely important and probably the most important of all is to develop love of learning. know personally when there's something that don't know, there's something that I'm not good at that then take an effort to like learn it to get better at it. And I'm not going to make say specifics. It could be some sports or it could be playing musical instrument or game. That process of learning to me is so exciting. It's like know it because when was child, getting better at something is really, really exciting process. So, will give you an example. years ago when was writing the war book, got myself pool table because wanted something to take my mind off the war book which is really heavy and was like kind of driving me crazy and wanted something where could just do kind of feel the strategy in the game itself and just kind of get out of my head. And at first was really bad at it, but slowly got better and better. was practicing and was playing against myself, you know, which is pretty easy. And would read books about it and would practice certain shots and when could make like double bank shot and things like that or put spin on the ball, was so excited. Man, this was really great. The feeling that you're improving at something. lot of people are turned off by learning. And if you don't find learning one of the most exciting things in the world, then think you're never going to develop the whole game. Everything else will fall apart. But it has to be something that excites you. If you are somebody who's interested in literature and you try and learn algebra, that could be interesting. You may enjoy the challenge, but you won't learn as much because you're not really that interested in it, right? But if you learn like foreign language like French where you can read the literature, you're so motivated that you will learn and you will that natural love that you have will come out. The other skill that you must develop, so just to reiterate, is being social, having love of learning. The third one is kind of related to the second one, but it is patience. lot of people nowadays are really really impatient. And the reason think is mean, I'm very have lot of impatience myself, so can't preach about that. But the reason why think it's gotten worse is we're so used to the power of our phones, of our computers, that we think everything should be happening quickly and instantly. If we have to wait 5 seconds to get piece of information on the internet, we think, my god, it's taking so long. It's takes so long to download." Whereas 20, 30 years ago, you would have had to go to the library. You would have to spend an hour to do it. You learned how to develop patience to find things. But people are so impatient because everything is so quick and easy and powerful right now. So you want to be able to slow things down. You want to have the ability to say if it's going to take me an hour to learn this, if have to spend time practicing something that's tedious, I'm okay with it. like the slowness. actually embrace the pain that's involved. So learning anything, developing any skill involves pain. When first got that pool table, was so bad at it. It was so frustrating and it really made me kind of upset because like being really good at things, right? But played every day and got better and better and better and better. And then remember one day mentioned this before. was playing with 50 Cent in his office and beat him three times in row and he's pretty good pool player. felt, "Wow, man, I've arrived." But then had humbling experience few days later when went to this pool hall in Manhattan and got creamed by this other guy. So, you know, put kind of put it in perspective, but was getting better at it. had to be patient because at first really sucked at it. So, developing patience is absolutely critical thing. And related to that, so all these things are kind of related to that is the ability to be bored. Right? So sometimes boredom is good thing. Sometimes being frustrated in in what you're doing is okay because it forces you it forces you to be patient and to slow things down as well. One other thing would say is and had interview about this is the ability the skill it is skill of managing your anxiety. So, when you're starting something out, when you're trying to build business, when you're trying to write book, when you're trying to create movie, you're going to feel lot of anxiety because it's not there. It's going to take lot of work. You're looking month, for me, years of work to produce it. And it makes you kind of anxious and it makes you, as said before, impatient. But being able to deal with your anxiety and being able to handle it and manage it and not get in hurry to get to the goals that you want is very important. Those elements of dealing with boredom, dealing with anxiety, and impatience are all interrelated. They're the ability to slow things down, to deal with the micro aspects of any kind of learning process. Those are skills that think are absolutely essential for going forward in the 21st century because what you want the endgame of all this is because you love learning because you've been patient and you've developed skills and you're good with people you will reach point where you have mastered couple of things. Right? So it's not like you want to go through life and just master one thing. You want to master two at least two kind of real skills in the world. For me it was writing and research and there were few others but being able to combine writing and research as had was what led to the 48 laws of power. So you reach point where you develop two two or three really basic skills and then when you're 30 or or in that vicinity you're able to combine them and to create something new kind of business new kind of enterprise. And because we live in an age where there's so much information available and so many skills you can learn even online developing that absolutely guarantee that something brilliant will happen for you. But if you don't have the patience and the love of learning then none of this will ever matter. So those are the skills think that are essential.