If there is a book I can recommend to my younger self, it will be Skip the line by James Altucher - a book that essentially argues (and is mostly true) that the traditional career path of working hard for years and slowly climbing the ladder is no longer effective.
Instead, James recommends a new approach: skip the line by pursuing your passions, experimenting frequently, and learning from failure. By continually trying new things and embracing your uniqueness, Altucher believes that you can achieve your wildest dreams and make a lasting impact on the world.
The ability to switch interests, even careers, and quickly rise among the top in the world is an invaluable skill. This is what the book Skip the Line: The 10,000 experiments rule and other surprising advice for reaching your goals teach us.
A brief background before we…skip the line
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 rules according to which you need to spend 10,000 hours to get good at anything through his 2008 best seller Outliers. Although the book provided lessons on how to be great and world-class at anything, it is not applicable to all.
10,000 hours rule holds true only for certain people and people who are in specific fields like sports or arts. But for most people, it doesn’t work.
An average person has to work, feed his family and fulfill many other responsibilities. If we go according to the 10,000 hours rule, can we really be successful in life?
Our interests, jobs, careers, purpose, and skills we need switch from time to time. So, is it really possible to switch things and get good at them as fast as possible? Well, a big yes. Sharing bigideas from the book Skip the line.
Build Micro-skills
There is no such skill as “business” or “entrepreneurship” or “investing.” Or even “software development” or “chess” or “writing.” Any good skill is a collection of micro-skills. And to be good at something, you need to be good at those micro-skills.
Whatever field you are interested in, pick a pencil and a paper and write down 10 micro-skills that you need to be good in that field. For example, if you want to be an artist,
You probably need skills like drawing, perspective, oils, watercolor.
Then you probably need to know the history of art so you can figure out how to stand out and be unique.
Then there are the “tribal skills” — sometimes called “soft skills” — which can be really hard but are needed to rise up in the art world: networking, communicating about your art, salesmanship.
Plus, Minus, Equals
[Plus], minus, equals is another technique to help you skip the line and rise to the top quickly.
Plus means to find a mentor, learn from him/her and add value to your life. You can either have a real mentor or a virtual mentor. A real mentor is a real person while a virtual mentor can be any other thing like books or online content.
But how do you find virtual mentors if you don’t have real ones? Well, just read. Reading turns every author into a mentor and sometimes they can be even better than real-life mentors.
Reading is a superpower that can turn you from a normal civilian to a supernatural vampire.
Btw, we are launching a super cool product early next week that will accelerate you to skip the line!
[Minus] means to find someone with fewer skills and teach him what you can teach and add value to his life. Why?
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