4 Skills of Successful People

I got this little blurb in an email update from one of the many random sites I decided to sign up for email updates from.  This one specifically was from Uncollege, a group dedicated to helping people find alternatives to a standard college education.  I thought it was an interesting list of skills needed for success that others might find helpful/interesting.  Also, I wanted to hear your thoughts. The group is decidedly liberal (you know, that whole hippy-homeschooler genre) but they have a l lot of interesting things to say.  As I was reading through the first two "skills" I thought "Man, I have this in the bag!!" Then I read the next two...turns out my bag has wholes :)

4 (More) Important Skills For Hackademics [people creating their own education] to Develop
By Jean Fan

About a year ago, I published a piece on the UnCollege site called 4 Important Skills for Hackademics to Develop. The four skills I listed were writing, coding, networking, and thinking entrepreneurially. At the time, I thought those were the key skills people needed in order to be successful. Each of them has very practical applications, and I believed that the combination of them would ensure that you never had trouble marketing yourself. 

What I (and the rest of the team) realize now, at the end of the first phase in our inaugural Gap Year program, is that there are even more fundamental skills that people need to be successful — crucial meta skills that I glossed over before. I realized that not everyone needs to write, code, network, and think entrepreneurially in order to succeed.

Then what do hackademics need?

1. The ability to be self-aware

I spend a lot of time thinking about myself. Specifically, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’ve done, what I’ve learned, and what I want to do. This ability to analyze my life has been instrumental to my success —the small amount of success that I’ve achieved so far, that is. 

It began, and always does, with the question: “Why?”

Why am I doing what I am doing? This is a question that I ask myself almost every day. I ask this question of myself to make sure I’m doing the right work. I ask this question of myself when I’m doing things that I don’t actually enjoy. I ask this question when I feel myself experiencing happiness or sadness or frustration. 

Question everything, Immanuel Kant once said. 

Understanding the “why” behind what you do means that you can properly tell your story later on, whether you need to explain your reasoning behind dropping out of college or sticking with that job or giving all of your things away to travel the world. You need to understand why, before you can explain it to other people. Therefore, self-awareness is key to effectively promoting yourself. For hackademics, effectively promoting yourself is key to success.

2. The ability to treat everything as a learning experience

As a community of people who have opted out of the traditional education system (either permanently or temporarily), we recognize that learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom. So where does it happen? 

Learn happens when we work, intern, or volunteer. Learning happens as we engage with other people in conversation, whether that’s the knowledge we gain or the social awareness we develop.

Learning happens as we live our day-to-day lives. Instead of separating learning from working or from living, we should treat every experience as one that we can learn and grow from. 

Living life like this is a great way to be optimistic. You can never really lose, because you’re always gaining knowledge and wisdom. Take every situation — good or bad — and ask yourself: “What can I learn from this?” You’ll find that you develop a much more positive outlook on life. At the same time, you’ll become a dramatically improved person.

3. The ability to maintain your well-being

At the Under 20 Summit in New York City last weekend, my friend Dany led a great breakout session on maximizing your mental and physical performance. He talks about the basics: drinking more water, sleeping regularly, exercising, and understanding your mind.

“When I dropped out of college to live and work on my own for the first time,” Dany says, “my attitude towards food changed. I discovered that my lethargy was caused by my eating habits... Nutrition plays a massive role in our lives. [Learn] how you can use the science to get up easier in the morning, be less stressed, and concentrate better.”

What I’ve realized in these past few years, as I’m studying the habits of the most successful people, is that most of them are also very healthy. Part of me is very intimidated by that. Not only is someone a professional rockstar, they also have a kick-[butt] body?! Unfair. 

What I’ve missed, and what Dany’s session reminded me of, is how closely interlinked the two realms of success truly are. In order to be professionally successful, you have to make sure you are building a foundation of physical success — or else you’ll never be able to reach your true potential.

4. The ability to disappoint people (especially people you care about)

For me, those people are my parents. As first-generation immigrants who both have doctorates, they were not very happy when I became involved with UnCollege. In fact, they were quite upset — especially because I started working here just as I began applying to university. My family life during my senior year of high school was turbulent.

Yet I continued working at UnCollege anyways.

Why? It was something that I deeply cared about, and its vision makes sense to me. I recognized that UnCollege was promoting a dramatic shift in paradigm, and I anticipated pushback. I realized that taking an unconventional path will inevitably make the people around you emotionally distressed — whether because it forces them to rethink their own lives, or because they are deeply invested in you and can’t bear to watch you fail.

There were moments in my past when I distinctly remember thinking to myself, ”My life could be so much easier if I just did what people expect of me.”

Then I remember that I only have this one life. I have to be selfish. I can spend it living to appease the needs of everyone around me, but I choose to live it in a way that satisfies me.