Skill (Blog)

[Steve Pavlina]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

Skill

[Dan.Linehan]

A diverse array of skillsets helps too. There are plenty of skilled programmers who are completely unable to make a worthwhile product, mainly because they don't have any background in any other industry.

They end up creating products that have been done a million times before. Like Pownce.

Send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. Create a network of friends and share stuff. It's free and easy…

Wow, welcome to e-mail.


A programmer who has never worked in restaurant management wouldn't understand the need for logistics planning applications between farmers and restaurant owners.

Someone who never worked in the mortgage industry wouldn't know that ten years ago banks were presenting their current rate offers to mortgage firms with sales teams who visited each mortgage company on a weekly basis. LendingTree saw the inefficiency of that process and immediately capitalized on it by creating an online clearinghouse for bank offers and current mortgage rates.

There are lots of businesses in place. They are all evolving -- limiting your knowledge to just one of them is not the same thing as specializing.

We owned all the tools ourselves, but not the skills to make a shelf with.

- Modest Mouse, Missed the Boat.

[ArthurHung]

I recently read this awe-inspiring article about the importance of "effortful study", leading to my conclusion that daily effortful study past our comfort zones, which comes primarily from strong motivation, is key to developing a "reasonable level of skill".

So important is "effortful study", in a sustained and measurable way, to improve rapidly that makes the process of journalling and goal-setting so effective - ideally directed by the guiding decision of a strong purpose.

Polarity works for me.

[lasti]

"What will you do when you have tons of passive income? Wait for death?"

So funny. And a good point!

[The Wise Turtle]

Yep, because everyone and their mother has a blog these days, it's important to have a long term goal beyond just "having a blog". Knowing what changes you'd like to make in the world and then writing and promoting your blog with those changes in mind will go a long way towards making your efforts pay off, in whatever way that means for you.

Peace, Love, and Bicycles,
Turil

[Sam988]

Originally Posted by lasti

"What will you do when you have tons of passive income? Wait for death?"

Do great things. Money = power.

[Steve Pavlina]

Originally Posted by Sam988

Money = power.

Actually money is quite powerless. You can give your power to money, but that will only weaken you. If you think you need money to do great things, you're procrastinating by creating an unnecessary obstacle to expressing your greatness. You can build a good flow of money to enhance your self-expression, but money is powerless to help you create that expression.

[Raymond Fernando]

Every year around my birthday I always sit back and reflect on what I am doing now and where I would like to be. This article came at such a perfect time! Thank You.

[uberinquisitive]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

You’ll probably have a hard time building momentum in any new endeavor if you fail to pay the price and develop your skills....

Every field has a core set of basic skills. If you commit to mastery of those skills over a period of years, you’ll probably do very well in your field. If you try to shortcut the process, get used to disappointment.

Thank you for illuminating this point.

I am in an artistic field (mainly writing), and until recently, I believed that art is about divine inspiration, and you either "have it" or you don't.

And then, I found the Advanced Fiction Writing blog. The blog is run by a former physicist, Dr. Randy Ingermanson. He has built an amazing system for the skill/craft of writing. And one of his big points: it takes years for a neurosurgeon to learn enough to perform surgery. Writing is no different.

Originally Posted by ArthurHung

I recently read this awe-inspiring article about the importance of "effortful study", leading to my conclusion that daily effortful study past our comfort zones, which comes primarily from strong motivation, is key to developing a "reasonable level of skill"

That article totally blew my mind. Count me in on effortful study!

[Brutha]

Great article. Building skills counts.
And you don't need complicated skills. Basic skills like speaking and writing matter a great deal.

Focus on skills instead of goals.

Yep, because everyone and their mother has a blog these days, it's important to have a long term goal beyond just "having a blog".

Steve didn't had a long term goal. People tolled him that he is a good writer, before he even sat the goal of becoming a great blogger.

Steve didn't read those 700 books on personal development that he read before he mad his blog either because he had the goal of becoming a personal development writer one day.

When he wrote he got feedback on his writing and improved his writing. When he read the books he had feedback loop because he tried to implent those ideas in his life.

Developing your skills through good feedback loops was more important then him deciding and setting the goal of becoming a good blogger.

[Conservative]

The advice Steve gives at my site: (link removed because I realize this is my 1st post and will come across as spamming):

Originally Posted by StevePavlina.com

I believe that great content is the best marketing there is. Great content generates word of mouth, and word of mouth builds traffic. Forget about traffic-building tricks and gimmicks, and focus on providing real value to your visitors.

What is great content? In my opinion the best content you can create is the deepest truth you find within yourself.

What do I mean by that? Most people write about what they’re certain of. You’re certain about your knowledge. You’re fairly certain about your opinions too. But when you write about these things, you aren’t sharing a deep enough truth, so it isn’t going to resonate with people except in a superficial way. You’re simply creating disposable content, competing with a zillion other sites doing the same.

On the other hand, if you explore your uncertainty, you’ll be going much deeper. What are you unsure of, fearful of, or resistant to? What ideas bother you, but you can’t figure out why? What is your heart telling you that your mind can’t yet accept? These are the key topics to explore in your writing. When you dig deep within yourself, find new insights at the edge of your uncertainty, and share them, your writing will really resonate with people. And that will generate all the traffic you could ever want.

It is basically accurate, and I suppose like most good advice it's taken me a while to fully grasp its full meaning. I find that the better I do, and the more I improve at blogging, the more the advice rings true.

I've built a moderately successful blog and have been posting on it for 2+ years - and I find that looking back at the original '06 posts, they are horrible. Many of them were like 2 sentences long and offered nothing original, or even funny.

Today, I'm still working out the right format and working on my skills as a blogger, though I'd say I've worked out the skills to be at least "proficient" in this area after posting about 3-5 times a week for two years.

The advice "write like you are going to be read by a million people" is also good. I'd say that to improve your writing, you have to learn about the focus required for each individual article and not compromising your message at all.

[Sam988]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

Actually money is quite powerless. You can give your power to money, but that will only weaken you. If you think you need money to do great things, you're procrastinating by creating an unnecessary obstacle to expressing your greatness. You can build a good flow of money to enhance your self-expression, but money is powerless to help you create that expression.

Yeah right... most of the things on earth, if we want to get/make them, money helps A LOT to get there. Far from powerless.


But i get why you would think so. The whole LoA or subjective reality thing right? Well i live in a more practical world...

But with your great success with your blog i see how you could believe it, but there are another thousands of bloggers our there trying to imitate you, yet they won't get anywhere, even after reading this blog entry of yours.

[RT Wolf]

Obviously everyone will take away from this whatever they are ready for. To me, the message sounded like what I heard Covey saying: you can only reap after you have sown, never the other way around.

[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by Brutha

And you don't need complicated skills. Basic skills like speaking and writing matter a great deal.

Writing and speaking are not basic skills! The amount of depth that was excluded with that statement is...

(And relax, I'm not as psyched up as I may sound.)

Everybody can write, but can they write well? Can they write effectively?

The knowledge and understanding required to do those things is pretty intense in scope, the main issue being that there are so many related factors that come into play. That's why I consider personal development to be so important. You can commit to improvement in one area, but until you commit to mastery of life, you'll never really net any improvement that matters.

Amusingly, most depth is a result of the complexity of people. Whether you are dealing with yourself or with others, people are a large barrier to direct effectiveness.

In all honesty, if you could somehow find a system that doesn't require interaction with people and channel your talents and efforts into that, your life would be many times easier because, at most, you'd have to deal with your own complexity (not that your own complexity isn't also mind-boggling in scope).

Writing, like most things, may appear basic or simple on the surface. As progress you begin to see how many relationships and influencing factors there are. I'd even go as far to say that "writing" and "speaking" are highly misleading labels. The actual activities involved have little to do with writing and speaking—they're just the final medium. The effectiveness part comes from things that largely have nothing to do with the act of writing.

[ericabiz]

I think the key point here is that Steve didn't start writing because he wanted to make a ton of money. For him, writing is an outlet -- a way to express himself. That's similar to music, art, or athletics for other people.

I get that, since my outlet of choice is writing, too -- and I've managed to jumpstart my blog's success that way. But my blog isn't a way to make a huge income. I have urges to write. I get all itchy when I haven't written for a while.

Today I had this huge to-do list of other things to do, but when I started reading some blogs this morning, I got an insatiable urge to write. I hadn't written in 2 weeks, but three hours after I got the itch I finished a groundbreaking post called "You Are Worth More Than You Think: Overcoming One of the Top Reasons Entrepreneurs Fail." (It will be up at erica.biz - Erica Douglass challenges you to change your life! tomorrow.)

Writers write because they can't NOT write. I go nuts if I don't write. I've learned to channel that itch into something that helps other people instead of making it all about myself. I can see a lot of similarities in Steve.

Don't think it's about the money. Don't force yourself into "blogging" or "writing" because you think that's what will make you a lot of money. Do something that you'd do even if no one ever paid for it.

[Steve Pavlina]

Originally Posted by Sam988

but there are another thousands of bloggers our there trying to imitate you, yet they won't get anywhere, even after reading this blog entry of yours.

Imitation is the sincerest form of powerlessness.

Seriously, part of the reason people suffer from financial scarcity is the silly thought that money will somehow give them power if they don't already feel powerful w/o it.

The main reason I have plenty of money flowing through my life these days is that I figured out how to empower myself when I was broke. That internal sense of empowerment is far more important than any amount of cash. If you throw lots of cash at a disempowered person, they'll just find a way to blow it on stupid stuff.

Money doesn't bestow power. Money can only serve as an additional channel for your current level of power. If you feel powerless w/o money, you'll feel just as powerless with it. Powerless people who inherit lots of money spend a good deal of time being paranoid about losing it.

[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by ArthurHung

I recently read this awe-inspiring article about the importance of "effortful study", leading to my conclusion that daily effortful study past our comfort zones, which comes primarily from strong motivation, is key to developing a "reasonable level of skill".

So important is "effortful study", in a sustained and measurable way, to improve rapidly that makes the process of journalling and goal-setting so effective - ideally directed by the guiding decision of a strong purpose.

Polarity works for me.

What Steve's skill article and the expert mind article leaves out is that we practice things disproportionately.

Months and months ago I read the expert mind article and intuitively disagreed with it. I *knew* there was some nebulous quality that had more power than skill. I primarily drew upon this quality whenever I did most things and found it was transferable to nearly anything I did. It's the reason I could pick up a game I've never played and, in the right situation, be as good as or better than people who've played three times as much as me.

Fast forward a few months and I learn that quality is called "talent" and has to do with your biology. Skill and knowledge are learnable; talent, past the age of approximately 16, is not. Your talents are your multipliers, and when you draw on them you enjoy exponential learning and output, and become highly resilient where you would otherwise wilt.

You become better at what you practice. That's certainly not revolutionary. What's interesting is asking why some people are significantly better than others who also practice equally, or perhaps more than those with this innate ability.

The answer lies in your biology, and to ensure your survival and be more biologically efficient, your body develops with specialty in mind so you become someone with a few very specific yet extremely dominant patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour—a specialist.

You can practice at something to become better, but unless you have the fuel provided by a biological yearning to feel a certain way, your practice will be slow, unsatisfying, and generally inefficient compared to what you could experience if you aligned with your "passions", which I like to currently define using the WordWeb definition of strong feelings or emotions.

I'd go as far to say that if you don't feel inquisitive, fulfilled, immersed, or energised, you won't develop much skill at all.

[Brutha]

The answer lies in your biology, and to ensure your survival and be more biologically efficient, your body develops with specialty in mind so you become someone with a few very specific yet extremely dominant patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour—a specialist.

Do you have some source? It could also lie in the quality or the practice or luck (specially in non-game skills like the ability to have a good blog, that might just come from being in the right niche at the right time).

If you take some think like good memory as a talent that helps you to get good at playing chess because you can better remember moves, memory can be improve past age 16.
I also don't see why you can't increase your passion for a topic after age 16.

[JoaquinFox]

What happened to ready, fire, aim? Personally, I don't see it as a tragic event if all these blogs are failing. They deserve to fail sure, but that's really looking at it in the short term. If these unsuccessful bloggers all fall flat on their faces they'll learn a lot more about blogging and business than they would if they just stayed at jobs they hated. And they'll be building their skills in the process. Isn't that a major part of gaining skill, failure? The maturation process requires failure.

I thought the only real failure was giving up entirely. A failed blog, or any other failed endeavor is only really a failure if you don't learn from it and allow it to stop your growth. This seems like a contradiction from Steve's podcast where I'll paraphrase, "Follow your passion. Even if you absolutely suck at it, if you are passionate and you stick to it, you'll eventually get better." Those words made me cry when I heard them and they really help when I hit rough patches. Thank you Steve!!

Maybe I'm missing the point entirely. Maybe this latest post is about unrealistic expectations of success and the effort and time involved to achieve it? At any rate, I don't expect to never "fail" and as I see it those "failures" and persistence will only help me to build my skills and to grow. It's like a video game...no gamer wins a game without having their avatar killed numerous times. Their skill is directly related to their failure.

[tekomino]

Originally Posted by Bruce Achterberg

Your talents are your multipliers, and when you draw on them you enjoy exponential learning and output, and become highly resilient where you would otherwise wilt.

Oh yeah definitely that is the case. For anything, if you want to be really a world class you have to put in the either extraordinary huge amount of work or you have to have various degree of talent and still put in huge amount of work. There is no escaping huge amount of work

I remember when I started Tae Kwon Do long time ago my trainer said that you need about 10,000 repetitions (good conscious tries) to learn a single kick or a move. Yep, right on. After 4 years 400 people that started with me got reduced to about 10...

To master something, from my experience and from reading about others, you need to invest about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

So if you want to be great at something think about it. Start chopping on those 10,000 hours. 2 hours a day and in about 13 years you'll master it.

That's why most of people don't succeed. They don't want to put the time in.

It took me about 8 years to build my business from scratch with deliberate work every single day no exceptions for average 4-6 hours while holding full-time job. In first year I made from $60 to $400 a month only... Today most CEO's don't make as much a year...

Here is great article from CNN on subject you guys might find interesting.

[Sam988]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

Imitation is the sincerest form of powerlessness.

Seriously, part of the reason people suffer from financial scarcity is the silly thought that money will somehow give them power if they don't already feel powerful w/o it.

The main reason I have plenty of money flowing through my life these days is that I figured out how to empower myself when I was broke. That internal sense of empowerment is far more important than any amount of cash. If you throw lots of cash at a disempowered person, they'll just find a way to blow it on stupid stuff.

Money doesn't bestow power. Money can only serve as an additional channel for your current level of power. If you feel powerless w/o money, you'll feel just as powerless with it. Powerless people who inherit lots of money spend a good deal of time being paranoid about losing it.

Ah i get what you mean. I agree, for someone who has no purpose and doesn't feel able and capable of changing his environment, money alone won't do the trick. As we know, most lottery winners end up broke after a while, which proves that the person must be empowered already and have the right mindset to be able to get the full benefits of having money.


What i mean with my post is that, if someone knows what he wants, then to reach his ends, most of the times, having money will help a lot. I'll have to resort to the very much clichéed phrase "along with power comes responsability". If the person isn't responsible then yea his life will still be a mess with or without money, but if someone knows how to settle his life, then money is a great tool for amplifying his reach and power.

[Jarrod]

My favourite line: "The universe doesn’t really say no, but sometimes it says not yet". Useful thing to keep in mind.

The other element present that I've been thinking about lots recently and seen around is the necessity of constantly working to improve something a little bit each day. Important for business, critical for personal development (If you are interested, I wrote about it on my blog a week back).

Thanks for the interesting post.

[thorstenbonn]

I couldn't agree with your last post about 'skill' more. I have just recently decided to launch my own blog and after days of trying to find a pattern between what and how often I post, and how much traffic comes to the site, I decided to post what feels right to me when it does.

Ironically, this method has given me the best results because I am not so attached to the outcome as before.

thanks for all your great work...

[munish]

Originally Posted by Sam988

What i mean with my post is that, if someone knows what he wants, then to reach his ends, most of the times, having money will help a lot. I'll have to resort to the very much clichéed phrase "along with power comes responsability".

then money is a great tool for amplifying his reach and power.

I don't think that you need money to do what you love.

Without money you may do that on smaller scale,but still you could make some meaningful contribution .

[Jake Birkett]

Good article thanks Steve. Life's an RPG (or is it a strategy game?). Build up your skills and accept the quests that the Universe gives you along the way...

[Brutha]

Writing and speaking are not basic skills! The amount of depth that was excluded with that statement is...

(And relax, I'm not as psyched up as I may sound.)

Everybody can write, but can they write well? Can they write effectively?

Sorry I missed that above.
That something is a basic skill doesn't mean that it's easy. It means that it's the basis for a lot of other things.
Two very different things and you should know the difference, because you have read at least some things about strategy.

You even argue in favor of simply (less complicated) approaches.

The making of basic simple systems is really hard. To check in your game metaphors:
if you can make a game work with less exceptions that require extra rules the game is better than a game with more exceptions that have to be covered with complex extra rules.

I would expect you to be able to mentally separate the two things after reading sirlin all the time.

Basic skills like writing + huge amount of practice in that skill -> Success.

[Steve Pavlina]

Originally Posted by Sam988

What i mean with my post is that, if someone knows what he wants, then to reach his ends, most of the times, having money will help a lot.

I'm suggesting that this is the very belief that repels money.

When I used to believe that, I constantly had financial problems. The more I saw money as part of the answer to my problems/goals, the less money I had.

[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Do you have some source? It could also lie in the quality or the practice or luck (specially in non-game skills like the ability to have a good blog, that might just come from being in the right niche at the right time).

If you take some think like good memory as a talent that helps you to get good at playing chess because you can better remember moves, memory can be improve past age 16.
I also don't see why you can't increase your passion for a topic after age 16.

Look into work by Marcus Buckingham.

Also, you seem to be trying to shape things to your current understanding. If you want to really understand things, I recommend you doubt your own doubt and consider things (A) without judgment and (B) as a separate instances. Once you understand what you're working with, then you can start subjecting it to other thought processes.

I also recommend that you question what definition people are using when they use words (such as "talent"). Also, put your trust in people getting the results you want, since they're the ones who can help you or other people get similar results.

If you do the above, it's likely it will lead you to a very deep understanding that holds up from many perspectives.

Re: Your post about writing and speaking as skill.

It seems you're approaching this as an argument. I know analytical people love to do this, and can't really help it, but our interaction won't be constructive if we continue (just take my word for it... I've seen the pattern enough times to know it's better if we go our own way).

[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by tekomino

Oh yeah definitely that is the case. For anything, if you want to be really a world class you have to put in the either extraordinary huge amount of work or you have to have various degree of talent and still put in huge amount of work. There is no escaping huge amount of work

I remember when I started Tae Kwon Do long time ago my trainer said that you need about 10,000 repetitions (good conscious tries) to learn a single kick or a move. Yep, right on. After 4 years 400 people that started with me got reduced to about 10...

To master something, from my experience and from reading about others, you need to invest about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

So if you want to be great at something think about it. Start chopping on those 10,000 hours. 2 hours a day and in about 13 years you'll master it.

That's why most of people don't succeed. They don't want to put the time in.

It took me about 8 years to build my business from scratch with deliberate work every single day no exceptions for average 4-6 hours while holding full-time job. In first year I made from $60 to $400 a month only... Today most CEO's don't make as much a year...

Here is great article from CNN on subject you guys might find interesting.

I've read that article you linked to; it's good stuff.

Deliberate practice (aka "effortful study") in an activity that is talent aligned is the recipe for consistent, near perfect performance. In real-world terms, it's the recipe for great success.

These are the people you want to listen to. To the degree I internalise the principals these expert specialists use, the more effective I become. That seems to be the general pattern for others, too.

On a side note, it's interesting how the 10,000 hours basis is useful in everyday application. E.g. If you want to start doing something and actually want to become good at it you can say, "would I want to do this for 10 years?" Asking that question—or at least, "is this something I'd happy do for for and eagerly want to do when I'm not doing anything else?—has helped me avoid walking down paths that would not make use of the best of me. I'm sure it's saved me years of unpleasantness and ineffectiveness. Potential is an interesting thing: hard to really know when you're making use of it.

[Bruce Achterberg]

Originally Posted by Dan.Linehan

A diverse array of skillsets helps too. There are plenty of skilled programmers who are completely unable to make a worthwhile product, mainly because they don't have any background in any other industry.

They end up creating products that have been done a million times before. Like Pownce.

Send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. Create a network of friends and share stuff. It's free and easy…

Wow, welcome to e-mail.


A programmer who has never worked in restaurant management wouldn't understand the need for logistics planning applications between farmers and restaurant owners.

I find this very true in my experience.

Usually only with a bit of understanding of how something works, I'm able to make more effective decisions. What has helped me tremendously is to not compartmentalise things. Once you don't compartmentalise--which seems more intuitive for me anyway--you start to see relationships and connections between things.

And if I need more effectiveness in a certain "supporting" area that I have only a basic understanding of, I always have the opportunity of deepening my depth of understanding in a specific field. When you do this, you experience exponential improvements in your understanding since one understanding reinforces every other understanding. It's extremely high leverage.

Amusingly, often when I write something and I liken a certain idea to an example, people say "you can't say X has anything to do with Y." What that person is really saying is "I don't have the talent themes that let me see the world like you do, so I don't believe you." Unfortunately that's not all that helpful. What's really helpful is interaction with people who have an understanding of talents, especially their own.

That said, even if you have vastly different talents to other people, you can still communicate effectively. The key factor is your ability to be clear. If you can remove the need for the other person to see the world like you do and be explicitly clear, you part the

I can almost guarantee Steve did this with his book, and many will say, "how does he know or figure out this stuff?!"

Steve doesn't do this so well in his blog and forum posts, however, and that's why you see follow up posts like Sam's where Sam disagrees with Steve. Steve is drawing on things that he can clearly see, but Sam can't, so they tend to argue semantics back and forth, not really understanding the very subjective behind the terms each of them are using.

Life become much easier for me when I realised that very few people speak using actual language and instead draw on their own conceptual definitions. They may use the same words you are using when you speak with them, but unless you understand their conceptual definitions, they're effectively speaking another language in the guise of English.

And hehe @ the programmer/email story. I find almost anybody who designs something does a similar thing. They create something as experts in one field, then question why it isn't successful. Meantime, they've completely ignored the other factors at play that require experts in other fields. I find usability and inclusivity are most commonly overlooked. The lesson is that we're all specialists, and we are more effective when we make use of the specialty of other people and acknowledge that trying to become "well rounded" is extremely counter productive in terms of utilising human potential and effectiveness. We're much more effective if we acknowledge our specialist focus and sharpen and make use of that intense focus.

Unfortunately people don't see the uniqueness in people. That's why most of our current systems standardise people, damning them to ineffectiveness instead of exponential progression.