4 Skills I am Learning in 2024 for Elevating Chances of Success
“When a man's value is no longer measured by what he does, by his finances or social standing, how does he determine his worth? In our world, a man's presence - his depth of awareness - is his most valuable asset.” ― David Deida
Whenever I fall sick or go on holiday, I more often than not end up miserable.
When I step away from the daily hum of work and back-to-back meetings, I get more time to think about what I want out of my life, and questioning whether how I am leading my life is enough to get me there. When the answer is no (which it often is), feeling miserable is the obvious next step for the brain.
So, step 1 is thinking about my priorities and actions, step 2 is feeling sad about not doing enough. This article is all about the 3rd step.
The third step involves reassuring myself of the fundamental realities in front of me, deciding on a few concrete actionable for myself and then dragging myself back to work on the grindstone.
“Start With the End in Mind” — Stephen Covey, Author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Before I explain why I am learning the things I am and how they in my opinion, are the fastest way to achieve my goals, I think I should make clear what my goals are.
My goal is to create meaningful value for as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, and set an inspiring example for others how consistent efforts can help make meaningful change in anyone’s life.
It’s a big goal, and as big goals usually are, it’s hard to break down into simple actionable steps. The fact that there is an element of “as quickly as possible” also thrown in the midst of it doesn’t help either.
So, as I usually do to solve any problem or answer any questions I have, I turned to other people and books.
I studied the work of Dan Koe, David Deida, Alex Hormozi, Ali Abdaal, Daniel Priestley and many others. And after listening to what all of them had to say, I started sensing some patterns.
These patterns are nothing but gaps which I consistently identified between my current state and the state these smart and ultra successful people are promoting. To put it simply, I identified skill gaps.
There are things which I don’t know and things I don’t have enough practise over. Learning these will put me on track to achieve my goals. Time spent on anything else, whether I like it or not, is wasted cycles.
Whether this mindset is healthy or not, you should ask @nateliason, but given that I don’t intend to change my mind set in the near future, I have decided on the following skills to learn and get better at in order to “create the most amount of value in the least time” - which is my goal:
1. Leveraging AI
Author Nat Eliason mentions that when computers first started figuring out the game of chess, there were three very distinct phases.
In the first phase, the computers reliably lost to the humans. They couldn't beat them at chess.
Then, there was a phase where the computers could sometimes beat the humans at chess, but not always. Humans still stood a chance. 𝐃𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞, 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧-𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬. A human could sometimes beat a computer, the computer would have the upper hand on other occasions, but a human and computer working together would end up having the highest chances of success.
But eventually, that phase ended, and the computers dominated everyone.
One day, we'll get there with our day jobs too and human presence would cause more problems than benefits.
But we’re not there yet. We're in this sweet spot, the phase deux, where you have an incredible opportunity to make AI your friend, your most powerful tool and make the most of it.
I commit to do all I can and learn and educate people about this wonderful and powerful new tool. I even used generative AI to create my latest YouTube video’s thumbnail (https://twitter.com/sudomakes/status/1786723870411505940).
If you are looking for a good place to start, I suggest you follow AI stalwarts like Dan Shipper and Mustafa Suleyman and keep an eye on what's continuously cooking at OpenAI and Microsoft.
2. Marketing and Sales Skills
Any technological advancement of the past decades has done one thing - lowered bars of entry and slashed costs of creation.
AI will get better at doing work that currently takes humans much more time to do on their own. This implies that those who learn how to leverage AI well, will be able produce far more products in a much shorter amount of time than was possible before.
If anyone can make a song, author a book or animate a movie, more people than ever before will take a shot at it. We move from a problem of lack of enough products to a new problem of lack of distribution.
And this is where evergreen skills like marketing and sales will come in.
The real challenge is getting an overstimulated population with shrinking attention spans to believe in you, remember you and interact with your work or product out of a sea of other things vying for their attention.
And this according to me is the second important piece of the puzzle towards hitting my goals. I am currently reading $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi to get better at this skill.
3. Personal Branding
The biggest ROI that can be received from getting better at marketing and sales is investing in one’s personal brand.
In the modern age, people don’t believe much in companies and traditional brands as much but can definitely get behind their favourite influencer or content creator. For example, if you work out, there is a high chance you have a favourite fitness influencer on YouTube whose free videos and workouts you follow.
Now tomorrow if you wanted to go out and buy a protein supplement, which one would you buy? There’s a high chance you’d go with whatever your idol is selling.
My hunch is that personal branding and being influential online will not be a skill for the select-few in the future. If you want to succeed, being well-known would be a pre-requisite. My YouTube channel, my social media posts, as well as this essay that you are reading are all efforts towards honing this skill.
4. Writing
“More than anything else, I consider myself a professional writer at this point. That's what I do, more than anything else with my time actually”. — Linus Sebastian, Former CEO of Linus Media Group
A huge part of getting better at personal branding is getting better at writing. Writing helps you think better, among other things.
You probably underestimate how important writing is. It’s useful not only to write essays like this, but every YouTube video script, every Instagram post caption, every email you send, heck every WhatsApp message you type, benefits from this one skill.
This skill is so valuable that even a consistent 1% improvement on a regular basis can make the difference between those who succeed and those who just get by.
LLMs with their advanced ability to condense and expand knowledge at the blink of an eye will make high quality and incredibly clear writing more important than ever. I suggest following Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush to learn how to get better at writing.
Conclusion
“If I ain't the greatest then I'm headed for it.” — Aubrey Graham
So this is my action plan, my straw to hold onto in this storm which I find myself in. Will it work out? Only time can answer that.
I would like to know what your plans are. Are you also concerned about your future and if your actions are good enough to get you where you want to be? Maybe we can discuss this in the comments.