Hard Skills, Soft Skills, And Money-Making Skills

In the world that I grew up in, there was an unreasonable amount of emphasis on “hard” skills — like design and development — technical things where you can produce a tangible output.

There’s considerably less emphasis on the “soft” skills — the somewhat intangible elements that weave in between the produced output, like air.

It’s unbelievably ironic to me that the world we’re trained for — where hard skills dominate and earn you money — is rapidly going away.

Now (and possibly it has been like this forever) you need both hard and soft skills to make a decent to great living.

Money-making skills are often soft skills. It doesn’t matter how awesome you are in AI, Design, Web Development, etc…

• if you cannot communicate the value of what you do.
• if you cannot tell if someone is interested (and willing to pay for) what you have to offer
• if they don’t believe what you say
• if you don’t know how to communicate or command trust
• if you have no idea how to get to the heart of the matter
• if you flake out when the hard times come around

Soft Skills Are Harder To Learn

“Soft” skills are ironically the hard ones because the answers aren’t clear-cut.

It depends on your interaction with people. (And your interaction with you).

Some days, you wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Some days, others do that. Yet, you gotta overcome the difference and create productive, forwarding, and useful conversations over idle banter (or worse, fits of anger).

Because anyone can wake up on the wrong side of the bed anytime, getting people on the same page gets increasingly harder as the number of people grows.

So the feedback you get changes drastically — since you can do the same thing but get wildly different feedback. Is there any surprise that there are people who rate a certain book 5 stars, but others give the same book only 1 star?

If feedback is variable — dependent on the other people’s moods and experiences — you’ve a bunch of data that you gotta sort out before the “feedback” becomes useful at all.

It’s all noise until you figure out what to do with it. (No, blindly obeying all feedback isn’t the answer — it gets you nowhere).

You’re at the frontier of your own life

The “hard” skills were mostly solved by our forefathers or people at the frontiers — the basic math for calculating stuff doesn’t change much until you gotta deal with large magnitudes (like going to space, or shrinking to nano particles).

But in your life, you’re at your own frontier.

No two people you meet are gonna be the same — too many variables.

So how you handle people changes drastically depending on who you meet.

Even the numbers matter. Handling 2 people, 4 people, or 8 people requires vastly different skillsets.

While there are general theories of how these work, nobody can put together a formula for you — you gotta find your formula for yourself, because nobody can work like you do.

Ain’t that hard?

Yeah.

It’s not easy.

But knowing this, what do you choose now?