Saving and Investing are essential skills when progressing towards Financial Independence. One aspect of the equation that I want to talk about more is increasing your income, and a key way to do that is to improve your skill set. Knowing how to maximise your skill set means you are maximising your chances of achieving a high income.
There are a handful of skills that I believe are mandatory to have in the modern day. They affect your ability to connect with others, share your thoughts, and understand how to provide value to others.
Having awareness of these skills – and working towards improving them – allows you leverage them to improve your circumstances. This gives you the freedom to improve every other aspect of your life.
Welcome to the Work Series – my thoughts on how work is more than our career, our jobs, or the chores we tackle in our day to day lives. Work is every challenge we overcome – including how we learn new skills and how we learn to use them for our advantage.
Why Do You Need to Maximise Your Skill Set?
Maximising your skill set allows you to maximise your chances of success. Building skills gives you the ability to take advantage of opportunities as they become available. The more skills you have, the more likely it is that you are able to do good work.
In order to do good work, we need to be good people. I’m not referring to “good” as in good or evil: I mean mighty, independent, strong people who are capable of solving problems in their lives.
You are more likely to be able to do good work if you can solve your own problems. If you are healthy, energetic, and keen to learn, you can develop the skills you need to become mighty.
Society has progressed to the point where we need money to survive. Not even the mightiest can solve all their problems independently. Additionally, society rewards those who can solve the problems of others. Money – or crystallised human effort – is the reward provided to those who solve the problems of others.
The reward can seem disproportionately high in some cases, but the value they provide is important enough to someone to pay for it. Regardless of how we perceive the value of someone else’s work, the result is the same: they knew how to provide value to others, and so they received money for that value.
Therefore, if we want to become mighty, we need to know how to make money. And we are most likely to be rewarded with wealth if we possess a large number of skills and have the ability to do good work.
In my eyes, personal finance is only one aspect to consider for a good life. We should also be developing our mind, body, and soul in a way that empowers us to do what we want to do. Developing a better relationship with ourselves is the key; not only to grow as individuals, but also as positive members of society.
Pursuing this relationship with ourselves requires us to dedicate time to ourselves. Often, this time requires us saving enough money to allow us to dedicate to it. While you don’t need to retire early to do this, a sabbatical or career break1 may give you the clarity of thought to improve your perception of yourself.
Of course this is an intentional act; time away from work can’t solve all of your problems alone. It must be combined with other activities, such as self-reflection, learning new skills, and a focus on financial & personal goals.
Giving yourself the freedom to learn new skills is what allows you to determine how best to improve your circumstances. Not only that, but these skills often directly lead to the best way you can improve your circumstances: improving your hourly rate of pay.
Improve Your Hourly Rate
Your hourly rate is one of the biggest determinants of being able to be successful.
The Cycle of Value is a concept I’ve recently used to explain the hourly rate’s importance. This starts with a simple statement: the higher your hourly rate, the faster you can earn money. But this becomes a cycle that you can use to your advantage with an appropriate strategy.
The more money you can earn per hour, the less you need to work to meet your needs.2 The less you need to work, the more control you have over your time. Once you have control over your time, you can set your life in order, then seek to improve your skills. When you maximise your skill set based on what’s available to you right now, you increase your income potential. This unlocks new jobs with new hourly rates, and the cycle starts again.
But your hourly rate isn’t everything. There’s no point earning $100 an hour if you have to trade it for a 60 hour work week and sacrifice time with your loved ones. The point of a high hourly rate is to solve big problems in your own life – not to give you the ability to pay to make them go away.
Jobs that pay well simply reward you for solving problems that the market has deemed valuable. But jobs also allow you to learn new skills, making you more competitive in the market and allowing you to solve larger problems for your employer.
You can use the skills you’ve learnt at your job to make something even bigger than just your job. This allows you to understand who you truly are once you remove your job from the equation.
A high hourly rate is what allows you to Choose Work You Love, and to take back control of your time. Saving is essential in the beginning, and Investing is necessary long-term. But maximising the value of your time is an endless pursuit that pays dividends across your entire life.
The 4 Highest-Value Skills
Doing things that matter to you with full control of your time is how I define success in the modern age. It is a lifestyle that only the mightiest of us attain.
There are 4 essential skills to achieve that life. These skills will help you no matter what job or industry you are in. Just about every successful person is able to leverage all four of these skills to a huge degree. These skills are especially important for knowledge workers, content creators, or those aspiring to become one of these.3 If you can develop these skills, you can massively increase your hourly rate, which will change your life.
I recommend learning these skills in the order presented. Each skill uses the learnings from the previous skill as a foundation to support it. Learning the skills out of this order may work for you, but this is the way that’s worked for me.
Learn to Write
Everything stems from writing. It’s one of the earliest forms of preserving stories and knowledge from the past. Everything from religious texts to movie scripts are written by someone, with the express purpose of allowing someone else to consume it.4
Writing is the foundational skill upon which all others are built. Learning how to write requires learning how to think. Knowing how to write is knowing how to take a thought, articulate it, and record it in a manner that others can read and understand.
Knowing how to collect your thoughts in a manner that others can understand is the first step towards giving value to others. Learning how to write is essential as you can practice writing independently before involving others in your craft.
Learn to Speak
Speaking takes your ability to share your ideas to the next level. Speaking is the fast-paced, instant feedback version of writing: you share your thoughts and receive feedback immediately.
Conversations with friends, or dates, or school & business presentations all require differing levels of speaking ability. And the stakes of each become higher as you progress through life. Being able to perform as a speaker in these higher level environments directly works to increase your value.
If you can share your thoughts in front of a group of people, you’re in a position to offer value to multiple people at once. This is necessary if you want to maximise the value of your time.
Being a good speaker also has the side effect of making you appear more confident, charismatic, interesting, and knowledgeable to those around you. All of these skills serve to boost the opinion others have of you. This can lead to social proof and a better reputation, as well as the opportunities that come with both of those things.
Learn to Teach
Everyone has problems they want solving.
Learn how to solve problems, and how to give the solution to other people.
Your skills in speaking should have progressed to the point where you can discern what people’s problems are through conversation. Once you can understand what those problems are, you can work to solve them.
Solving people’s problems requires teaching them how to solve those problems. The most valuable solutions to others are those that give them the independence to be able to solve their problems themselves in the future.5 But you need to know how to write and speak in order to communicate this information in a manner that actually solves their problem.
Whether you are sharing a solution in written or spoken form, your previous skills must be sharp enough that you can solve problems in whatever form your customer or client needs. If you can write and speak, you’re in a position to deliver solutions. But you need to ensure you know how to solve something.
A good place to start is to use the skills you’ve built throughout your career. Unfortunately, some skills are embedded into the jobs that require them (e.g. manufacturing products, teaching 9th-grade history classes) that certain skills may not be transferable. Understanding how to extract the essence of skill-based tasks for your own benefit is how you separate your professional self from your job or career.6
Learn to Share Your Teachings
Knowing how to communicate and solve problems isn’t helpful if nobody knows you exist. The final step is arguably the hardest – it’s learning how to share your teachings in a way that people can find.
You can do this through social media, word of mouth, or leveraging your professional network. Social media has introduced so many methods of sharing information – written, photos, long-form and short-form video to name a few. You’ll need writing for all (and speaking for some), but there’s bound to be a medium that works for you.
I used to avoid social media and think it was a means to attract attention for nothing more than vanity. That those posting online were simply sharing how affluent or popular they were. In the last few years, that opinion has changed entirely.
I used to consume content and wonder how on earth these creators reached the massive followings they had acquired. But the answer was simple:
They provided value.
Sharing valuable things with your circle impacts them alone. But a post or video can reach many people at once, which can lead to interest, opportunities, and further learning.
Increasing your leverage, and the actions you take is a direct method of increasing the value of your time. And for someone looking to maximise the value of their time, a social media presence is an incredibly powerful resource to build to make that happen.
What If I Don’t Want to Leverage Social Media?
Whether it’s a messaging app or an account you scroll endlessly on, almost everyone uses social media. Many people avoid posting on social media due to a desire to remain anonymous. That’s a valid concern nowadays.
Social media is being used to manipulate how you think and how you consume. And with the world being terminally online, there’s almost no escaping it. As a result, knowing how to use social media in some way is essential nowadays.
The algorithms deem that this content is valuable enough to show to you.
If you don’t want to leverage social media for your personal brand, there are other options. Businesses thrived in the past without using social media. Social media has only existed in the mainstream since the mid-2000’s.
I imagine there are some businesses that can succeed in this age without a social media presence, but I also imagine they’re few and far between. After all, you need a way to garner attention, and social media is a free platform to allow the world to find you.
To anyone looking to maximise their skill set: learning how to use social media (or Content Management Systems, like WordPress) as a creator is extremely important. Not only does it teach you to have a better relationship with social media, but it can also be leveraged to deliver real benefits in your life.
Building something and sharing it online allows people to find the value you are offering. Sure, you can run a business through newspaper ad campaigns or word of mouth, and maybe it’ll be a success. But social media is so ubiquitous that ignoring it seems detrimental to anyone looking to grow their income, brand, find people with similar interests, or offer things of value to others.
Closing
Knowing how to maximise your skill set allows you to increase your value. The more you can do, the more you can offer other people and businesses. You can reap the benefits of this through your career, creations, or personal brand.
A broad skill set is underpinned by the four primary skills. Knowing how to write ensures that you can collect your thoughts and present them in ways others can understand. Speaking provides you the ability to connect with others, and engage in other forms of creation and ideation. Teaching allows you to share your knowledge and directly change the thoughts of others (ideally for the better). And sharing your teachings requires you to remain competitive in the various ways that content is dispersed throughout a population. Right now, that last skill requires an understanding of content creation, social media, marketing, and brand building.
These four skills (and what we accomplish with them) shapes the way we engage with others, our work, and our relationship with ourselves. Knowing these skills allowed me to leave full-time work in late 2023. Now that I make content and work freelance through my consulting business, these skills are more important than ever.
I’m over two thirds of the way through articulating my personal philosophy. This has been a journey I’ve been on over the last 8 months, and something that I’m extremely proud of. As I continue to crystallise these thoughts, I see patterns forming that link the concepts together. These are more than purely financial, and as I continue to create I realise I want to do so about other topics as well. Career progression, the nature of work, and the importance of creation rank highly as interests to me.
As a large portion of my readers follow for financial independence related posts, I hope that this content is also of interest. Although if you’ve made it this far, I’m sure it is 😉
As always, thank you for reading.
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- One can attain the ability to take a career break through dedicated Saving, Investing, and Choosing Work They Love. This site exists as a series of essays describing the skills I developed to allow me to do this in my own life. ↩︎
- Yes, you can (and should) earn more than you need in the present. Your “need” should include what you need for the future – that is, the amount you need to save and invest in order to achieve Financial Independence on your terms. Factor that number into your definition of “enough”, not just what you need today. ↩︎
- I see these two paths as efficient means of accumulating wealth, as their expected incomes are either high or uncapped. These paths often accrue additional benefits, such as career opportunities or additional sources of income. That said, they are often stressful and difficult, although every job is to some degree. I’m sure there’s a good reason why over 50% of Gen-Z want to become influencers. ↩︎
- In the case of a diary, that person is you. ↩︎
- This is not necessarily the solution that makes the most money for the provider of the product/ service. ↩︎
- More thoughts on this soon. ↩︎