10 SKILLS That Are HARD to Learn, But Will Make You RICH!

Hello, Believe Nation.

It's Evan.

My one word is believe, and I believe in people more than they believe in themselves. And my sincere hope is that if you believe in yourself as much as I believe in you, you'll be able to change the planet. So to help you on your journey today, I'm doing a video on the 10 skills that are hard to learn but will pay off forever. And as always, guys, as you're watching, if you hear something that really resonates with you, leave it down in the comments below. It's much more likely to stick with yourself. And if you leave a comment within the first few hours of the video going live, you have a chance to win one of two daily prizes. Enjoy! Skill number 1 is speaking up.

One of the things you would want to be sure to do is, whether you like it or not, get very comfortable— it may take a while— with public speaking, for example. I mean, that, that's an asset that will last you 50 or 60 years, and it's a liability if you don't like doing it or are uncomfortable doing it, that also will last you 50 or 60 years, and it's a necessary skill.

Skill number 2 is being honest with yourself.

One of the big things that all startups do is they lie to themselves over and over and over. Mine's faster, mine's cheaper, mine's better, mine's this, mine's that. No, it's not. And the reason it's not is because whoever it is you're competing with, it's not like they're ignoring you. It's not like, oh my goodness, this guy just started on Shopify in the startup competition. He's doing $1 million this year. Woe is me, I might as well close up the doors. What are they doing? I'm gonna copy what they're doing. And now you've gotta stay ahead. And so, you know, you've gotta be very careful as an entrepreneur to be brutally honest with yourself. And those are some of the things that you'll hear from me as a mentor. That, you know, know what you know, know what you don't know, but you've got to know your business better than anybody.

Skill number 3 is having confidence.

I don't know if you'd agree with me on this, but in many ways, one of the key factors to legendary success isn't your natural ability. It's not whether you have the right product. It's not whether you're in the right field. It's not whether you've had a blessed background. It's not whether you have the right IQ. I want you to really think about and deconstruct and play with, maybe later tonight in your journal. I want you to deconstruct this idea of confidence. And it seems like a very simple word, but just think about it in your own life. When you have confidence, or we could even call it fire. When you have that fire within you, that confidence, that interior bravery, You almost have this power to do whatever it takes to get your brave vision done. You see, in this world, it's not about, you know, in many ways, your strategy in your business or your ability in your life. It's about this thing called confidence. And we have all had these times in our lives when we are full of confidence. And what other people see as a problem, we simply do see as an opportunity. Other people see it as a stumbling block or a wall and we They see it as a stepping stone or this solution. And so confidence is something that you really want to wire in. Confidence is something you really want to develop. Confidence is a practice. Confidence is a muscle. And like any muscle, the more you focus on it and practice it and train it, the stronger your confidence is going to grow. And I just have to say it again. When you are at a place in your life when there is an ongoing steady stream of confidence confidence, moving through your mindset, moving through your heartset, you do the heroic in your business and you achieve the remarkable in your life.

Skill number 4 is listening.

Nelson Mandela is a particularly special case study in the leadership world because he is universally regarded as a great leader. You can take other personalities and depending on the nation you go to, we have different opinions about other personalities, but Nelson Mandela across the world is universally regarded as a great leader. He was actually the son of a tribal chief, and he was asked one day, "How did you learn to be a great leader?" And he responded that he would go with his father to tribal meetings, and he remembers two things when his father would meet with other elders. One, they would always say, sit in a circle. And two, his father was always the last to speak. You will be told your whole life that you need to learn to listen. I would say that you need to learn to be the last to speak. I see it in boardrooms every day of the week. Even people who consider themselves good leaders, who may actually be decent leaders, will walk into a room and say, here's the problem, here's what I think, but I'm interested in your opinion. Let's go around the room. It's too late. The skill to hold your opinions to yourself until everyone has spoken does two things. One, it gives everybody else the feeling that they have been heard. It gives everyone else the ability to feel that they have contributed. And two, you get the benefit of hearing what everybody else has to think before you render your opinion. The skill is really to keep your opinions to yourself. If you agree with somebody, don't nod yes. If you disagree with somebody, don't nod no. Simply sit there, take it all in, and the only thing you're allowed to do is ask questions so that you can understand what they mean and why they have the opinion that they have. You must understand from where they are speaking, why they have the opinion they have, not just what they are saying. And at the end, you will get your turn. It sounds easy. It's not. Practice being the last to speak. That's what Nelson Mandela did.

Skill number 5 is managing your time.

My challenge in our generation is that gradually, through entertainment, through television, through media, through every way possible, we are living in a generation of the dumbing down of ideas because we have traded effectiveness for busyness. Statistics say— yeah, somebody ought to clap on that— we are busier than any other generation we have seen in the last 300 to 400 years. We are so busy, we are busier than a one-armed wallpaper hanger. We're just busy. You'll get it later, don't worry about it, it'll hit you in a minute. We are just as busy as we can be, and we think because we're busy we're effective. But I want you to challenge your schedule for a minute and ask yourself, are you, are you really being effective? Or is your life cluttered with all kinds of stuff that demands you and drains you and taxes you and stops you from being your highest and best self? And are you substituting busyness and all the chaos that goes along with busyness from being effective. Let me tell you, a bunch of scientists got together and they begin to do some research, and they begin to determine that 80% of the things we do are busy things that we do in an area that is not effective. That the average person only spends 20% of their time doing the thing that they are really gifted at, created at, passionate about, excited to do, and the rest of it is all the dismal, dumb stuff that we all have to do in order to survive. Just crazy stuff that we're doing. Wonder what would happen if we would go from doing 80% of things that are busy but not effective and 20% of the things that are really effective, if we would switch those numbers around and only give 20% of our time to the things that we have to do and 80% of our time to the thing that we were created to do. Wonder what would happen to your life. Now think about it a minute. There's a lot of things you could take from me and I could make it. You could take my suit, I got another one. You could take my car, I could get another one. You could take my house, I could get another house. But when you take my time, you have taken something from me that is totally irreplaceable. We take all kind of classes for money management. We know how to manage our money. We know how to repair our houses. We're working on our hair and our bodies and all of this kind of stuff. We do everything except the most important thing is to value our time. It takes time to be creative. You were meant to be creative. You were created in the likeness and the image of a creator, and in that likeness and in that image, you have creativity. If you had time, you would be creative. But in the absence of time and with busyness and clutter and the phone ring, beep beep beep, y'all got music playing on your phone, all kinds of stuff. And no matter what kind of song you put on, after a while you hate to hear it, because every time you hear that sound, you know it's somebody else wanting something else from you that's taking you away from what you are gifted and creative to do.

Skill number 6 is stop whining.

So I have this thing that I've been promoting called No Whining Wednesdays. Wednesday you cannot whine, complain, or criticize. And people like, well, what is whining? Whatever you think it is, don't do it. And every time you do it, you have to put a quarter in a jar. If you whine about anything, "I can't, I'm tired, why don't you, why don't you, why haven't you, I'm—" Every one of them will cost you a quarter. Or complaining, "Why don't you, why do you always, how come you, I always, they never," whoop, up, cost you a quarter. Then last week I had people send me pictures of their jars of quarters. Oh my God. But what they said to me also was, this was wonderful because I was never ever aware of how much whining and complaining and criticizing I do. Now I've got mothers doing it with their children. So Wednesday is No Whining Wednesday. We need to practice that. We need to stop whining about what isn't happening, what we don't have, what we can't do, what somebody didn't do. We gotta get it clean in 2014. No whining, no complaining, no criticizing.

Skill number 7 is staying present in the moment.

If you're living in the past, you're gonna be depressed because you are rehashing things that happened to you that are not gonna happen again. If you're living in the future, you're gonna be anxious because you are anticipating what's coming or you're wishing for things that aren't happening yet. Being in the present is where the gold is. Being in the present moment is where you will have the greatest control, where you will feel the most at ease, and where happiness flourishes. There's a super tight connection between happiness and the ability to live in the present moment. A lot of people believe that happiness is tied to the things that happen to you. Not so at all. In fact, there is a, uh, Professor of positive psychology, he's one of the grandfathers of the movement. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. His name is Martin Seligman, and he studied happiness for decades. Now, one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that 40% of your happiness levels are preset by genetics. 60% you are in complete control of. And one of the things that this professor has, has discovered is that it doesn't matter what's happened to you. In fact, some of the people that have had the worst things the worst things happen to them, like people that have survived the Holocaust, are actually the happiest and most grateful people in the world. Happiness comes down to this right up here. It comes down to your thoughts, it comes down to your mindset, it comes down to your attitude. And you are 100% in control of what you're thinking. You may not be in control of how you feel in the moment, but you can always, always, always, always be in control of what you think, and that will change how you're feeling. One of the most powerful things that you can do in terms of think, and this gets back to Strick's question, is how do you be present? Being present is literally nothing more than the skill of having your thoughts be in this moment, not in the past, not in the future, but right here. The way that you teach yourself how to do that is that the moment that you catch yourself being distracted, the moment you catch yourself starting to worry, the moment you catch yourself drifting to the future or drifting to the past, that's a moment of tremendous power because you basically just woke up. You basically just noticed that you're not here in this particular moment. So use that wake-up call, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and ground yourself in this moment. The best way to ground yourself in the moment is to look for something in this particular moment that you can savor. Now I'm using the word savor on purpose because it's the word that psychologists use to describe what happens when you find something in this moment right now, right here, right now, to focus on and to appreciate. It could be literally the questions. These are printed out questions from people on social media. And if I were to stop and look at these and savor them, what I would feel in this moment is a tremendous amount of gratitude because people are taking the time to write And that makes me feel incredibly grateful, and it also makes me very happy because it means that, that the folks that are writing are taking control of their lives and seeking out the information that they need. Another form of savoring that we can all relate to is eating. As you're eating, instead of drifting to the future and thinking about all the things that you need to do, or hanging out in the past and rehashing everything that's happened during the day, be in this moment, in this meal. Slow down. Think about the food that you're eating. Think about the people that you're sitting with and how you feel about them. And if you want to take it up a notch, actually acknowledge them. Hey, this food tastes amazing. Thank you for cooking. Or I'm so glad to see you and that we get the time to have this meal together. Those small, simple acts of savoring are how you expand your happiness inside the present moment. So how do you be more present? Simple. The moment that you catch yourself in the future, in the past, worrying, whatever, refocus yourself right here, right now, and then find something right here, right now that you can savor. And when you do that, you're not only gonna be present, you're gonna feel more grateful, and you're gonna feel a little boost of happiness.

Skill number 8, being consistent. Success is not, it's success is not a destination. People always think that, oh my God, this person's so successful because they've had a successful movie or a successful show. But success is a journey. You have to consistently always, always be successful. That's when you're really successful, because otherwise you'll be remembered for your last failure. And I've had a few, but I just have to compensate for my failure by just getting up and running. The more time you take to sort of mourn it, you're wasting that much more time in being successful. So you just have to, you know, perk up, pick yourself up, Dust yourself off and just say, 'Alright, what can I do?' There's always a solution. You can't expect— people always get mistaken that just because this year has been what it has been, it's been because I consistently worked hard for about 10 years. So now I know my job enough to be able to be appreciated for it. But if I hadn't had the last 10 years, I would never have had this year or the year before that. So success is not a destination where you or power is not like, okay, today you're powerful. You have to consistently be powerful and consistently be successful. And that is a journey.

Skill number 9 is getting enough sleep.

Well, first of all, I prioritize sleep. And that means making— that means saying no to things you want to do. It's not easy.

No, it's hard. I think the hardest thing.

Yeah. Last night, you know, Sheryl Sandberg interviewed me at the San Francisco Symphony Hall. And then I had to sign books. And I would have loved to go and have dinner with her, but I went to bed. And because if I had gone out to dinner and hadn't gotten my at least 7 hours sleep that I need and had to get up early to do TV, I would not be enjoying being here with you now. And I'm really enjoying it. And I'm 100% present. I'm not tired. And I hate being tired more than I hate anything.

And skill number 10 is having empathy.

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made-up story. It allows me to feel pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain. And my nervous system is sympathetically wired and it conducts that current to you sitting in a movie theater and to the woman sitting next to you and to her friend so that we all feel that it's happening to us at the same time. It's a very mysterious and valuable resource of the human species. And women, I think, access it most effortlessly. We cry at sad movies. We don't feel we lose face or stature or position doing it. We see a news story that enrages us and we write letters through tears, our hearts pounding. I've often— I used to wonder why human beings developed these inconvenient and embarrassing responses, this sniffling, choking, wet obstruction. You know, the thing that physicians and soldiers and stock traders and journalists and fashion models and politicians and news commentators and venture capitalists all must suppress in order to work most efficiently. I thought, what possible value function could it serve in the Darwinian scheme of, you know, survival of the fittest and the strongest and the most heavily armed? No, seriously, I thought, why and how did we evolve with this weak and useless passion intact within the deep heart's core? And the answer, as I've formulated it to myself, is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us. It is what civilizes us. It is what connects us.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to I want to know what did you think of this video? What did you take from it that you're going to apply immediately somehow to your life or to your business? What was your favorite from the 10 and how are you going to apply it? Leave it down in the comments below. Really curious to find out. Also, if you think there's an 11, 12, 13 that you want to add to the list, leave it down in the comments. I'm super curious to see what you have to say. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself And whatever your one word is, much love. See you soon.