Upgrade Your Skills For A Better Career | Vishen Lakhiani

Welcome to category seven, your skills. So we are still on growth. And when you think about the experiences in the world that you want to have, the next question that emerges is, who is the man or woman that I need to grow into to have these experiences? So we've really discussed your intellectual life, and that's important. Now we come to skills. Here's how I separate the two. Your skills are the things that you need to grow in development to help you with your career, with whatever is you're doing right now that has to do with how you earn a living. So when we go into skills, what we're going to be focusing on is how to get better at our jobs, better at our careers. And this is an area that so many people need help in, because far too many people get into a career and then start stagnating. We think we learn everything it takes to be the best accountant, the best coder in college, and. And then when we get to a job, we get stuck at a certain level. So we're gonna look at some of the rules around skills, and we're gonna teach you some quick ideas to get out of the funk and to get yourself to whole new levels when it comes to the skills that let you be you and earn an incredible living so that your career can progress. Whatever it is that you're building or creating can move even faster. You can find more fulfillment at work and get that next raise. The first idea I want to share with you is an idea from the book. It comes from chapter five. When we speak about systems and I talk about an idea where most people get stuck doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again the same way. But sometimes to really grow in our skill, we need to take a step away from merely practicing that skill and focus on what I call your refresh rate. Your refresh rate is how often you step back from what you're doing, you actually look at what you're doing, and you improve that process. So one of the things I started implementing in my life to speed up my skill development is something I call the 10% rule. No matter what I'm doing, that is part of my career. I set aside 10% of that doing time to focus on discovering new ways to make myself better and refreshing my way of doing things. So, for example, when I first started out mindvalley, I had to do customer support. I did my own customer support, and I would budget about maybe 10 to 15 hours a week for customer support. Now, rather than spend 15 hours a week Just doing customer support. I would take out one and a half of those hours and figure out how can I do this better. And I would research best practices. I would create new systems, new templates, new online FAQs that I could use to make my customer support role more and more efficient. So I remember the numbers right. I used to be able to answer something like 40 emails, 40 customer requests in one and a half hours. But with that 10% rule, with spending just 15 minutes a week really thinking about what I was doing and innovating on it, I got my efficiency rate so, so high that I could now work with 80 customer support requests in that same one and a half hours. Because I've been investing 10% of my time building a better FAQ, researching better software, creating new tools. And that's how I got myself better at my job. When I started getting into marketing and programming, I would apply that same rule. Rather than spend a full 60 hour week working on a particular marketing project, I would carve out some of that time, six hours, the 10% rule again, to study books and marketing, study books on sales. And that would just make me get better and better and better at that role. When I started the company Mindvalley and we grew to a 200 person enterprise, we implemented this as part of our culture. So we encourage everyone in our company to spend at least 10% of their time learning. Someone on our programming team, for example, might spend 10% of their time actually experimenting with new forms of code, new technologies to make themselves better at what they do. The point is, when you do not do this, you get stuck in a rut. You stay at one level, but when you can create this 10% time, you get to completely expand your skills. So let's now get to some of the biggest rules that people have around their skills. Are you held back by any of these ideas? Ask yourself these questions. What do you believe you're good at? What do you believe you're not so good at? Recognize that many of this, whether you're good at something or not so good at something, can often stem from the beliefs that you have about your own self. Where did these preconceptions come from? For example, I love music, but I never pursued anything in music. I never learned to play the piano or play the harp. The beautiful musical devices you sometimes see in my room all belong to my wife and my daughter. I never did that because when I was young, someone told me I was tone deaf. And I believed them. I believed I was tone deaf. So I decided I would not spend any time investing in learning anything about music because I just didn't have that gift. Well, it turned out about 15 years later I actually had my hearing tested, and I am not tone deaf. I listened to someone's opinion rooted not in science or a medical degree, but someone's random opinion. And that shifted what skills I chose to pursue in life. So how much of your perceptions about what you're good at or what you can do came from someone else telling you you were not good enough? Don't make that same mistake I did. What holds you back from learning new things? Is it money? Is it time? We've discussed some of these rules in the previous category. What abilities and character traits do you feel you have that are most valuable? What do you feel you suck at? And then decide, what do you want to focus on? Do you want to take the skills that you're not so good at and make them better, or do you want to take the skills that you're really good at and make them even better? There is no right or wrong answer. It all depends on what career or projects or goals you're pursuing in your life right now. But these are important questions to ask yourself as you go into this exercise. And now that you're ready, let's begin the exercise. So I'm setting up my nifty iPhone timer here for three minutes and we will begin. So start writing down. What skills would you like to learn that would help you thrive at your job? What skills would you enjoy mastering? Maybe you want to switch gears professionally? What new skills would you need to pick up? Are there certain skills you'd want to learn just for the fun of it? What skills would you learn that would make you happy? What skills would make you proud? How much time would you set aside learning these skills? If you could go back 10 years and pick up a skill just for the pure joy of it, knowing that this skill would make a huge impact on your career or your profession? What would that skill have been? What's stopping you from learning it next? What habits or practices would you bring into your life to further hone your skills? How much practice time would you implement if your skill requires a practice? What classes, courses, online programs would you take to help you develop this skill? How much time would you make for these programs? How would you ensure that you complete them? What's the next big skill you believe you need to learn to grow in your current role or position? And that's it. You're done. So at this point, you've made a list of how you can grow in your skills. The important thing to keep in mind is that 10% rule. Read chapter five of the book Code of the Extraordinary Mind to learn more about refresh rates, about skill discovery, about set points, so that you put yourself on a path where you're consistent. Consistently growing. The greatest people in the world are consistently growing. In fact, Warren Buffett, in an interview once gave this piece of advice. He said, you want to know what the greatest investment of all time is? Well, the greatest investment of all time is the investment you make in yourself. Because if you're continuously growing your skills, you get better and better and better with your ability to earn more, to make a better living, to contribute to the world, to make more money. So it's often not about figuring out how to take the money that we have and invest it somewhere. It's taking that money that we have and investing it in ourselves. That is the single greatest investment any of us can make into the future. So I actually used to invest in the stock market. I remember at a very early age, I decided to take that money that I had in the stock market because it wasn't growing much anyway, but to instead put that money in investing in my skills. I was two or three years out of college, and I think that was a considerably smarter move. That helped me learn leadership, it helped me learn new forms of programming, it helped me learn how to run online advertising. It helped me build the business that is today mindvalley. I could have kept that money in the stock market and maybe taken 10,000 to about 100,000. But taking that money and investing it in myself a allowed me to make millions. And perhaps this is why Buffett says it is one of the greatest investments you can make. Another great thinker, Harv Eker, when he teaches his seminars, he suggests this. He says, at any point in your life, Always set aside 10% of your income for growth. Save up 10% of your income to put into books, into online programs, into opportunities to travel to locations and take classes that can help you grow. He said, if you want to get wealthier in life, take 10% and don't put it in the bank. Don't invest it somewhere. Invest it in yourself. And this is the surest part to growing yourself, growing your income, becoming that millionaire, getting to the next stage of your being. So I wanted to leave you with those two insights as we leave this category. Invest in your own self for your skills and your growth. It is the greatest single investment you can probably make. Thank you.