Briefly Important: School…
I think as a 33 year old woman who a) went to school and b) has a significantly successful career (mostly reflected by the fact that I know how to write “significantly successful” without looking it up - bow before me peasants!) I feel like can reflect back and determine:
What would I have needed school to teach me, just to succeed a bit faster and focus on the most important things?
After a bit of thinking (about 5 seconds, let’s not kid ourselves)
Quite frankly, school covered pretty much none of that.
School seemed to excessively focus on fostering knowledge beforehand, just in case you could need it somehow. Quick, learn differential equations just in case motherfucker.
What I now find is:
The situation determines the knowledge you need. The actual ability you really should train is being able to become sufficient in a topic as the need arises, and not in preparation. To THEN (and now comes the part that really nobody wants to hear) talk about it publicly. In a way that doesn’t make people want to be spontaneously assassinated from a rooftop sniper. Present surface level knowledge in an engaging matter. That’s how cult leaders do it bitch!
I swear to you from the bottom of my heart: you can have the most hyper genius expert in any field, the most experienced CEO blablabla. Doesn’t matter! Most people are absolutely shit presenters. Absolute abominations. Say one word and the first thing your audience does is check how much time is still left until they can finally leave. FINALLY!
And yes…YOU are probably one of them. I hope you appreciate the gesture, always here to brighten your day. <3
But honestly, 99% of people I meet that are intelligent and have something to say fail to say it. They fail to sell their point. They fail to capture their listeners. Sometimes they get through with it, because believe it or not: people usually cut you a LOT of slack. It sometimes takes a long time and a lot of very boring meetings and keynotes for someone to just stop getting invited one day. Fucking sad.
You know who gave me the absolute best advice on this? My 13 year old niece and that’s odd, because with 13 you usually have the mental comprehension of an empty glass of stale milk. Not her, apparently.
She will soon attend a school for photography, art and theatre acting (a lot of soft skill, penniless bullshit you now think) and she said:
“It only works if you commit 100%. If you feel awkward and hold back, you make it ACTUALLY awkward. But if you tell yourself ‘fuck it’ and lean in, you nail it most of the time”
Sounds pretty fucking smart to me. Maybe we need to stop calling it “soft skills”, don’t you think?
THAT’S the gist of it.
(BTW I always thought you wrote “gist” like “jizz”. You don’t…found out the hard way)
