Tag: business

Three underrated skills that everyone should learn

1. Sales.

Whether you like it or not, you’re involved in a sales pitch every day. In addition to trying to be sold by retailers, you’re also being sold/selling what you should eat for dinner, what movie you’re going to watch, what your plans should be for this weekend, etc. If you get good at selling, you’ll get what you want more often than not in life. The key is to not make it sound like a sales pitch. People like to buy. They get excited about buying. But they hate being sold.

2. Storytelling.

Good storytelling can capture imaginations, paint vivid pictures, express ideas that can’t be conveyed otherwise, and win people over. If you are a good storyteller, you’ll naturally draw people’s attention and they will be more likely to enjoy your company.

3. Carpentry.

To be a good carpenter, you generally have to have good forethought to see what repercussions there are for what you are about to do. It requires hands on skill. And, there is usually more math involved than most people think. Doing work with your hands accesses a different part of your brain than reading, writing, or listening, and is essential to becoming as well-rounded as possible.

Listen to build better relationships

Listen with the same passion with which you want to be heard.

Everyone wants to be heard. You do. I do. We all do. When you’re talking and someone cuts you off mid-sentence, or pulls their phone out, do you like that feeling? Do you ever get the sense that someone’s response seemed almost canned, like it was kind of relevant, but not really, and that the person was just waiting for their turn to make a point? Now, admit it, have you ever done this to someone else?

Stop doing that.

As much as you want to be listened to when you’re talking, so does the person with whom you are talking! Make sure you stop trying to “multitask” and start paying attention to whoever you’re with. This will lead to better, stronger relationships with them and a feeling of connection that benefits you both.

If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.
“If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.” – Harriet Lerner

How do you view failure?

How do you view failure? Are you afraid of it? Is it something to be avoided at all costs?

I used to think about failure that way. It was my biggest fear. I didn’t want to look dumb by not knowing something, or by trying to do something and being inadequate at it. That was a nightmarish scenario in my mind.

But the more I read, the more I realized that life’s greatest entrepreneurs, the most innovative thinkers, and the people we often think of as the most outwardly successful all had one thing in common. All of them took chances and they all failed along the road to success.

Many of them “failed fast.” And that’s actually a strategy for a lot of successful people. Why take a year to fail at something when you can get the same lessons by failing within a couple of weeks? Fail quickly, make corrections, then try again. If you fail again, make more corrections and repeat.

You are more likely to see quicker progress (and, ultimately achieve your goal) if you fail quickly as opposed to slowly. There are many reasons for that, but I believe the two most important reasons are this:

1. You’re taking action. If you want to achieve something, take massive action. Most of us set too long of a timeframe to achieve our goals. We can accomplish them much quicker if we just take bigger, more frequent steps to get us towards our goals. You need to build momentum.

2. You feel more accomplished. It’s a little counterintuitive that you feel more accomplished after failing quickly, but hear me out. You’re taking action, moving (mostly) in the right direction over a short period of time. That feels way better than slowly doing something because you can see a tangible difference in where you are today versus where you were a week or two ago. Not only that, but say you move slowly and then realize after a year that whatever project you were working on wasn’t going to work. How unmotivating is that? You just “wasted” a year trying to do something when, if you would have taken massive action, you could have figured out in months? That’s rough.

Failure is a good thing as long as it doesn’t kill you (or your business) and you learn from it. Get back up after you’ve been knocked down. Try something new and you will be one step closer to your goal. One of my favorite quotes is from Denis Waitley. He said, “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” So go be somebody. Go do something. You’re only a failure if you either don’t try in the first place or if you quit.

Four things to avoid when trying to improve…

1. Avoid getting locked into bad habits. You usually have an idea of if you shouldn’t be doing something, so don’t do it.

2. Avoid resisting change. Change not for change’s sake, but to progress. Always strive for a better way to do something – doing it more effectively, more efficiently, or finding something to replace it. (Do you need to be doing that activity at all? Does anyone?)

3. Avoid seeking comfort in repetition. Just because it’s comfortable doesn’t make it right. The greatest times of accomplishment are often preceded by the greatest challenges/struggles which push us outside our comfort zone. We must embrace challenge.

4. Avoid applying old solutions to new problems. Your core values should stay the same. Your goal(s) might stay the same. But your tactics on how to complete the goal could (and probably should) change somewhat regularly, depending on if the tactics are producing the results you want. Just because a specific solution worked for something else doesn’t mean it will work for this new problem.

Solving problems with money?

The “easy” solution is to throw more money at the problem. But while that may fix the problem short-term, it is really only acting as a band-aid. The underlying problem is still there. You may have stopped the bleeding or helped to prevent the wound from getting infected, but you haven’t healed anything.

While it’s tempting to throw money at the problem, use that either as a temporary stopgap, knowing that you need to get a plan together and put it in place ASAP – OR – avoid trying to fix your problems with money altogether (especially if you’re a startup/don’t have expendable cash yet).