The Only Two Skills You Need, And Bullshit Ones To Ignore
I love to research what it takes to succeed in building skills, and reading stories of how people make great things happen. It’s one of the ways I like to stay motivated. This is my attempt at sharing what I’ve learned so far in my pursuit of success knowledge. I hope you find it helpful.
First, without bullshitting you, I’m going to come right out and tell you the answer. The two things you need to succeed are:
1 Passion
2 Hard work
Note: you need both of these. Nothing more, nothing less.
These are the only two things that can be identified in most cases of success or skill building. Everything else is a side order.
You could stop reading here, but I want to justify these two points, and detail them out a bit more. Also want to share with you some success tips that I think are bullshit or should be deemphasized.
Passion
Passion comes in many forms, but we can all agree you must love or enjoy some part of the process. This is what will allow your brain to not get bored when you repeatedly expose yourself to the hard work part of the process.
There are some counterintuitive points to passion that I think are overlooked. For example, many people think that passion means that you live every single living moment of your life obsessed with a problem / genre / domain. That’s probably not true. I strongly doubt Jeff Bezos was spending his waking hours thinking about selling books. His dream and his passion was likely larger than trivial book transactions. He wanted to build “The Everything Store”, for example.
Hard Work
What does hard work mean?
There are a lot of studies that all pretty much agree that hard work means persistently doing something over and over until you get good at it. The numbers vary some from study to study, but 6 hours per day seems like a good start to gaining success in a skill or success. The key is persistence + time = hard work.
These might seem vague to a skeptic but they truly are not. You must love or enjoy the thing you are doing, also you must work at least 6 hours a day often over the course of years (3–6) to get to intermediate / expert level.
Is it guaranteed to work? No. What we are focusing on is cases where it worked and what the patterns are in those cases.
Bullshit Ways To Success
I’d like to lay out some things that either have no scientific evidence as the primary reason of success, don’t apply to everybody, or maybe they work but should be like #10 or less on the list of priority. In other words just straight up bullshit. Here we go…
- Meditation
- Taking risks (absolutely not required)
- Having an “education”
- Managing finances intelligently
- Listening to what rich people say
- Exercise
- Cold showers
- Caffeine
- Drugs
- Buying videos or lessons from people that say “I was a poor guy and now I’m rich I’ll tell you how”
- Waking up early, sleeping early (or late)
- Being in a steady relationship or being married
- Knowing the right people
- Subscribing to anything
- Reading self improvement books
- Religion
- GSD (Get Shit Done) theories
- Saving money
- Not watching tv and refraining from other joys in life
- Listening more
- Having a mentor
- Being brave
- Listening to advice from people who are successful
- Live / work balance
- Avoiding conflicts
- Believing in yourself
- Following intuition
Why should you trust me?
Here are some skills I’ve built over my life, that I would say I’m either at intermediate or expert level in. Some of these things I’ve learned without knowing what the recipe is, but passion drove me to work hard. Some of them like programming and business I’ve done in a very deliberate way. I’m not a Zuckerburger though, so don’t look to me for advice on being a rich guy.
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Soccer
- Skateboarding
- Chess
- Air Hockey
- Chinese language
- Computer programming
- Product development
- Philosophy
- Writing
- Growth Hacking
- Startups
If you have anything to add or if you just want to troll or fight with me I’m totally ok with that. Leave a comment below even if it’s very offensive I’ll most likely love that.
