4 Hard Skills That Pay off Forever
With book recs and a bonus tip I use daily to level up even more
In perfect English, self-mastery is a bitch.
Learning how best to pilot your body and mind is a process that takes lifelong sustained effort, and often rewards you with minimal gains.
Everything you learn compounds. Incremental gains for exponential success.
Here are 4 hard skills to work on today for a better tomorrow:
1 — Clear communication, plain talk, twisted tongues
As long as we live, we’ll have to interact with other human beings. From the trivialities of ordering from a diner menu to the important scheduling of meeting times, being able to communicate your ideas clearly is literally a quicker way to success.
Being able to choose the correct words to convey information and hold the attention of others is the bread and butter of society. And I like my carbs!
If you’ve ever been to a high school graduation, you know just how cringey it can be to listen to students give speeches that sound ill-tempered, raggedy, and unpolished.
Now think about a great Ted Talk. The information is more likely to be clear-cut, digestible, and meaningful. Clear communication is a skill that develops with time.
Fortunately for us, spotlights are easy enough to avoid. But in the context of everyday life, finding ways to practice proper language use is vitally important to an efficient work ethic and bolsters the way you’re perceived. Not to mention the social capital you earn from wittiness and jest.
With enough effort, you’ll see gains immediately. I’m no Neil Gaiman, but my earlier writing was absolute dogshit against how I write now. And with more practice, I’ll think the same about my writing a year from now.
The best part is that learning to communicate clearly can be facultatively active. Intentional effort isn’t always a source of our learning. The awkward moment that comes from answering a misheard question is a wonderful teaching tool.
Go out in the world. Write, speak, engage in all forms. Practice how you see fit.
2 — Managing time and energy
There are days when I’ll have plenty of energy but not enough time, days when I’ll have time but not energy, and any combination of degrees between.
While scheduling time for activities is important, having enough energy to complete them to a high standard of quality is vital to producing impactful output.
It just sucks that in every matchup between humans and hustle culture, humans always lose.
Against the expectation of machine-like productivity, the fight is far from fair.
Here’s how to level the playing field: organize your days based on your energy levels.
It is absurd to think people can operate at maximum capacity for extended periods of time. Instead, it’s better to work with any fluctuations in our energy so we can capitalize on the type of work we can produce at our peaks and troughs.
Sinem Günel (aka one of our resident Medium giants) breaks her days into three types:
- Focus, where deep work with high returns is done. Writing, creating coursework, and interacting with her students are all pillars of a focus day.
- Buffer, where organizational and preparation is done. Responding to emails and accounting is typical on these days.
- Free days, where she participates in activities that restore her energy. Recharging through social interaction is done these days.
At the end of this article, I’ll link you to my in-depth look at the concept of proper energy management. Just know that monitoring is everything. Take extensive notes. Diet, sleep, content consumption — anything you feel might add or subtract to how energetic and focused you are in a day is important information.
The more you pay attention to these variables, the more able you’ll be to make use of energetic highs and lows.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received was from a literature professor and author. She told me to “do what you can when you can,” meaning that while writing (or any other activity) should be done every day, new words don’t always need to meet the page.
Some days you only feel inclined to edit. That’s part of the process. OK. On other days you might fill your day rereading passages of your favorite prose for inspiration. That’s fine too.
Pay attention to your energy. Work with the cycle. Expect fluctuation.
3 — Self Analysis, because Freud’s couch wasn’t enough for the cultural zeitgeist
Keeping a journal is the easiest life hack I’ll preach about until the end of time. Having a physical record of your thoughts is a great way to measure personal progress and track the development of ideas.
It is also extremely useful in trying to understand the motivations for your actions. In writing about behaviors alongside your ideas, patterns will emerge.
I know now that when my room is a mess, this is usually coupled with increased stress and higher output.
What a curious relationship to discover!
After reading a bit of Antifragile, I learned that in some circumstances, some people require a certain amount of what I’ll call a living noise, that is, some form of clutter, distraction, or static, in order to improve their quality of work.
I noticed this behavior before in one of my closest friends and roommate in college. He’d study with multiple screens around him. Streaming on one monitor, the game on the TV, and music for background. A slurry of static, cesspooled into the white noise of a productive study session.
There are a hundred other golden insights I’ve found among the pages. And no pressure, either. You don’t need to write every day, so long as you continue coming back to it.
Write in a journal. Think through your life on the page. Being able to have your present thoughts converse with previous ones is an enriching experience.
4 — Meta-learning, or, learning about thinking to think about thinking about learning
Learning about the human mind is a bit like reading the manual to a vacuum cleaner. The vacuum works fine by itself. But having the knowledge of how best to tend to a snag in the machine can come in handy whenever it begins to leave dirt on the floor.
And, should you find yourself curious enough to engineer it, knowing the shortcomings of a current vacuum design can pave the way for your own innovations.
The same is true about our cognition.
A Mind For Numbers planted the seeds for my current ideas on energy management based on how the brain works. Base knowledge for further thinking.
Atomic Habits tells us to adjust our workspace so that it increases the likelihood of positive behavior. I’ve since kept open journals and language learning textbooks (I’m attempting Japanese) out on my desk. Fully in sight.
I pick up and use these items daily. That’s progress. All thanks to hacking my brain a bit.
Lately I’ve been putting more time into learning better note taking methods. Learning about how the mind processes information and how best to store it has been a fruitful obsession.
Putting these practices to further use will serve my thinking in the future, cutting down on the time it takes to write articles like this where I make reference to several books with big ideas in them.
The human mind is a powerful tool. Learn to use it. Weaponize that shit. Go to war on productivity and emerge victorious.
5 — Bonus! Learn the theory of EQ curves and remold reality
This one is a bit niche, but is extremely valuable and something I use daily. Equalization, or EQ-ing, is the process of changing the values of sonic or visual media to make the listening or viewing experience more pleasurable to the audience.
Think of it as putting the polish on media content.
With sound, this is done either additively or subtractively. Additive EQ increases the amount of signal to that area. Subtractive EQ decreases that signal.
I won’t get into the technicalities of it. But knowing how to customize audio using EQ translates easily into everyday life.
If you enjoy EDM music, you might want to boost the bass signal in your headphones. Opening up your settings and tailoring the lows to your needs makes for a better listening experience.
If you ever record audio, removing some lows and mids and increasing a bit of the highs can make your voice come through cleaner.
There’s an inherently human reward in customizing your experiences. Tinkering with tools that change our perception is like magic.
The same is true in visual EQ curves. They are called something different in the land of video and photo editing, but I understand them as EQ because the theory translates smoothly to it.
Increasing the highs boosts the lighter tones in an image. Lows to shadows.
Audio is just audio. But visual content can be customized based on light and shadow and RGB channels, making for an intimidating challenge.
Of course, EQ is just one piece of the overall processing that goes into making finished media content. Well-produced podcasts and twitch streamers will also give you a wonderful masterclass in compression.
But knowing EQ theory is an important skill that is easy to understand and put to immediate use.
As an artist, I can geek about music production theory forever. For now, I’ll spare you, ha!
All these hard skills are valuable tools in your arsenal. Putting real time into practicing any of them will give you permanent and compounding rewards.
Hopefully through my ideas shared here, you’ll be able to begin thinking about self-improvement in deeper and different ways.
More value for you — Let’s continue our conversation about energy management. Read more about energy management here.
Even more value for you — Here’s that Sinem Günel article I mentioned earlier. A great take on categorizing your days based on energy levels.
P.S.: You should get my posts directly in your inbox. Do that here. If you want to enjoy more of Medium, you can support me and thousands of other writers by signing up for a membership. It’s only $5 a month, and you get unlimited access to every writer’s big ideas. Sign up with this link to support me directly with a portion of your fee at no extra charge. If you do, thank you so much and I’m looking forward to enjoying our time here together.