If you want to do well in your professional life, learn to write effectively, speak effectively, and sell effectively. It is surprising, how little effort is made in our education system to foster these three most important skills for practical life.
Think of any successful political leader, businessman, teacher, bureaucrat, management professional, industry expert; and the reasons for their success would include some or all of the above mentioned three skills. Name any career and I could show you how by learning to speak effectively, write effectively, or sell effectively, you could scale up your progress.
In this digital age, it leaves you with no excuse to lag behind in these crucial life skills. There are many people around you who have mastered these skills, without being taught these things as a part of the regular curriculum. You can do that too. For that, you must take responsibility of your personal development and make use of all the resources around you.
So here are a few things which might aid you to develop these skills:
1. The right mindset
It is crucial that you take this journey of skill development as serious as your traditional education. You have to be convinced about the tangible benefits these skills would bring to your career progression. Time and money spent in this regard is not an expense. It is an investment. You have to identify room for self-improvement. You must set a clear, measurable, and time-bound target to monitor your progress.
Advice:
1. Write down three tangible benefits of speaking, writing and selling effectively, each, to your career and education.
2. Set three specific, measurable, and time-bound targets for yourself.
(e.g. I will have three op-eds published in the national daily newspaper by 31 December 2020)
2. Different styles
You must familiarize yourself with abundance of styles, and how you must adapt to different situations. There is just no single style of writing. A novel and a research article are written in different styles. A children’s story book is written differently from an autobiography of a politician.
Similarly, different situations demand a different style of speech. You won’t speak at a fundraiser like you would at a funeral. You won’t talk to people at a social dinner like a state official delivering a policy statement.
In the same way you would have to employ different techniques to sell a computer software and to sell a brand of biscuits. Marketing strategy for a shoe business would be different from that of a furniture business.
Advice:
1. Identify influential writers, speakers, and salespeople/ businesses. Follow their work.
2. Make a list of features which make their writing, speech, or sales pitch effective.
3. Notice how they use different techniques in different situations.
3. Readers are leaders
President Harry S. Truman of the USA has famously said, “Not All Readers Are Leaders, But All Leaders Are Readers”. To develop an effective writing style you must read good writers. The same goes for speaking effectively. Half of the art of speech is the appropriate choice of words (the other half being good delivery). And what better way to widen your vocabulary than by reading more. There is such abundance of books, that a lifetime seems a short period of time to go through all of those. Read. Read more. Read widely. This would broaden your horizons.
Advice:
1. Start reading with best-sellers; those are best-sellers for a reason.
2. Read the works of experts in the field.
3. Read different genres. Do not stick to just one category of books.
4. Read books of Dale Carnegie (esp. How to Win Friends and Influence People) and Brian Tracy (esp. Psychology of success, Marketing).
3. Online courses
Learning through presence in a physical classroom or by being present around a teacher is as old as learning itself. While historically it had been impossible to learn from someone except by physical presence, technology has given us the solution in the form of online courses or as they are commonly called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).
These online courses and videos have given us the freedom to choose and explore any topic, any time, from anywhere around the world. There are online courses available on any topic you could imagine. Online courses of the most prestigious universities around the globe are now available (Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, etc.). FOR FREE. You could access most of their course material for free and even sign up for a paid certificate track, from your home.
With declining attention spans and shrinking capacity to focus, many people now find reading to be an uphill task. While that situation needs to be addressed in itself, in the meanwhile, online courses offer a great alternative learning tool.
Advice:
1. Find an Online Course that would specifically help you learn the skill that you are aiming for.
2. Stick to one online course at a time. Complete it. Only then move on to the next one.
3. My recommended forums are Coursera, edX, and even Youtube. Each has its pros and cons, but that’s a topic for another post.
4. Practice, practice, practice
Practice, edit, revise, practice, edit, …. When it comes to getting things done, the best method is to “actually do”. Start writing; make a first draft, edit, edit again. Think about different types of topics. Practice speaking in different situations. Think about different products and the most effective sales strategy for those products.
In your idle time, make random mental sales pitch for different products. How would you redesign marketing campaign of Samsung? If you were marketing head of your favorite food outlet, what would you do differently than the current one? What impact would it have on the customers?
If you are hesitant to share your writing, speech, or sales pitch with strangers at first, have your family and close friends read or listen to your thoughts. Have them share their reviews about your work. To experiment, you can even just float your ideas around with random people. Talk to the person sitting next to you in the bus, standing in queue with you, sitting on the next table at the restaurant etc. You have nothing to lose.
Advice:
1. Practice
2. Practice more
3. Practice even more
Conclusion
Global landscape of education is changing fast. There are more opportunities than ever before to acquire and master new skills. That too, at increasingly lower costs. Unfortunately, traditional educational institutes have not only lagged behind in teaching important skills but also have failed to make use of the latest technologies.
You are responsible for your learning. With the availability of numerous free, low-cost, online resources, you no longer have an excuse to lag behind in learning and applying any important skill.
Write effectively. Speak effectively. Sell effectively