Build Skills in Your Twenties
Our new age compensates for skills and knowledge.
In my considerably short life, there are few things I have really come to terms with as truth and facts. As someone who is constantly questioning stuff, looking at new and different ways to do things, I must say, discovering the importance and power of skills was imminent with my constant yearning for knowledge.
Our society respects education, and I must hail that. However, we must do more than that. Our current world dispensation demands more from the average person than decades ago. Life is getting better as we have better internet, we enjoy electricity, have access to transportation options and enjoy new technologies coming up. In similar vein must we develop ourselves to make the future better for ourselves and posterity.
This requires a new level of thought, action and skills. A skill is simply the ability to do something effectively and efficiently. Due to the nature of skills, you cannot learn it all in school. The time is simply short. Considering that life itself is a learning process, your entire life is a school. Approaching life with such a profound mindset will help you constantly upgrade your skills to meet the new standards.
Back in the day, a programmer would've needed to learn only a few languages to be able to create good solutions and applications. In our present age, there are new technologies and frameworks which you need to acquire to be considered good. If you are from the old school, you do not need to do anything but stay “unupgraded” to lose your job.
Why skills? We are in the gig economy where it isn't just about jobs but also about freelancing, doing 2 or 3 different part-time jobs to make ends meet. This kind of schedule requires a person to learn different things and skills which are mostly not even taught in schools.
Take a full-time YouTuber. To succeed, you need skills in video editing, videography, graphic design, probably motion graphics, scriptwriting, and a suite of other skills. In a typical production house, each function will be distributed to a team or different people individually in charge of each aspect of the production. But to survive as a YouTuber, you need to embody all these people.
According to the World Economic Forum, certain fields are declining whilst others are gaining. The current labour needs to build new skills to stay relevant to their employers or face extinction. Those with the skills survive.
Most people feel good saying Steve Jobs and other people were able to make it after quitting school. But the question after this statement is, what then made them successful? It was skilled. Things they gad acquired from school and their experience. And these marketing, sales, innovation, leadership, etc skills made them who they are. You cannot go far without the skill of doing what it is you want to do.
There are a world of skills, hard and soft skills. I implore you to research the skills that matter to your field and to make the most of that knowledge. The ability to learn things and acquire skills is a powerful skill that has been underestimated in our part of the world.
Let us normalise acquiring skills. If you are wondering about my headline and why this piece is for young people; here you go. Young people are young and need to acquire these skills to be able to fit well into the new world they haven't been well trained for. And most successful people advise that people in their twenties fail and fail fast by trying everything. The lesson isn't to comply fail but to learn what works quickly so you can focus your thirties on building on certain skills that work for you and that you can build wealth from.
