Career and Well-Being
If I Had Another Chance to Live in the Modern World, I’d Reinvest in Five Skills.
How mastering these skills made a difference in my professional, personal, and social life over the last five decades.
Why Mastering Certain Skills Are Crucial
As we make sense of the world using our skills, specific skills are crucial to surviving and flourishing in this modern world.
Although skill-building is a complex and tiresome activity, mastering a skill can be made joyful if we approach it with enthusiasm, optimism, and consistency methodically, alongside supportive mentors and coaches.
Over the last five decades, I developed many skills that helped me create, grow, and achieve desired results in my personal, professional, and social life. Some skills required formal education that took me 25 years.
However, I gained most of the essential skills through informal learning, bold experimentation, and consistent habit-building practices with a passion. Each skill in this list took me at least 10,000 hours to master.
Once, a savvy interviewer asked me if I had another chance to live in this modern world, which skills would I reinvest?
Thus, in this article, my objective is to briefly explain the importance of five game-changing skills making the most significant impact in my life alongside how I gained them. They were so crucial to me that if I was given another chance in life in this modern world, I’d reinvest in these five skills with devotion.
These five skills helped me earn my living and made me perform better in my personal and social life. In addition to contributing to my professional development, these critical skills also helped me solve my entangled health issues leading to a transformed life that I cherish.
As these skills are overexposed in job applications, they might lose their real meaning and impact. However, in my opinion, they are essential for everyone to survive and prosper in this modern world.
They are not ordinary skills that we can take for granted. They require considerable investment in terms of time and effort to become a thought leader in a field.
Gaining these skills just by reading books or watching videos does not seem adequate, even though those means could help. To reinforce the acquisition of these skills, one needs to try and develop these skills with consistent experimental and exploratory effort.
In addition, we need to integrate these skills into various aspects of our lives. For example, if one skill is skipping, its absence or weakness might affect the efficiency of others.
1 — Strategic and Tactical Planning
We manifest outcomes in our lives, starting with thoughts in visual formats, what leadership experts call vision. Everything begins with planning and creating mental maps.
It doesn’t matter how fast we drive in the wrong direction. Without a map showing us the right direction, it is impossible to reach our destination. Likewise, it is not feasible to achieve our goals without creating pragmatic plans.
I learned the importance of planning when I was in my primary school years. However, I developed my strategic planning skills during my postgraduate leadership education and research by observing distinguished leaders who transcended this skill.
The vital finding from these thought leaders was they planned strategically, considering multiple factors in the past, current, and future, aligning with their priorities, preferences, and a set of criteria.
As we seldom need to change a strategic plan, we need another approach to sustain our strategy in the right direction. My eye-opening moment was learning about the tactical approach to executing the strategy to manifest the vision as tangible outcomes. Using strategic and tactical planning helped me distinguish my profession, contributed to becoming a thought leader and empowered the richness of my personal life.
2 — Effective Problem Solving
Due to constant internal and environmental stimuli and catalysts, our body and mind need to react in order to survive and thrive. Therefore, we face constant setbacks manifesting as never-ending problems.
I survived the challenges of life, transformed my health, and earned my living by solving my personal problems and my client's problems. Thus, problem-solving is not a trivial skill. It is essential for everyone.
Problem-solving is a skill that refers to addressing an unpleasant or destructive situation when needed. It is a systematic approach using reflection, reasoning, creativity, multiple perspectives, instinct, intuition, various approaches, techniques, and tools. Problem-solving starts with identifying and defining a problem.
Then, following an established process, it is completed when the outcome is achieved. For example, relieving pain or resolving a customer complaint is an outcome of problem-solving.
Problem-solving is, directly and indirectly, related to strategic and tactical planning skills. My intensive research on leadership and cognitive science taught me that every leader and entrepreneur extensively use problem-solving skills to create and lead their followers.
Problem-solving is an essential cognitive skill entrusted by the executive part of the thinking brain. It includes other cognitive abilities like focus, attention, task switching, working memory, mindfulness, and critical analysis.
I introduced ten fundamental skills and key approaches to mastering problem-solving in an article titled Problem Solving: The Sexiest Skill of the Century: Practical tips to improve problem-solving skills with insights from the cognitive psychology literature.
3 — Information and Knowledge Management
I acquired information and knowledge management skills through formal education at a postgraduate level in 1990 when information started exploding via the emergence of personal computers and the Internet.
The curriculum at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where I live, included multiple facets of the discipline, including analyzing data, processing information, converting them to knowledge, and disseminating insights for public use. The course rewired my brain teaching me to drink from a firehose.
However, mastering information and knowledge management skills took me over 30,000 hours of subsequent practical work in large corporate organizations with many business and technical stakeholders.
Besides three years of master's and seven years of doctoral studies. I still work on sharpening this skill set as it is critical in my life and profession, also contributing to and enhancing my problem-solving and planning skills.
Nevertheless, everyone does not need such extensive formal education to acquire information and knowledge management skills. It is possible to gain the fundamentals in short courses covering critical aspects such as analyzing, processing, and digesting information.
From my experience, speed reading and prolific writing are essential sub-skills that can improve these necessary skills in the 21st century. The key attribute to consider is filtering information using a set of criteria that we design based on our necessities and goals.
4 — Influential Networking & Synergetic Collaboration
I loved working with machines in my younger years as they were easy to manage with predictable input, process, and output based on logic. However, this formula did not work with humans.
The process part was highly complex. Each person can process information differently and produce unpredictable results. An input with a perfect intention might end up in awful output. Working with people was the most complex thing in my life, so I had to master my networking and synergetic collaboration skills.
When solving complex problems for personal and professional requirements, I needed the support of other people. Just working with my immediate team was not adequate. Some difficult issues required input from people with expertise, wisdom, and extensive experience.
I desperately needed collaboration with others to develop my network and extend it to a broader scale. Meeting enormous client needs was impossible with just working with the primary team whose members lacked the essential capability.
To achieve my networking goals, I created several communities of practices to bring like-minded people together in my discipline. They helped me understand the requirements of consumers, guided me in the solution process, and cheered me up in achieving successful outcomes.
Trust, credibility, and authenticity were essential to influence people. Asking for help is an excellent way of collaborating in solving complex problems. The next skill set on my list empowered me a lot to work better with human beings.
5 — Effective Communication to Think on My Feet
To gain effective communication skills allowing me to think on my feet, I needed to learn about writing and public speaking. Interestingly, my analytical reading skills immensely contributed to improving my writing and public speaking skills.
Later, focusing on the abilities such as cognitive flexibility, social intelligence, and emotional regulation helped me master effective communication skills.
Sharing my thoughts in articles, scientific papers, blog posts, books, and design artifacts and presenting them in front of others with an authentic voice helped me attain effective communication skills. This skill set enabled me to think on my feet.
Communicating with people at different levels is challenging, requiring both broader and narrower perspectives interchangeably and flexibly. Initially, I enjoyed the like-minded people who elevated me by preparing me in a safe pool to swim in the ocean in later years.
As far as my early memories go, I started learning this skill when I was five years old, memorizing and citing a poem in front of fifty people in kindergarten. Then in my teenage years, due to judgmental peer-group pressure, I faced a fear of speaking in front of people.
Nevertheless, with the power of formal and informal education, I managed to eliminate this perceptive fear by rewiring my brain to see it as a pleasure rather than a perceived threat to my existence.
Taming my amygdala using my neo-cortex was the subskill for persuasive verbal and written communication allowing me to speak in front of thousands of people with euphoric joy.
Conclusions
Skill-building is a never-ending process.
I see skills as tools that we need to sharpen constantly. Starting from the most fundamental level, gradually, we can improve and master them at the highest levels.
Investing to gain these skills allowed me to improve my physical and mental health alongside achieving momentous goals such as earning a living, publishing multiple books, filing invention patents, writing scientific papers, talking in front of people, and developing my relationships with others.
I look forward to hearing about your critical skills.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
If you enjoyed this story, you might check a related article titled Three Practical Steps to Sharpen the Mind for Lasting Health and Happiness: Optimizing well-being and life satisfaction by maximizing neuroplasticity and rewiring the brain with healthy lifestyle habits.
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