🌻4 Soft Skills That Pay off Forever(MUST READ)

You won’t find these skills on a resume

*This article is a sister piece to an article about hard skills with the same name. It will be linked at the end of this article.

You can build all the hard skills in the world and still struggle with productivity and output. Being a quick study doesn’t make you a well-rounded individual.

Self-mastery is the process of reacting to your newest stage of personal growth. It’s also incredibly difficult, but well worth the time put into it. Developing soft skills turns intangibles, like social capital and public perception, into real opportunities. Fruit after the seeds.

But in order to harvest, solid time needs to be put into your personal development.

Read also: 8 people skill that pay off forever (must read)

Here are four soft skills that pay off forever:

1 — Interpreting the needs of everyone will let your win friends and influence people fast

We’re all the heroes in the story of our lives (I hope). As such, and especially in Western cultures, the individual is prioritized over the collective. A bit paradoxical, given how many of us work for and with other people.

So let’s try to be more neighborly.

The benefit of catering to the needs of those around you isn’t always tangible, but it is more impactful. We can meet the needs of people by taking the time to observe their behavior, mannerisms, and movements in everyday situations.

If you know a storm is coming later in the day, bring an extra umbrella to give to a coworker. The biggest risk is a lost umbrella. You don’t need to hand out luxury umbrellas. Just a working one. And that simple act of acknowledging the needs of others won’t go unnoticed.

You’re online, browsing Medium. Someone else is spouting off about their earnings taking a hit. Maybe reciprocate the feeling in a comment, then offer a solution that’s worked for you. Share the wealth.

In both instances, the act of offering something immediately useful to the other person amounts to one unit of social capital. Or units, depending. And humans tend towards reciprocity.

So practicing good interrelations by opening doors for people and refilling the coffee pot might not net you an immediate return — and maybe that spare umbrella is forever lost to the ether.

But good riddance!

Investing those tiny seeds of social capital go a long way in further developing relationships with people you regularly interact with.

This is why repeat customers are given the occasional discount at their favorite local cafe. Why random pay bumps are issued. Fees waived.

Sometimes all it takes is a small act of kindness to change the course of someone’s day. There are so many things in the background of people’s lives we’ll never know. So make a nice comment on a friend’s Instagram post, and they’ll be the first to like your next three. And so on.

2 — Mental clarity on demand

Keeping a journal is the easiest and fastest way to a better life. Ideas, influences, and passions are all intangibles. Being able to write, think through, and sort each of them between pen and ink is an incredibly valuable skill.

I’ve thought often about how I’d go about interviewing employees. Aside from having a decent resume, I feel the need to ask the applicant what their values are. Not political values, but real ones. The kind that makes their world go round.

You a family man? Environmentalist? A hedonist, in endless pursuit of life’s pleasures?

Or maybe another applicant likes to drink tea and think quietly to herself, building wealth through an array of side-hustles.

Simply making and knowing these distinctions are vitally important to an individual workflow.

In knowing your values, decisions can be made faster and with more conviction. When time is ultimately all we have, it makes sense to not waste it where we can. So many of my personal values are the result of years-long meditations on aspects of my life I care deeply about.

And this isn’t to say that a person’s values are made explicit only through pen and paper — just that spending decent time reflecting can pronounce your convictions faster and more formally.

Further, keeping an active record of your tendencies and behaviors and reflecting on them can better inform how you might act in the future. Current events are echoes of history. The same is true on an individual scale. It helps to practice what you preach when practices and speeches are held in your own handwriting.

3 — Fortify your mental toughness by reading philosophy

As life goes, we’ll be met with many successes and misfortunes. It’s up to us to develop the proper coping mechanisms to keep a clear mind in times of terrible circumstances. Lucky for us, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

So many great minds have come before us. Each with their unique vantage on the world and their own conclusions about how one ought to strive for the good life. Use their ideas to your advantage.

Reading philosophy is a great way to process the emotions we may feel toward misfortune and provide us a mental model to reframe life’s negative experiences as positive ones.

There is no right discipline to follow when it comes to thinking about how best to live your life. Learn broadly and borrow the best ideas you find along the way.

From the Stoics, I’ve learned systems of thinking that have helped me remain calm amidst personal and worldly drama. How to hold myself accountable for my work.

From reading the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who discussed existentialism to a great degree, I’ve learned to value nature and beauty with more respect. Reverence, even.

Recently, I’ve read a wonderful article by about Eastern thinking. Taoism is something I’ve been meaning to look into. I’m curious about what I might learn from a culture so separate from what I’m used to.

Go out into the world and discover philosophy. Take back with you anything you think is useful. There is no perfect way to live, so pick from every source and from every mind that has found a flourishing before us. Assemble your philosophical bouquet.

4 — Creative problem solving

I’ve thought about what I might say to a future son or daughter to teach them how to think critically about the world around them. I’ve thought of this exercise.

Take an object and ask yourself what it is.

It could be anything. A TV remote. A ream of paper. An old shoe.

Then ask again as to what it can be.

Imagination flexed and stretched, a TV remote becomes a phone. That ream of paper becomes a Textbook For The Dark Arts (and sciences). That shoe turns into a small boat — with the laces woven together as an anchor!

As we age, our childlike imagination grows dormant. I believe we can continue to access this level of creativity through exercise; by thinking of a cereal box as not just an object to store breakfast, but also as the potential torso of a robot, a shield, or a surfboard.

In the real world, I believe this type of thinking can produce more creative problem-solving ability. When a problem arises, most people take stock in a default mode of thinking.

Let’s take professional cycling for example.

If we were coaching a team of professional cyclists, we might want to put more hours into cardio and muscle training. This makes sense. So next season we double down, but still manage to lose out on any medals and trophies.

If we thought a bit outside the box, we might realize that the team’s recent lackluster performance wasn’t their strength and stamina. It was an array of other conditions that, if controlled properly, could make winners of a losing team.

To break the ice, this is a true story.

The British cycling scene was forever changed when their new coach, Brailsford, began optimizing for so many variables that were outside the norms of regular coaching. Mattresses and pillows were experimented with and optimized. The bicycle seats and frames were reworked for marginal improvements.

“They even painted the inside of the team’s truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of finely tuned bikes.”

Read also: 10 high-income skills you should learn to make more money online (learn here)

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

Dust! Who would’ve thought!

Brailsford didn’t see the cycling world as it was, but as it could be. Rethinking the way you view your own processes is an incredibly powerful tool for producing better outcomes.

For me, typing speed comes to mind. Easy. I can practice typing with various web programs. My form and keyboard type seem like reasonable places to start. Thinking beyond the ordinary, I’ve discovered alternate keyboard layouts like Colemak DH and Workman that I’m keen on trying soon.

I’m sure other marginal adjustments, like the amount of caffeine in my system and how slouched over I am, play important roles in my typing ability as well.

Or maybe another set of variables entirely.

Think of your own work. What are the most logical parts of your game to be optimized? Then think deeper. Go beyond the scope. Find smaller adjustments to make in the periphery of your work. They just might make you a world champion cyclist.

More value for you — Read my article about the four hard skills that pay off forever. So many people seem to get immense value from these ideas. I’m sure you will too.

Even more value for you — Skill-building is contingent on the energy we can put into the activity of learning. Learn how to leverage energy management here.

Contributed by Justin Boyette

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