Break the Mold: 4 Unexpected Skills That Can Help You Achieve More

Skills make you valuable. And value brings money. This is where being highly skilled in certain fields gives you an advantage.

Seth Godin illustrates this well in his book, The Dip:

“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.”

We often think about persuasion, writing, and so forth when it comes to income-generating skills. And those skills are still relevant.

But there are more subtle skills that successful people have that others take for granted. These are abilities that most people never view as skills.

These unconventional skills make the difference between those who succeed and those who stay average.

Here are the 4 of skills you need to practice if you want to break the mold and achieve more.

1. Feedback Analysis

How well do you know yourself?

If you’ve read enough self-improvement books and articles, you’d already know the importance of self-awareness.

But how do you effectively become self-aware?

Do you know the best way for you to work? Have you mastered your strengths and weaknesses to overcome any challenge?

Often, people know it’s important to be self-aware. But they’re not sure how to do it right. This is where the Feedback Analysis comes in.

It’s a concept popularized by management author Peter Drucker. You can do it like this:

1. Whenever you make a key decision, like a career change or a new project, etc., write what you want and expect to happen.
2. Say you’re deciding if you should start a clothing line business. You can write things like, “I’ll have X designs in X months,” or “I’ll have my first sale after X weeks,” and so forth.
3. Write your predicted result somewhere visible, a virtual notepad saved in the cloud, or even an email you can send yourself and mark with a star.