61–70 of 173 posts
Salesmanship. You have to sell yourself and your ideas in many life situations anyway. Why not do it with a maximum impact? And it brings in money if you choose a marketing/advertising job path or start your own business.
So my pick is sales. When I was presenting my thesis to the assessor, he was unimpressed. It was a bachelor's thesis, technically simple, but it attacked the problem from a different angle and had better progress than some PhD students working on the same project. My supervisor congratulated me on the presentation. I told him my assessor wasn't as impressed. He replied, "Maybe you didn't sell it well enough."
Since then, I got a little obsessed in finding out how to sell things better. A lot of people get the wrong impression of sales. They think it's an overdressed guy trying to put their foot in the door and promise anything for a sale.
Sales is simple. You have something that someone wants. Something other people wish they had and probably even spent a lot of money trying to patch themselves. They would happily part with money to get someone else to handle it. The trick with sales is to simply to find those people and explain your product in such a way that they throw money at you. There's no need to be good with words or be charismatic. Just explain the product well and explain why it's worth it.
It applies to many other parts of life too - getting a job, getting a date, hiring, pitching for a startup or scholarship. The first step is understanding what you have and why it's better. The rest is just articulating that well.
Communicating effectively with others will open up more opportunities than any other skill. It’s also a great way to learn more about others and yourself.
I expect many participants here to be strong in the logical aspects of rhetoric and would suggest focusing on social interaction, understanding the audience, playing with different presentational styles, receiving and giving feedback, and the part I find most difficult, figuring out and acknowledging what you want to achieve in a given interaction.
Not a lot of these suggestions have anything to do with a partner. Mostly solo skills, except maybe dance. Maybe we could come up with some that would enhance ones time spent with a partner/spouse?
Foot massage? :)
negotiating maximum compensation for the difficult and challenging work you do as a computer scientist
Being handy and having the relevant tools turns a lot of multi thousand dollar problems into hundred dollar problems and hundred dollar problems into non-issues. Having fewer smaller problems makes life less stressful.
Does it need to be said that everyone should have a basic toolbox / toolset and fasteners around? A set of screwdrivers, spanners, hammer, nails / screws, glue, tape, pliers, etc shouldn't take up more space. A (cheap) multitool or multifunctional pocket knife would already do most of those.
You can change a water heater with two shark-bite fittings, an adjustable wrench (and a screwdriver if it's electric instead of gas) and maybe a little help from YouTube and there's a ton of bang for your buck in that. There's very little automotive maintenance you can't do with a basic socket set and some screwdrivers and pliers and there's a ton of bang for your buck in that as well. But those kinds of basic tasks can be gateway drugs into developing more and more skills and as you develop more skills you wind up wanting the tools that make application of those skills more efficient.
Eventually you wind up at a level of available skills and tools where your only sources of expensive problems are people and not things, you are more limited by time than money, you've considered registering an LLC so you don't have to do as much lying when purchasing from companies that usually only sell B2B and you've unsubscribed from the advice subreddits in several fields because you realize that they're just full of idiots who can regurgitate textbook advice but don't have sufficient understanding of the constraints the people asking the questions are likely working under.
Not a lot of these suggestions have anything to do with a partner. Mostly solo skills, except maybe dance. Maybe we could come up with some that would enhance ones time spent with a partner/spouse?
(currently we joke that at that point we'll have to "learn to use walkers together")
If you're a shy person who would like to do better in social situations - learn to dance. Becoming a dancer opened up all sorts of doors for me. It made me comfortable in social situations from small-talk in intimate groups to public speaking in front of large ones. I even ended up married and living in a foreign country. Currently I'm learning the language and making some progress. All of which I can trace fairly di…
If you're approaching dance with a view to finding new realms of aesthetic experience, reserve judgment on whether you like the music. Some genres of music are meant to be enjoyed more in your body than in your head, or may come from an unfamiliar culture, so you'll need to be dancing for a while to get it.