In the professional world, there are two kinds of skills that matter. These are job skills and career skills.
Job skills are commodities. Career skills are assets. Let me explain…
Job skills allow us to do the job. For instance, a programmer’s ability to code, or a plumber’s ability to unclog sinks, or a manager’s ability to tell people what to do in a way that generates compliance are all job skills.
Any skill we use when performing a given job is a job skill. It’s what you do.
Career skills are different. They are the skills you use to actually get the job and navigate your career.
For instance, going over HR’s head and networking directly with decision makers is a career skill. Crafting a resume that gets read by people who matter is a career skill. Negotiating a raise barely after three months of employment is a career skill.
Any skill we use to get our way in the corporate world is a career skill.
Remember this… Job skills are what you’re selling to employers. Whereas career skills are what you’re using to get and control your work.
Job skills are how you fulfil promises to employers and clients. But career skills are *why* you actually get paid, and how much you get paid.
Here’s the most important bit: Counter to popular opinion, career skills matter a lot more than your job skills, especially early on in your career where you learn so much on the job anyway.
In fact most employers will hire talented professionals in a pinch, even if they lack specific job skills. But they will rarely hire someone without the right career skills, saying something along the lines of “it’s not a good fit” or “I’m not sure if this will work” or “we’re looking for someone else”.
This is because that sense of “good fit” an employer feels is generated ENTIRELY using career skills.
Ultimately career skills determine why you get picked over your competitors.
As it has always been.
As it is supposed to be.
As it will always be.
Now, given that your career skills are monumentally important in determining where you work, how much you get paid and how seriously people take you and how much they respect you; let’s talk about the top 3 career skills that have the most disproportionate impact in your pay grade.
1) How to Stay Motivated without Discipline:
Everybody wants to win, but hardly anybody has the will to win. Hardly anybody refuses to take “no” for an answer and stands firmly in their ground.
This is primarily because people try to create discipline and force themselves into getting their way, rather than “hacking” their motivational circuitry and letting it happen naturally and with ease. It’s like forcing a square peg in a round hole, it doesn’t work!
That’s why, we don’t believe in discipline in the sense that you should force yourself to do things you don’t want to do. Instead, we practice “mind mastery” and create systems that make our success inevitable, regardless of what we feel like at any moment in time.
Why fight your feelings and emotions, when you can have them fight for you?
Of course, this is the exact opposite of the “serf conditioning” most individuals who have endured the tyranny of the public education system are taught. Make no mistake: the mainstream education system is about compliance to authority and laboring, rather than getting your way and accomplishing.
If you want to transform your life and get what you want rather than the same old, you have to be taught how to do this. Keep reading…
2) How to Be Seen By The Right People:
The biggest and most important career skill is to become someone who the right people see, someone that attracts jobs and opportunities, someone who is sought out by many people who want to give you money.
All the formalities like resumes and cover letters, all the tools like LinkedIn and email, and all the techniques like networking are secondary to this one insurmountable fact: You have to be seen by the right people. You have to be wanted by the right people.
You have to be capable of creating value for the right people.
Of course, chances are, you already are capable of creating such value. Most professionals are. But that’s meaningless until you crack the “code of demand”.
Most people put the cart before the horse, and they try to fake their way into demand by pretending to be important, or throwing around buzzwords and keywords, or incessantly begging for attention like pesky advertisers.
But it doesn’t work. It never has. It never will.
You have to first understand how the psychology of demand works. And you have to learn what the right people actually pay attention to, as opposed to what they say they do. Keep reading…
3) How to Become an Exception to Policy:
In essentially every high-value job I’ve had, and every high-value position I’ve seen my students and other members get, we were the exception to some rule.
We got paid more than what the allotted budget. We were given titles of our choosing. Started with an extra paid week off. Were given an office rather than a desk, unlike everyone else. We didn’t have to have our references checked. We got half our stock options vested instantly… On and on it goes.
There is a sweet spot between asking for too much, and asking for the right privileges in the right way so that the negotiating party agrees. Not just that, but they also trust that you’ll be discrete, and that no one else you’re working with will learn and get jealous about how unfair it is. (Because if they do learn, the team collapses. Are you starting to see why salaries are hidden?)
Make no mistake. Becoming an exception is a skill: To think outside of the boxes corporations try to put you in, and to ask for what you want from a position of strength.
If you want to live your life enjoying a career of your choosing, you need to learn how to “ask in such a way so that you shall receive”.
Contrary to popular opinion and the brainwashing most have to endure, when it comes to the business battlefield in the real world – there are the victors and there are the defeated.
The victors feast on lavish dinners in corner offices overseeing the skyline of the entire city beneath their feet, while the losers huddle together in smelly, noisy cubicles, munching on cheap leftovers under the gaze of flickering fluorescent lights.
Pre-internet, whether you became a victor or a loser was pre-ordained.
But now, where you’ll end up is your choice.
Stay ignorant and let the game push you around. Or learn the appropriate career skills all the way to the top.
Your choice.