Skills make us Unique. Do they?
Thinking about taking a new course to make yourself different? Think again.
Working in a professional environment pushes you to engage with people, thus you need communication skills.
Now to communicate you must find common topics to discuss among your peers. Here’s the part where all other constructive parts of one’s life enhance their personality.
So how do we prepare for this learning curve? Here’s my take on it.
Top 1% is a myth.
The curriculum you studied is the same as everyone else. So is the degree, so are the exams, so are the results of every other topper every year.
Thousands of people learn how to code every year, they too pick up the best courses as you would, they too learn from the same people you follow on the web.
So if everyone is practically learning from the same things, what is something that makes you unique?
Experiences are the Exceptions.
The more new things you try out, the more rich becomes your neural network.
Understand it this way:
Whenever you’re challenged with a problem, your brain tries to find the most relevant path to deliver the best possible solution utilising the resources available to you.
The resources used by the brain are the diverse experiences encountered since birth.
Believe it or not but by the day of birth, things like fear of heights and habits of cleanliness get embedded in your neural system, and it triggers on moments that replicate similar situations.
Now imagine this same challenge is given to 100 more people around you. This is where experiences make a difference.
And here’s how you overcome and outperform the competition.
Identifying Core Competencies.
Throughout our lives we spend time not money, we earn people not a bank balance, we collect experiences not dollar bills.
Something that can never be the same around you are the people. You learn from them, interaction becomes a factor and so does the exchange of knowledge.
Learning from life around you becomes much more powerful than any course that can be taken up online with a google account.
Growing up in a joint family or a nuclear setup, learning from a mentor or group of early birds, living with siblings or being the only child, all of this builds up and develops your neural network in a certain way that works out for the best of you.
But all of this has happened, it’s a thing of past, can we do something to change ourselves now.
Yes you can. Here’s how.
Burn yourself.
I’m in my 20s and I like to call this my energy age. Dragon ball Z was never my thing but that energy does seem nice to me.
I was presented with an opportunity in the first year of my bachelor’s degree and I took a chance of my life that made me love myself more everyday.
I gave an interview to join AIESEC and I got selected.
But the interesting part is that they sent all new recruits to attend the National Leadership Development Summit that was hosted at a location away from your home and you’d have to carry your casuals, professionals & traditional clothes along with you because it comes out to be the best experience you could ever ask for in your 1st year of college.
You’re asked to live with 5 people in the same room, all from different cities, backgrounds, families and you do not know who they are.
And this moment where life felt unpredictable, to my surprise this was the moment I felt the most comfortable in.
And now I understand why.
It helped me find my strengths, improve on my weaknesses, helped me in exploring how the world works, how people interact, what they’re more likely to do in critical situations.
And I grew.
The most interesting thing was that “not everyone is as willing to try as hard".
90% were there for fun. But only 10% utilised the opportunity to the fullest.
They tried to learn, notice, perform, fail, adapt and eventually grow every single day. And I wanted to be one of the 10%.
So i did the same. I learnt about people as much as I could.
But did it help? Oh yes it did.
The Emerging Director.
I love this philosophy, where a director portrays his/her narrative in a way people understand, relate and enjoy their narrative.
I developed the mindset to be the director of my life, make it my story, and own that story everyday.
Focusing all the energy at one place is not the answer.
It’s about giving enough energy and then some more in everything that you do. The worst that can happen is people won’t like it.
That is when you learn, adapt and present it in a better way. And here’s something you would like to remember before you step out of this article.
There are no Retakes.
Own your life. Make this the moment where you know what do to. Know whom to help, whom to take help from, and be a bigger person not because you should but because you can.
Being who you want to be instantly makes you more powerful. It makes you think like a warrior & protect your hard work, to work like an ant & never stop growing, to stay robust like a camel & survive through the toughest.
All this happened because I learnt to trust myself, believe no one else, and learn like no one can. I did it because I put myself to the test, not by taking a course, but taking a moment to realise the meaning of life.
Think Again.
We started from taking a course to make you different. You take a course to learn something useful. You use this knowledge to work better and in turn develop a skill. But let’s change the equation.
It won’t matter if you develop a skill to put on your resume, but it would matter if you’re willing to do everything to learn from that skill and use it everywhere that you can.
No one would reward you for developing this mindset, or even if you give a solution with a different approach. What everyone cares about is the result.
Believing in the potential you possess makes you the master of your own future. You train yourself today to become something for tomorrow. And allowing yourself to enjoy this experience humbles you down to the core.
It makes us more practical, more natural, more self aware & more human.
