What are the most important skills I should master above everything else?

Answer:  I don’t know! The answer is different for everyone–and our answer will be different at different times in our lives.

The best answer is the answer that best sums up how you feel today. What are the skills you wish you could master today more than anything else? 

Here is my best answer. Today,  I wish I could learn how to:

1. finish what I start more often;
2. focus like a laser on whatever I’m doing;
3. be “fully present” when listening to people;
4. find more people who are a good fit with me and to  form close, loving connections with those people;
5. learn and remember things better;
6. live my life free from irrational self-doubt;
7. be more effective in helping others I care about.

Your wish-list, of course, will be entirely different. For instance, you might want to learn how to:

1. better care for your body;
2. help your child be less shy;
3. tip yourself out of negative emotions more easily;
4. handle receiving criticism better;
5. be more persuasive;
6. break bad habits;
7. conquer procrastination.

Once we’ve identified our wish-list of skills we’d dearly love to master, we then just have to:

(1) find out how to master those skills;
(2) draw up a campaign of skill-mastering strategies that best appeal to us;
(3) implement our skill-mastering campaign, where we try all the various strategies on our list, retaining those that work and dropping those that don’t.

That sounds a simple-enough plan!

The two key goals of this website are to provide lots of strategies (and hopefully mostly proven strategies) to help you put together good skill-building campaigns and to help you monitor your progress as you build those skills. As you can imagine, this is an ambitious project. It’s not surprising that I am plagued by lots of self-doubt! It will take me ages to collect all the information I have in mind and to set things up. In the meantime, you can research your wish-list topics yourself and compile your own skill-mastery campaigns to implement.

I hope to do follow-up posts to demonstrate how I put together skill-masterycampaigns to address the skill deficiencies on my wish-list. This way, I can show you what I’m talking about here. (Of course, since I struggle to finish everything I start (see No.1 item  on my wish-list!), I can’t guarantee I’ll write these follow-up posts!  Sigh!!!)