Welcome explorer

You’re back in the Slipstream. Your shortcut to financial and mental freedom.

You’re here because you know one thing to be true:

The better your thinking, the better your life

In recent weeks, you’d have noticed I’ve been going for a more simpler format. I want to refine my writing and my thinking. I want to value of this newsletter to be clear to anyone joining.

To that end, would you let me know what ideas/ issues you enjoyed the most, if any?

On to this week’s idea.

LIFE/ WEALTH

Skills over Qualifications

Welcome to 2024. If you’ve got access to the internet, you already have what it takes to succeed.

The internet provides access to the biggest library of human knowledge in the world. What’s more, it is growing every day.

With platforms such as Youtube, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack and more coming out everyday, people are able to output knowledge at a faster rate and at lower cost than ever before.

We are seeing in real time the digitization of education.

We are living through it.

Look at your own behaviour for example.

How do you gain new knowledge? How do you find out what’s happening in the world? How do you connect with your friends? How do you learn how to do things?

I’m sure for most of you the answer would be “Through the internet”.

The internet has democratized access to knowledge. Yet this does mean that everyone will win. There is still ability and luck as important factors that can determine what you eventually find out about and learn.

Either way, you can learn new things every day, for the rest of your life, and you would still only make a small dent in the ocean of human knowledge.

I say this not to demotivate you from learning, quite the opposite. I want to free you from the burden of learning. There is no end. You just keep doing it, just like breathing.

To understand that there’s no end to learning is freeing in many aspects. Mainly in that there’s no rush anymore, as there’s no finish line.

But from a more practical standpoint, there’s another reason we shouldn’t fall in love with learning all the time.

And that’s knowledge is only potential power. True power comes from being able to do things in the real world.

This is also known as having skills.

Qualifications - the misdirection

When we were growing up, we were misled into thinking that we need to gain a qualification (re: degree) to prove we are valuable, or can be, to society.

The qualification also determines which direction we end up in life. If we are able to achieve a harder or a more prestigious qualification, we would end up being more successful.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Qualifications are like collars. They are limiting in many ways, and signify an ownership over you, rather than you over it.

Many times, people will justify their current course of life, or decisions in life, because of the qualification they had acquired many years ago.

Something that took 4 years, 8 years maybe even 10 years to accomplish, now dictates the direction of the remaining 50.

The maths just doesn’t make sense.

A qualification is only the starting point.

It is a proxy for skill. That is, it is a symbol for one’s supposed ability to possess or gain requisite skills in a field.

Too often we hear of graduates who do exceedingly well come face-to-face with the real world and find they are poorly equipped and essentially have to start from zero.

So, a graduate has to then spend a few years in a “Graduate program” where they do menial labour and earn minimal. If they are lucky, the learn some skills that are transferable. Most often, the company trains them with company-specific skills and knowledge.

As a result, people become more boxed into their careers over time. Their (few) skills and (specific) knowledge keeps them trapped in the path set out by the qualification.

They are lost when it comes to charting their own path in life, because they never learnt how.

Skills pay the bills

The biggest lesson I’ve learned in entrepreneurship these past years is that your actions determine your outcome.

People who are successful apply a simple set of actions to a business problem.

Over enough businesses, you see that these actions stem from different kinds of skills.

And the number of skills are not that many.

For example, business can be started with just the skill of Sales. It doesn’t matter what your business produces or does, if you don’t sell it, you wont make any money. So a Fundamental skill of business, and life for that matter, is Sales.

You will also need a basic skill of Finance - to handle the numbers and money when accepting payment from your customer.

You will need a skill of Communication, so that you may work with others harmoniously and be able to recruit others to your company and manage them. Without being able to communicate well, you will not able to make use of the leverage of other people.

Lastly, you will need a skill of Vision or Planning. For a business owner must always be ahead in his mind, to determine the actions that he must do today.

That’s pretty much it.

Notice how there’s no real need to be able to develop a product or deliver a service. That’s because these roles/ skills can be outsourced. So while these skills are needed by the company to succeed, it is not necessarily needed to be in the entrepreneur.

Service businesses are just skills for hire

Once you are able to do something effectively for yourself or your employer, such as run Facebook Ad campaigns, you will be able to do it for other people as a service.

This is also known as freelancing and a common business model on the internet. It’s how you, as a business owner, can find the skills required to launch or grow your businesses. It’s also how you can start earning your first bit of money online.

Goals - Skills - Projects - Actions

One of the best way to thinking about skills is in relation to your goals.

Start with thinking about where you want to be/ who you want to be in 2-3 years from now.

• Who is this person?

• What do they do everyday?

• What skills do they have that enable their lifestyle?

Now, work backwards.

What projects can I do that will enable me to build up those skills?

Then finally, what actions can I do this week to move those projects forward?

This is how you set yourself an action plan to build important skills that will lead you towards your goals.

Remember, people hire other people for what they can do for them. Skills play a major role in this, as through skills they can improve a person’s business, relationships or health.

Look at life as a challenge through which you build and gain skills over time.

Build skills, and you will always be able to make money.

Build the right skills, and you will be able to live the life of your dreams.

Make time to figure out the right skills for you.

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