6 Nov
Expand Your Skillset
ENTER HERE THE STORY OF THE BIKE SPOKES ON A WHEEL
I really feel this book is about a three year process for one to fully learn and implement into their lifestyle. I think it’s a great tool to give anybody that’s about 13 years old and show them how they could start a career and build towards a phenomenal, successful resume that could take them into any field.
If you’re a parent that wants their children to be successful, then give them this book and really emphasize this chapter during their youth. This chapter explains how to expand your skill set. Everybody has some kind of skills when they start out. If you love to play Pictionary and you always get things right, or you love to play video games, then that means you have a creative and open mind.
If you always get your homework finished on time, you’re very punctual, and you’re never absent from school, then that means you’re detail-oriented and a great project manager.
Keeping this in mind, let’s remember our 111 business philosophy and let’s build a foundation in that area. If you want to be in pharmaceuticals and you think you have a 111 in that area, then let’s find an area that you’re interested in and tackle it at no cost. Instead of going to a class and taking some seminars or tutoring from someone at your high school on business subjects, I would rather you do an internship on business.
If you’re 15 years old, instead of going to the accounting department of school and asking about what classes are offered, why don’t you actually go to an accounting firm and do an internship with them? That’s going to be 10 times more beneficial and productive than if you just take a class.
Also, the guy at the high school that’s teaching the accounting class is probably getting paid somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000 annually. Really? You’re going to take finance advice from someone who makes that little money? That shows the breadth of his knowledge in business and finance . His position in life is telling you what he found in some textbooks and his finances which got him to the point where all he could do was become a teacher at a local high school. That’s not very successful in my opinion.
With that in mind, we want to find an internship to build on your skills and maybe it’s going to pay, maybe it’s not, but you could start as early as possible. I was doing internships at the age of 13.
Be creative. If you want to be a lawyer, go help at the police station. If you want to be a social worker eventually, then volunteer at your school’s counseling office and you might be with the liars, cheaters, and the ill-minded, but they’ll give you a head start on your competition because once you become a social worker, you’ll already have the skills developed on how to be aware of stuff.
When I look at somebody’s resume, I look at a few different things. Do they have any internships? Do they have any volunteer experience? That tells me two things. It tells me one that they’re passionate about what they’re doing, because if you really care about how to write a book and you want to become a publisher, then I guarantee you’re going to do an internship at some publishing firm or some magazine and you just want to submerse yourself in all of the areas possible that you can do in publishing to see if it’s really you.
If you went to school, and I’ve seen this before, got your degree, then got your masters, then got a doctorate or a PhD, but you never did an internship and actually went out in the field and got any experience, then you’re going to have a hard time adapting to the business lifestyle.
I bring writers in and they work for me and you can tell that all they’ve ever done is academic writing. Academic writing is kind of bland. You do it for your teacher and the teacher is usually stuck in the academic setting too where they want you to write in a boring, bland way. They train you how to write boring articles that you reference everything and people just don’t like to read that stuff.
I really suggest that if you want to be a real writer that you take a step outside the classroom and go do an internship. Who cares if it’s a year long? The longer it is, that’s the more skills you will have in that area because we aren’t looking to get you a job today, we’re looking at a job a year or two down the road.
Sure, this might be a $5 to $10 per hour job now or even grinding out hours for free, but the training and inside trade secrets you’ll learn are priceless – I don’t care what industry it is you enter. This book is teaching you how to be a millionaire, how to be so successful and be the best in any field, so really take this concept to heart and do those internships and train with the best of the best. If you come on as the administrative assistant, which is probably all you can really do when you first start out in the company if you don’t have any internships or if you start out in the fax room, then all you’re going to be doing is faxing stuff all day. But if you do an internship with a top firm, then you stick with them for a year or two and they will give you the inside secrets of the inside of the projects and you’ll work on some really top stuff.
I was looking at Dance Spirit magazine the other day and I was reading a few articles and I realized that these articles are all written by this one girl named Melissa. Just knowing how business works and seeing that this is a corporate business, I thought, “I bet Melissa is one of their interns.” I looked in the front of the magazine and sure enough, she’s one of three interns, and they write all the articles. How cool is that? They get to be an intern and this entire magazine is put together pretty much by those three interns that I’m sure are about 20 years old.
The real business minds behind the magazine put together all the marketing packages, they make sure it sells, and all of that, but the actual writing is done by interns and most people that you meet in a job that you’re going to talk to, those things that you read, they’re put together by interns. So you’d be surprised at how many people are actually interns in companies and it’s not as intimidating as you would think. Once you become an intern and you realize you’re doing a lot, my books for example are written mainly by interns. I’m sitting here now with a microphone and I’m recording this chapter but the final result was put together by an intern. That’s something that is really incredible.
If you read the Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, he has administrative assistants working in other companies for him and they do the majority of his work. He doesn’t really use an internship system but you’ll see that the majority of work that gets done around the work that gets out in front of the public is done by interns or by assistants. You want to realize how to do that kind of work so that whenever you go into a company and you actually want a salary you can say, “I’ve done internships before. I know how the world works and I think that I’m a valuable asset because I’ve already done two years of internships.”
Volunteering
Beyond that, you also want to do volunteer work. Volunteer your time with school projects around the community, at your church, pretty much anything. This is obviously beneficial for whoever you’re volunteering, but you’ll learn how to communicate and do tasks and build a presence in the community as someone who is compassionate. Without compassion for your clients, your business will never succeed. I’ll repeat that: without compassion for your clients, your business will never succeed. You have to be passionate about what you’re doing and you have to care beyond a level of “What is my paycheck?” You have to care on a level that changes the world and brings us together in the sense that your business has purpose.
I was talking to an acquaintance of mine the other day. She said, “Matt, I know you give resume help. Can you look mine over and tell me what I can do?” I looked it over and said, “You know what, just read my book. Read The Summit of Success. It will teach you how to have a better resume. Looking at it right now, I see you don’t have any volunteer experience. It looks like you’ve done like a three month internship but it looks like you did it just to say you did it. You didn’t really learn anything there. I wouldn’t hire you based on this. You need about another year of training and do a lot more volunteer work and all that.”
Now, keep in mind this friend is a law student and is mid 20s and a has maintained great grades and studied hard her entire life. She responded, “Matt, I’m not like you. I just want a job. I don’t want to do volunteer stuff. I don’t want to change the world. My job isn’t that important to me either. I want to get a nice income. I’ve already gone to school and I’ve done all the work that I’m supposed to. Now it’s time for me to get a good income.”
I was like, “Excuse me? Who says that you’re allowed to get a good income just because you went to school for six years?” She went to law school. “It doesn’t work like that. You have to be passionate in order to make a difference in this world and only the people that are passionate can rise to the top and get the jobs because there are enough people now that have been to college and went through that grind but did it without any passion and that’s 90% of the workforce so the hiring managers are looking at people and they’re looking for that passion. When you were in high school, did you go to the police station and volunteer there just to see what the cases were like? Did you come into the courthouse just to see what a case was like? Did you help write articles for the lawyer? Did you help out on cases and just run their faxes for them? That shows passion. You can say, “I’m 24 years old and have already been in law for 3 years. I’ve been on 12 cases and I volunteered at this, I did a blood drive with a law firm…” then they’re going to be like, “Wow, this person really cares about law. I think we have an entry level position for them and they’re going to grow into a great lawyer with us. Let’s go ahead and hire her.”
So that’s how you expand your skill set. Like I said, this takes about 3 years to really take in everything that I have in this part of the book and apply. Don’t look at this as a book that you’re going to read in a few days and apply it and say, “Okay, now I know how to be successful.” No, these are things that I would suggest if you are 40 years old, give it to your child and help him become more successful.
That way when they’re 20 years old, they’ll already have all these skills built and it’s something that your father never taught you that you can pass along to them and that’s such a gift, and even if you’re 40, that doesn’t mean you’re too late, that just means that you’re going to have to stay at the job you’re in now and build up the skill set to eventually become the entrepreneurial success that you want to be.
Expand your Skillset
You’ll also want to put yourself out there and just do as many things as possible. When I was in school people didn’t understand what I was trying to do but I would go from the track team then go to football practice then go to the chess club, then to the web design program. I was the webmaster, I was the captain of the track team, captain of the soccer team, and captain of baseball, class president, senior editor of the newspaper. Each of these areas I made sure that I was number one in and I put a lot of time into each one of those and what that equaled out to was not very much social time after school but a lot of academics and a lot of training so that once I had that foundation down I could get a really good job and use that in my skill set.
Go out there and play sports. If you’re more of the nerdy type, play sports. Trust me, you can learn it. It’s just muscle memory. It’s still training your body in a different way than you train your mind. Join the chess club if you’re a dancer and you have no analytic skills. Chess will teach you that. Join debates if you aren’t very good at talking to people. Find an area that you’re the weakest in and involve yourself in that area. Join Toastmasters and join various contests and competitions. Go out there and run 5k races. Run a marathon. Do something that’s going to put yourself out there in an area you don’t feel comfortable in and this is how you’ll expand your skillset.
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