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Excerpt

What are the top five skills you would advise a newly graduate to learn – to thrive in the future to be successful?

First skill – communication. Communication is super important. How you communicate with people. Will you be able to engage them? Communication doesn’t mean talking. It doesn’t mean speaking. It doesn’t mean speaking on stage or typing in chat, You know how to formulate words. That’s not communication. You know how communication starts?

By listening. You have to learn the art of listening.

You need to learn how to listen first. That’s the key to great communication. If you make the other person feel like “Oh, this guy really understands me”, then that person would be more open to listen to you as well. And great communication happens in between.

The second thing that you need to learn to thrive in the future and to be successful, I think is sales, nothing happens until someone sells something.

Sales is one of the oldest skills in history. It is one of the oldest professions in history, being a salesperson. You cannot be successful if you cannot sell. Whether you are a businessman, an employee, an inventor, or an idealist, you have to learn how to sell. If you don’t know how to sell, success will be ever elusive. It’s hard to find success in life if you don’t know how to sell.

The third one would be the ability to accept criticism, in short, humility. It’s hard to hear people say bad stuff about you – things that you need to change. That’s how it is as human beings, it’s really difficult. But if you keep rejecting, that the chances of you improving is very small. The easiest way for you to know your weaknesses and blind spots is usually from how other people see you.

The fourth skill that you need to be successful in the future is to delay gratification. You have to learn how to delay gratification. You cannot do things now. When you want it, when you feel like it. That is difficult to do. The idea of pay now, so that you can play later, is real. The idea of play now, but you will have to pay later, is also real.

If you keep playing now, and the now is usually when you’re younger, when you have more energy, when you can network better, and you have to pay later, what happens is usually you end up poor.

The fifth thing for a newly graduate to learn, to thrive in the future, to be successful. And you have to let me say this because I’m a man of faith, I’m a born again Christian. I think one of the skills that you need would be to have a daily relationship with God. That is one of the secrets that I always say is right in front of you. I keep saying it, but people don’t follow it. It’s mind-blowing, but really that is something that is super necessary for life. There are a lot of promises.

So if you read the Bible, if you learn to have a relationship with God, even if you just read the Bible, the book of Proverbs, you actually learn a lot of things and these things will help you to succeed in life. So for me, that is a skill. I would consider it a skill just because not a lot of people do it, just because not a lot of people invest time in that. They would invest time and money and effort in their personal growth, in their public speaking, in their personal finance management, in their insurance. But they don’t invest in their spirit. They don’t invest in their soul, which I think is a very real part of us. And it’s something that everyone should invest in.