I realized today that I am still at the beginning phases of my “entrepreneurial” journey… meaning: I am not a seasoned entrepreneur.
Why that would be, you ask?
Today I had an insight. Everyone talks about knowing, maybe even knowing how to do something, but hardly anyone talks about building skills, the building blocks of a successful life.
There is a what to do… and then there is a how to do it… and they all look magical and at least foggy for most people…
There are so many how’s that I can promise you it takes years of diligent doing projects one after the other, with help, before you’ll get any good at it.
Here is an embarrassing example: I have been making my own capsules of supplements… I buy empty capsules and fill them with whatever I want to take.
Last year in December I bought a 100 capsule capsule-filler “machine”… and until yesterday I made thousands of capsules with it, many of them destroyed.
I never suspected that I am at fault: it is a stupid machine, I thought… But yesterday I had an insight, and suddenly it was fast, effortless, and all the capsules came out perfect.
Eight months process till a certain level of mastery.
And that is what I am talking about: a skill takes a long time to perfect, to make you unconsciously competent, especially if you don’t have someone to catch your mistakes… like I didn’t.
For years now I’ve attempted to help people choose the best field to invest their energies in, a field where their skills would make them shine… but every time I get hopeful, I find out that people have NO SKILLS.
Unbelievable… for me. Because I have so many… but then again, I am, nowadays, finding myself reluctant to develop new skills… I guess they have gotten to me and corrupted me, without me even noticing me.
Who are they?
Every generation, for the past 200 or so years, grows up with less and less encouragement from the previous one, to build skills.
In fact there are hardly any people out there who could help you to build skills… because they themselves don’t have it.
It seems that today only the autodidact can shine… Autodidacticism or self-education (also self-learning and self-teaching) is education without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools).
They are rare, because it is itself a skill, as is knowing how to practice, how to know when you know enough, and when it’s time to challenge yourself.
Today everyone wants to be a writer… because everyone had to learn to write in school. But writing well, constructing characters, storyline, having a way with words needs to learned, they are all skills.
And the “market” is full of dilettante writing, copycats, written by hopefuls that think they will make a living with writing.
Same with driving: everyone can be an Uber driver…
But the world is so hungry for skills and there is so little supply…
No one is willing to invest in something that doesn’t pay off immediately.
I see many people who have been in a semi-professional job for decades, and their skill level has never really increased…
To take anything to mastery, and that is the goal, takes conscious practice.
How you do anything is how you do everything… meaning: your attitude to one skill is the same as your attitude to other skills.
Unless you have a goal to increase your skill level 1% a day, 1% a week… you are never going to get to mastery… and mastery is where it’s at.
Mastery in the depth, the width, the precision, the elegance, the speed of the skill.
I do have a couple of people who work on a skill or two, report back daily. I have yet to see anyone really challenging themselves, getting better at it.
I have a new deal with one of my interns: I’ll teach her to process audio files for podcast, submit them into some places to promote them… I will work with this intern to see what it would take to take someone to mastery… not as a should, but as a game. A game worth playing.
So, to return to the question in the title of this article, what else does skill building does, other than build skills?
The short answer is: it activates capacities in your DNA… and make them available every step of the way, to build a life you love and to help you live it powerfully.
Yeah… regardless the actual skill you build, just generic skill-building does that.
One tenth of one percent is willing to invest in building a skill… any skill.
Their sight is set on the prize, and it doesn’t look like skill-building is the fastest and shortest route between how it is now, and how it “should” be… So they resort to dreaming, retreat to their desire trap, and… drumroll please: do nothing to become more, better or different.
To get what you want in life you need to earn what you want.
But in the dream, in the visualization, in the desire trap, you already have it… you imagined it and it is as good as done… except that it’s not real.
Real things require you to invest yourself, invest effort, invest time, invest money, invest your attention… Bummer, eh?
