13 skills that are hard to learn but will pay off forever
The best things in life may be free, but that doesn't mean they won't take time, sweat, and perseverance to acquire.
That's especially the case when it comes to learning important life skills.
We've highlighted our favorite takeaways, as well as a few other skills we thought were important.
- Mastering your sleep
There are so many prescribed sleep hacks out there it's often hard to keep track. But regardless of what you choose, establishing a ritual can help ensure you have restful nights.
Numerous studies show that being consistent with your sleep schedule makes it easier to fall asleep and wake up, and it helps promote better sleep in general.
- Empathy
"Empathy — the ability to feel what others feel — is what makes good sales and service people truly great. Empathy as in team spirit — esprit d'corps — motivates people to try harder. Empathy drives employees to push beyond their own apathy, to go bigger, because they feel something bigger than just a paycheck," she writes.
- Time management
Effective time management is one of the most highly valued skills by employers. While there is no one right way, it's important to find a system that works for you and stick to it, Alina Grzegorzewska explains.
"The hardest thing to learn for me was how to plan," she writes. "Not to execute what I have planned, but to make so epic a to-do list and to schedule it so thoroughly that I'm really capable of completing all the tasks on the scheduled date."
- Asking for help
"I once was told in a job interview, 'You can't have this job if you can't ask for help when you need it,'" Louise Christy writes. "Naturally, I said I could. Later, I found out that the previous person with that job had screwed up big-time because he was in over his head but couldn't admit it and didn't ask for help."
- Consistency
- Positive self-talk
"Ultimately it doesn't matter what others think of you," Shobhit Singhal writes, "but what you think of yourself certainly does, and it takes time to build that level of confidence and ability to believe in yourself when nobody else does."
- Knowing when to shut up — and actually doing it
"You can't go around whining about every other thing that seems not-so-right to you in this world," writes Roshna Nazir. "Sometimes you just need to shut up."
Keeping your mouth shut when you're agitated is one of the most valuable skills to learn, and of course, one of the most difficult.
- Listening
Along with shutting up comes listening, Richard Careaga says.
- Minding your business
"It takes ages to learn and master this," Aarushi Sharma writes.
Sticking your nose into other people's work isn't helpful and wastes time and resources, she says. "You have no right to put forth your two or four cents, even if you are the last righteous person standing."
- Resisting gossip
"The most important thing in life to me is relationships," Jason T Widjaja writes. "And the most important thing about building and keeping good relationships is trust."
One of the easiest ways to lose trust, he says, is to gossip about people behind their back.
- Mastering your thoughts
To do what you want to do and accomplish what you want to accomplish, you need to consciously direct your thinking, Mark Givert writes.
"The challenge is that we are the product of our past experience and all of our thinking is the result of this," he says. "However, the past does not equal the future."
- Staying present in the moment
According to happiness researcher Matt Killingsworth, we tend not to be very good at staying present in the moment: he says that 47% of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing. And this is hurting our happiness, he says:
- Speaking up
Speaking up in public can be so hard for many of us to do. Even the American business magnate Warren Buffett said that he was once so terrified of speaking in public that he would throw up. "In fact, I arranged my life so that I never had to get up in front of anybody," he told his biographer Alice Schroeder in "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life."
Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move. Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.
Comments