personal talent management

The key lessons on how to become a great leader of any organization

An organization is only as good as its leaders. It’s absolutely true that too much hierarchy can kill the company’s creativity and productivity, but so does an absence of great leadership.

Some companies, like Treehouse, experimented with a flat organization without any leadership at all, and soon found out that people felt adrift, like lonely islands without support, when they weren’t being led properly.

But becoming a good leader is not an easy job. Developing yourself into a great leader is one of the toughest challenges one can set for themselves. That’s why you can find thousands of books and research articles written on the topic.

Nevertheless, we still don’t have a simple and clear formula for becoming a good leader. I guess we could really say that leadership is like beauty: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

No matter how much entertaining the comparison of leadership and beauty is, it would be foolish to stop at that. We definitely know several ways how one can become a better leader.

I cherry‑picked the best ones, describing the key personality and behavioral traits of great leaders.

You become a great leader by leading people

Let’s start with the most basic, fundamental mistake (new) leaders make. If you are a leader, your job is to lead people.

That means the majority of your time must be spent dealing with people. Many leaders never make the transition from doing their operational work to actually leading people.

Before taking a leadership position, most people excel at a specific job role. They are exceptional at marketing, sales, finance, product development or any other similar role. Because they excel at something, the natural course of things is to be constantly promoted until at some point they take the leadership position.

But succeeding as a leader doesn’t mean doing the same things you were doing before you became a leader. If the organization is small, you might not have the luxury of only leading people, but part of your daily schedule should definitely be dedicated only to leading people.

As a leader, you need to first set an inspiring vision and outstanding strategy for your team, and then you have to lead them. Yes, actually lead them.

You have to motivate people, empower them, hold them accountable for delivering and meeting certain standards, you need to coach them, see and develop their potential, and so on. It’s impossible to be a good leader if you don’t show care for the people you lead.

Here are some good questions to ask yourself:

Do you have a clear vision, strategy and operational plan for your team?
How much of your time do you dedicate to actually leading instead of doing operational work?
What’s your system of making sure people deliver results?
How much time do you spend motivating, empowering and coaching your teammates?

Become a great leader

Building relationships and delivering results

There’s an endless debate over whether a leader should be an autocratic or democratic one, more result- or relationship‑oriented. There’s a very straightforward answer to that, based on research.

A leader should be both. An outstanding leader knows how to build good relationships (democratic orientation), but also makes sure that results are delivered (autocratic orientation). It’s not one or the other, but one and the other.

That’s a hard transition for most leaders.

Leaders who are relationship‑oriented are terrified of setting clear goals, boundaries in relationships, giving honest feedback and holding people accountable for their work. They are terrified that people will stop liking them if they became more result‑driven.

On the other hand, people who are result‑oriented have a deep‑rooted fear of showing the human side of themselves. Showing vulnerability, trusting people, having a friendly talk … these are things that productivity‑oriented leaders equate with losing respect. But consequently, they never develop their true potential as leaders.

People will like you even more as a leader if you actually lead them to the results. People will respect you even more as a leader if you show that you care about them.

In both cases, you have to start developing “the other side” of every great leader. If you care more about relationships than goals, you have to make the first small step towards holding people accountable for results.

Homework

A very good first step is to make a list of small behaviors that bother you with people that you lead (spending time on social media, taking too many smoke breaks etc.) and communicating with them clearly that they’re crossing the boundaries. Relationship‑oriented leaders find that terrifying, but once they set boundaries for the first time, it feels very freeing.

It’s not much different with result‑oriented leaders. Noticing that one of the team members has a bad day and asking them what is going on by showing genuine interest for their moodiness might be a great way for people to start feeling more welcome and appreciated.

Nobody wants to feel only as a workhorse at a job. If you are a completely result‑oriented person, you might soon find that people will respect you even more if you show your human side.

When looking for balance between being relationship- and result‑oriented, the book The first 90 days by Michael D. Watkins offers a very good guideline.

As a leader, you will build your credibility if you are:

Demanding but can be satisfied
Approachable but not familiar
Determined but reasonable
Focused but flexible
Executive but don’t cause too big shocks
Prepared to make difficult decisions that are also considerate

One more good notion is to be more democratic when you’re setting the strategy and gathering ideas, and more autocratic in the execution phase.

The major leadership credibility killers

People love to be led by great leaders, but they can also quickly identify poor leaders and leaders who are only enjoying formal power without having any clue of what real leadership is.

With poor leaders in position, organizational problems tend to multiply. Team members become more and more unsatisfied, politics kicks in, people stop performing, and relationships starts to crack.

Without a great leader, the organizational environment starts to become toxic (unless people are extremely mature). Poor leadership is a negative spiral, very uncomfortable for all the people involved.

Here’s why: individual behavior is always a function of personality traits and environmental culture. The worse the culture, the worse the behavior of people. The worse the behavior of people, the worse the culture, and so on. And bad leaders are in the middle of all this.

Organizational culture eats every plan or strategy for breakfast. Leaders shape organizational culture by what they allow and what they don’t allow.

With bad leadership and consequently poor organizational culture, problems start to pile up. And bad leaders have the tendency to start running away. Obviously avoiding problems like the plague is one of the major leadership credibility killers. But there are several others.

The major leadership credibility killers:

Trying to do everything by yourself as a leader and micro‑managing people
Not making any difficult decisions at all
Keeping people in wrong positions and not firing the rotten apples
Not admitting your own and the team’s weaknesses and finding consulting help
Not developing and empowering people, and not breeding new young leaders in team
Not leading people situationally, based on their competences, attitude and tasks (as a leader you can use directing, coaching, supporting and delegating accordingly)

There is more interesting thing that I noticed.

Many people who become leaders start exploiting their position by, for example, starting their own distracting pet projects, wasting time on unnecessary meetings, spending time on coffee breaks, and doing everything except the thing they should be doing – strategizing and leading people.

4F response – the ultimate challenge leaders have to overcome

If you want to become a great leader, you must first know how to lead yourself. A big portion of leading yourself represents managing your emotions. And managing emotions is hard for leaders.

Here’s why: as a leader, you constantly have to deal with problems, issues and people. The people are usually an especially big challenge, since they’re not robots with performance specifications who blindly follow orders, but rather have very different capacities, attitudes, opinions, respect for authority, and so on.

In other words, being a leader means you’re in a constant state of crisis, dealing with numerous challenges and issues. That’s emotionally hard. Every crisis, problem, threat or misbehavior can throw you into the 4F mode – fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

And evolutionarily speaking, we can all quickly get thrown into one of the 4F states. Consequently, many leaders start living in one of the 4F modes. Their leadership style becomes one of 4F toxic emotional states. You’ve probably seen them many times:

Fight mode – the aggressive, authoritative leader, feared by people
Flight mode – the anxious leader, constantly creating crisis and drowning in work
Freeze mode – the leader who buries their head in the sand, and is completely passive and numb
Fawn mode – the leader who plays politics, tries to please everyone, but pleases no one

We know from movies that every leader in any of the 4F states, gets thrown out of the game sooner or later.

The anxious leader always loses first, because when you lose your head, you lose any leadership or even following capability. The fight mode leader is usually the wicked character that everybody wants to defeat, or goes with his head through the wall until he gets killed. People who freeze become a burden for everybody else. And politics and pleasing others works only for so long.

The solution lies in turning 4F states into an advantage as a leader. It takes an extraordinary emotional and mind management to achieve that, but when you do, you can really become an extraordinary leader, since not many leaders are in that club.

You can achieve that by developing emotional resilience, managing your own sensibility, and learning techniques to get yourself out of the 4F mode as quickly as possible, if there’s no survival danger present.

When you manage to achieve that, you can turn the 4F response into your advantage as a leader. Below is a table showing the direction in which one must develop the 4F biological responses to become an exceptionally great leader:

Fight	Flight	Freeze	Fawn
Assertiveness	Disengagement	Acute awareness	Love & Service
Boundaries	Healthy retreat	Mindfulness	Compromise
Courage	Industriousness	Poised Readiness	Listening
Moxie	Know-how	Peace	Fairness
Leadership	Perseverance	Presence	Peacemaking

Develop yourself as a leader or let other people lead

Carrying a leadership badge or possessing an executive title absolutely sounds nice. It can be a great career achievement – unless it’s only on paper. Nobody wants that, because leaders with only formal power do devastating damage to the organization and all the people involved.

You don’t become a great leader by being promoted and earning the title. You become a great leader when you decide deep down that you truly want to become a great leader and you’re determined to develop your leadership potential no matter what.

Earning a leadership status just because you excelled as an expert in a certain role for so long is far from making you deserving of being called a great leader.

Thus, the first important question to ask yourself is if you truly, deeply want to be or become a leader. If the answer is yes, make sure you start to strategically develop your leadership capacities and that you actually lead people.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with staying an expert in your field, taking a consulting role or finding another way to advance your career. Many times, an even more important skill than leading people is having the capacity to be led.

Lead, follow or get out of the way.

Let’s end by talking about Google’s extensive research study on what makes great leaders. The leaders who know how to deliver outstanding results and lead teams where people feel appreciated, feel much happier and retain better.

Like we said, it’s a healthy mixture of being result- and relationship‑driven, and making sure you’re not leading out of any of the 4F states.

Google Manager Behavior

Here are eight traits you should develop to become a great leader, according to Google:

Be a good coach
Empower your team and don’t micromanage
Express interest in your team members’ success and well-being
Be productive and result-oriented
Be a good communicator and listen to your team
Help your employees with career development
Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
Have technical skills so you can advise the team

The only way to develop as a leader is to constantly improve. Improving yourself means finding better ways to achieve results and changing your attitudes and behaviors.

As a final note, that means great leaders must have a great capacity for self-reflection and constantly find new better ways to communicate and behave towards the people they lead. So as a leader, start by asking yourself what you will stop doing and what you will start doing to lead your people better.

Reading challenge – The best way to fall and stay in love with reading
There are three types of people in the world. (1) People who seldom read a book in their lifetime, especially after the end of their formal education. (2) People who have loved reading as long as they can remember. (3) And then there are people who slowly grow fond of reading with time.

I belong to this third group. I always loved playing with technology and hated books. Until I stumbled upon an interesting thought: “A good book is definitely the best bargain you’ll ever get in your life”. I love good bargains and a book is definitely the best one.

You pay somewhere between $3 and $30 for a book. The same price as a latte. But unlike sugared coffee, the book stays with you forever.

After you buy a book, you have to invest around 7 – 10 hours to read it (this is the most important part when we talk about books), which is quite a big investment, but please mind all the benefits.

First of all, the author had to spend months and months writing down their thoughts, life experiences or materializing their imagination. By reading the book, you get an opportunity to enter someone else’s mind, find out how they think and perceive the world.

You get a chance to see the world through different eyes.

By reading a book you automatically expand your mind, improve your vocabulary, train your creative potential and analytical skills, improve empathy and much more. You do a brain workout while disengaging from everyday worries.

The benefits of reading a book are completely unfair compared to the investment.

The gains of reading are a no-brainer. But how to grow fond of reading? Actually, you are only around 30 days away from being indifferent about books to falling in love with reading. And it’s the habit that can change your life forever.

The process that will help you fall in love with reading

As I mentioned, I used to hate reading. Now I love reading. It’s the number one activity on my enjoyment list. But how did such a transformation happen?

It’s not really that hard to become a bookworm. I followed a very simple strategy:
1. Find the right topic. In the beginning, it’s essential to find a topic you’re really passionate about. The more passionate you are, the easier it will be to stay with a good book; or several of them. I started with books about ancient Roman Emperors, then startups, and today my passion is psychology. Just go to the library or browse book categories on Amazon until you find something that really fits your interest well. Alternatively, you can ask yourself: if you were a teacher what topic would you teach others?
2. Carefully choose the book. There are more than 1 million new published (300,000) and self‑published books (700,000) each year only in the English language. That’s more than 2,500 new books every single day. You can choose from among more than 130 million books that have already been published. If you don’t put the effort into choosing a really interesting one, you’ll lose interest. Go for the best books on the chosen topic and take some time to do the research, read a free chapter, reviews, forum discussions, quotes and comments.
3. The cat rule. When a cat bears her young ones, she carries them around wherever she goes. You should do the same with your book. Resting on a couch. Have a book with you. Doing the number two. Have a book with you. Enjoying lunch break at your job. Have a book with you. Wherever you go, make sure that the book is with you. Sooner or later, you’ll open it and start reading. And you will absolutely stand out in crowds, in a very positive way.
4. Don’t go to sleep if you don’t read at least one page. Set a goal to read at least 30 minutes every day. Sometimes you’ll manage it, other times it will be too exhausting. You will be too tired, too busy or completely unmotivated. It doesn’t matter. The only rule to really follow is to never go to sleep if you haven’t read at least one page of the book. One page. It takes 2 – 5 minutes. Come on.
5. Think with your own head. You can be a passive or an active reader. Being an active reader is so much more interesting and fun. So, while you read, force yourself to think a little bit; or rather think hard. Vividly imagine the scenes, the plot, the characters or whatever the content is about. Connect explanations in the book with your own life experience. Consider where you agree with the author and where you don’t. Look up new words and try to memorize them.
If you follow these five rules, you will sooner or later read your first book, and then the second one and the third one and so on. Once you witness how your love for reading grows, you will face a new challenge – how to read as much as possible.

There are many tricks to make more time to read, but one of the best way to push yourself into reading more is to join or create a reading challenge for yourself.

Reading challenges can greatly accelerate your reading motivation

Challenging yourself is always a good way to develop a new habit or to complete a very demanding task. That’s why 30-day challenges are a very popular concept in new habit development theory.

In the past, I’ve completed several different 30-day challenges, among others the challenge to write and publish a blog post every day.

A 30-day challenge to read every single day might be a good start at the very beginning, if you are really not fond of reading. But once you are a pretty regular reader, such a challenge is easy-peasy.

Luckily there are many tougher reading challenges to undertake. Let’s look at the concept of real reading challenges.

Popular reading challenges

There are communities all over the world that organize all kinds of reading challenges. Joining such a challenge not only motivates you to read more frequently, but you also get a chance to meet new people, share opinions and perspectives on books, and engage in interesting discussions.

Most reading challenges are based on one of the following frameworks or reading strategies:
1. The “tutti frutti” challenge – Tutti frutti stands for “all fruits” in Italian. It’s usually associated with gelato (ice cream) that’s made of mixed fruits. I use the same term for reading challenges where you read all kinds of different books, from poetry to classic literature and non-fiction. Participating in such a challenge will greatly broaden your horizons in a very short time frame.
2. Deep dive into one topic – If you read three to five books on a selected topic, you’ll know more about the topic than 90% of the people. Find one topic you are really or just a little bit interested in and start learning. Not only will you become a much more interesting person, soon you will find out that knowledge is real power.
3. Genre or author specific – The third kind of challenges are genre‑specific. The selected genre can be anything from business to personal development or psychological thrillers. The books can also be related to a specific author, topic or even a fictional character such as Sherlock Holmes.
4. Book Club challenges – Many book clubs organize different types of reading challenges. You can find online and real-life book clubs, supported by meetups, forums, real life chats or professionally organized events where you can ask authors anything you want.
5. Summer reading challenges – Christmas is usually associated with deepening personal relationships. And summer always seems like a relaxing period of the year, perfect for reading a good book or several of them. Thus, you can find many different summer reading challenges together with book recommendations.
Not to talk only about theory, here are some popular annual reading challenges:
If you need a good idea for which book to read, Goodread’s Listopedia is a very good start. Then don’t forget to check Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews for every book before you read it, and you can also find a good summary or read a few free pages on Amazon Preview to get a feeling about the author’s style.

Research is really important before you buy and start reading a book. And if you are looking for a real-life book club, try to find one on the Meetup Platform or contact your local library.

My summer reading challenge

For years now, I’ve been reading on a daily basis. Besides regular exercise it’s probably one of the most beneficial habits I acquired. Since I always love challenging myself, not doing a reading challenge would almost be a sin.

Rather than joining a formal reading challenge, I decided to build one for myself. I like to stay flexible and adjust my life settings and goals to situational circumstances; what and how I read is no exception in that.

Here are the bottom lines of my current situation, when it comes to reading and writing:
- I’m putting together a book (“blog to book” with a few extras). But that means it’s hard to simultaneously produce quality content for the blog and putting together a book.
- I have been writing new blog posts for more than a year and a half now. I strive to make every blog post an outstanding piece of content. That takes hard work. A short break from putting together my own quality content would be nice.
- I have a real desire to dramatically build up my knowledge about psychology. I feel like a vessel that needs to be filled with new knowledge. Thus, I currently strongly prefer reading than writing my own content. I want to take advantage of that feeling.
These are the three facts, I decided to build my reading challenge on. What I decided to do in particular is to read 10 books on psychologyuntil the end of the summer (5 traditional authors like Freud, Ericson, Rogers and 5 contemporary authors) and, of course, write really extensive summaries of the books.

I will try to publish a new summary every 7 to 10 days from end of June to end of September.

That’s the reading challenge I will do this summer. The next summer, I will probably read 10 books from one single author. And the summer after that, I might do the “tutti frutti” reading challenge. And then who knows what I might come up with.

If you like a good challenge, why not try the reading challenge. If you are not that fond of reading, it can be one of the toughest challenges you could undertake. But tough builds character.

And if you already love reading, why not challenge yourself in some innovative ways, like reading books on subjects you never read before, or test your limits when it comes to reading; you know, just for fun.
How to become the best version of yourself
You are here on this world for three main reasons. The first one is to experience as many different things as possible and enjoy life to the full. The second one is to create, contribute, share, and leave a positive legacy behind.

And the third reason why you’re here on this planet is to improve, evolve, grow and become the best version of yourself. So the question is: what can you do to make sure you become the best version of yourself?

The initial step towards becoming the best version of yourself is knowing your ideal self very well. The best way to do that is to make a persona of your ideal self (mind-map, notebook with pictures, etc.).

In general, personas are used in marketing for fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical representative of a user segment, but they can easily be used to clarify who you want to become.

The more exactly, accurately and sooner you know your ideal self, the easier you’ll get there. When you are clarifying and brainstorming your ideal self (the best version of yourself), there are 7 areas of life where you have to determine your realistic potential and your goals, including metrics of your progress and the strategy of how you will get there.

The 7 areas of life where you have to constantly improve to become the best version of yourself and should be part of your ideal self are:
- Body
- Mind
- Emotions
- Spirit
- Relationships
- Assets
- Career & Legacy
Before we continue to examine each of the life areas in detail, there is one more important fact to note. When you’re setting your goals, it’s extremely important that you consider your starting point.

And when you’re measuring your progress, you should compare yourself only to yourself. Well, to your previous self to be more exact. Other people can be your reference point, but what’s important is that you compete with your status in the past first and foremost.

Now, let’s go into detail of the 7 areas you have to pay attention to if you want to become the best version of yourself.

1. Take outstanding care of your body

Your body is the most amazing thing you will ever own, and without a healthy and firm body, it’s hard to become the best version of yourself. So the first thing you should do in order to achieve your maximum potential and peak performance is to take outstanding care of your body.

For outstanding care of your body, you have to pay attention to three fundamental areas of health:
- Exercise routine
- Healthy diet (minimizing sugar intake, maximizing green food intake, eating healthy fats etc.)
- Following general health principles (getting enough sleep, avoiding stress, loving your body)
- We can add managing any illnesses or weak body points to the list (we all have them)
The good news is that there are very actionable metrics you can use to follow progress regarding your health and how well you’re taking care of your body. So you can have a very clear picture of whether you’re improving your body capabilities and becoming the best version of yourself.

Here are a few core metrics you can measure:
- Calorie intake (macros, type of food etc.)
- Body composition (fat %, muscle size etc.)
- Aerobic endurance (VO2max, how fast you can run a mile)
- Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
- Muscular endurance (one-rep max)
- Flexibility, mobility, stability (yoga poses you can do)
2. Take outstanding care of your mind

The next thing you have to take good care of is your mind. We live in the knowledge society and taking care of your mind is extremely important.

Your mind is the greatest asset to create, deliver and capture as much value as possible on the markets; and you should also take care of your mind to make good life decisions.

To become the best version of yourself, there are a few aspects to taking proper care of your mind. Here are the main ones:
- Make sure you control your mind and that your mind doesn’t control you
- Minimize cognitive distortions with emotional accounting
- Regularly update your brain’s “software” or reprogram your bad habits
- Brainstorm ideas on a daily basis
- Always try new things in life
If you want to achieve your peak potential, you have to take control of your mind; otherwise your mind will hinder your potential instead of supporting you in achieving your peak performance.

If you don’t take over the control of your mind, the mind will instead focus on negative thinking, cognitive distortions and mental masturbation (entertainment).

The best way to take control of your mind is to practice meditation, focus on gratitude and what you already have in life, develop the abundance mindset, become aware of your dominant cognitive distortions and eliminate them with emotional accounting, and take regular updates of your brain’s “software”.

Yes, even if the brain is a remarkably powerful organ, the software it runs among neurons is quite buggy. Extremely buggy, actually. By reading, listening to lectures, talking to people, observing different situations, reflecting and other similar situations, you can update your software to be less buggy.

You also want to regularly improve your creative potential. We can all be creative; you just have to practice. There are two easy ways of developing your creative potential, without becoming an artist or something. Write down new ideas every day and constantly try new things in life.

To sum up, here are some very actionable things you can do to develop your mind to the maximum and become the best version of yourself in this aspect:
- Meditate
- Eliminate cognitive distortions one by one with emotional accounting
- Write down one thing you are grateful for every day
- Be a lifelong learner – constantly develop your competences, read and read a lot, go to lectures and seminars, take online courses, respect knowledge and make sure you acquire a lot of it.
- Did I mention that you should read every day and that you should read a lot?
- Limit mental masturbation activities like watching TV, reading the daily news, spending time on social networks, participating in useless meetings etc. Make sure you become the master of the time management.
- Every day, write down at least 50 ideas. Just open a notebook and brainstorm.
- Always try new things in life – take a new route home, try a new sport or a hobby, brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand, do the opposite of what you usually do, travel, learn a new language, play mind-development games etc. There are so many things you can do and try.
3. Take outstanding care of your emotions

Taking care of your mind already has a very positive influence on your emotions. By focusing on the positive and extensively dealing with your cognitive distortions, your emotions will also become much more positive. But that isn’t enough for you to achieve your peak performance.

Your ideal self is kind of a vision of who you want to become. But vision without emotional backup and strong will to act is just an illusion.

That’s why you also need a strong why; strong emotional reason or life mission, why do you want to become the best version of yourself. You have to act out of a sense of mission and inspiration if you want to constantly improve yourself.

You want to have a mission that is bigger than any life problems and obstacles you will meet on your way to becoming the best version of yourself. Only if you have a strong emotional why, a strong sense of personal mission, can you enjoy the benefits listed below.

Benefits that are a must if you want to achieve your peak performance:
- You feel more alive and valuable
- You have no problem with prioritizing tasks
- You can connect more easily and communicate with people much more passionately
- You enjoy the work you do
- You can innovate and be creative much more easily
- You can really have impact on the world and change it
- You can inspire other people to work with you
- You are a more charismatic and energetic person and probably happier as well
Personally, I call acting out of a powerful why transcendence. If you want to achieve that kind of a transcendent state, you have to take outstanding care of your emotions.

Your emotions are the ones fulling your motivation and willpower, not logic. So you must employ your emotions as fuel that drives your improvements.

But how do you do that? Here are a few things you can do:
- Become aware of your emotions with practicing mindfulness
- Employ visual representations (Kanban philosophy)
- The “True North” test
The first step you have to make is to pay close attention to your emotions. You can easily do that by introducing the Happiness index into your life.

Every day (or, even better, twice a day) you mark how you feel on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 – negative emotions, 10 – positive emotions), and then analyze exactly what kind of negative or positive feelings you’re experiencing and why you are feeling that way. Try to ask yourself “why” at least 5 times to get to the core of the problem (the 5-whys technique).

By doing such an exercise, you’ll gain much better understanding of your feelings, what motivates you and what takes motivation right out of your heart. Right after taking a note on the Happiness index chart, you can do the true north test.

Simply ask yourself: are you doing all the things you were born to do? Are you fighting for what you want in life or are you just going where life kicks you (usually those aren’t very nice places called average life or even zombie life).

If you want to achieve the best version of yourself, you have to follow your heart and listen to your gut instinct. You have to gather the courage to start following your true north. You have to start doing things you were born to do (work, love, creating, hobbies etc.).

One more thing that helps with emotional empowerment are visual representations. You’ll react a lot differently if I describe a snake to you or if I show you one on a picture or if you actually encounter one in nature.

Visual elements can motivate you extensively. So visualize, have a vision board, have a Kanban board, go for a “test drive” of what you want out of life. That will help you achieve your peak performance.

It also helps a lot to be emotionally motivated if you:
- Make peace with your past and
- learn to live in the present moment.
4. Take outstanding care of your spirit

Taking care of your spirit means that you have strong faith in life. There are many different ways of taking care of your spirit and all of them are okay, if they help you become the best version of yourself and if you aren’t hurting others with any radical beliefs.

Here are a few ways of how you can take care of your spirit:
- Having extraordinary faith in yourself
- Religion
- Spirituality
If you aren’t a religious or spiritual person, taking care of your spirit can come only from extraordinary belief in yourself.

If you want to do extraordinary things in life, if you want to become the best version of yourself, you must have extraordinary faith in yourself and life.

There are a few signs that show very well that you have extraordinary faith in yourself:
- Putting yourself first (but not in an egocentric way)
- Developing high levels of self-confidence and self-worth
- Having rituals in your life (for example a morning kick-off routine)
- Rewarding yourself even for the small wins
- Forgiving yourself for the mistakes you make
- Regularly celebrating life and being grateful for every day
- Having integrity and making sure you are a good person
- Building your success based on prestige, not dominance
The other two ways to take care for your spirit are religion and spirituality. Praying, doing good, having faith in God, being thankful, helping people and the society, these are all things that bring peace, karma points and general good into your life.

This is how you take care of your spirit and it’s a very important part of your personality and becoming the best version of yourself. You can only become the best version of yourself if you also make this place just a little better to live for generations to come.

Remember, legacy is always greater than currency.

5. Take outstanding care of your relationships

It’s impossible to live a quality and happy life without many healthy and deep relationships; and it’s impossible to become the best version of yourself without having outstanding relationships in life and taking good care of them.

People can make you or break you. People can bring out the worst in you, or people can bring out the best in you. In addition to that, nobody can succeed alone. You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.

You need a dream team of people in your personal life and you need a dream team of people in your professional life.

Therefore, if you want to achieve your peak performance, you have to strategically build relationships. You have to meet many different people and keep the ones that give you the most in your life. Once you’re an adult, the choice of who you’ll spend time with is completely yours, and you must choose wisely.

In your personal relationships, you have three pillars of love, support and empowerment:
- Spouse
- Family (primary, secondary)
- Friends
Who you choose for your spouse is, in many ways, the most important choice in your life. It’s extremely hard to be happy, successful and achieve your peak performance and ideal self if you fight at home all the time and if there is no love, understanding and tolerance.

Besides your spouse, having a happy family also gives strong emotional foundations and feelings of belonging. And strong foundations give you wings to fly high to your peak potential.

If you don’t have a good connection with your primary family (you haven’t chosen it), make sure you build a loving and caring secondary family.

To feel emotionally secure, take risks and be happy in life, you also need friends and the feeling that the people closest to you will help you if and when things go wrong. Without strong emotional support, you can never take risks to really become the best version of yourself.

In your professional life, you also have three important pillars:
- Boss / Stakeholders
- Coworkers / Cofounders
- Mentors / Mastermind group
You spent almost 1/3 of your time at work. Thus professional relationships can either make your life miserable or encourage you to become the best version of yourself in work-, career- and money-related things.

The first rule is to never work for a boss that you don’t respect and can’t learn from. Then you need many coworkers or cofounders if you have your own business and they should always push you towards new challenges and professional personal improvement.

You need to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, who you can learn from and with whom you can do real team work. Last but not least, having mentors or building a mastermind group can help you a lot in becoming the best version of yourself.

6. Take outstanding care of your assets

The last thing you have to take care of if you want to become the best version of yourself are your assets. Assets are what can leverage and accelerate your success and help you to achieve your peak performance on all levels of life more quickly and efficiently.

Assets are divided into two general categories:
- Inner assets
- Outer assets
Inner assets are all the assets that are a part of your personality, who you are and what you’re capable of doing. Examples of inner assets are knowledge, skills, experiences, creativity, self-discipline, values, beliefs, intelligence, passion, your life strategy etc.

The good news is that with inner assets, you can always create, better manipulate or acquire more of the outer assets.

You can easily measure progress and acquirement of your inner assets on the road to becoming the best version of yourself. Here are a few core metrics:
- Domain knowledge you master (number of areas)
- Number of skills you have
- Number of tech skills you have
- How long you can do focused work etc.
Outer assets are all the things that aren’t a part of your personality, but that you can possess and that bring advantages and material comfort into your life. Examples of outer assets are wealth, power, fame, social network, status, contracts, land, goods, technology etc.

The good news is that unlike inner assets, which are limited with biological bounds, outer assets can grow much faster. You can’t read 100x faster in one year, but you can have 100x more money.

It’s even easier to measure progress and acquirement of your outer assets:
- Personal income statement (Income – Expenses)
- Net worth (Assets – Liabilities)
- Your position in the company
- Number of professional connections
- Public and social media influence etc.
Knowing how to properly deal with the inner and outer assets is actually the main secret how people achieve massive success in life.

Now, in order to achieve your peak performance you have to constantly be acquiring new inner assets with everything mentioned previously in this post – taking good care of your mind, body, emotions and spirit. The more you take care of these things, the more inner assets you have.

But it’s not only about acquiring inner assets, it’s also about managing them properly. A ton of theory can’t compare with a gram of practice and real life experience.

To manage your inner assets properly, you have to be aware of them (listing your competences, past accomplishments, performing a personal SWOT analysis etc.), and then put them to good use by creating (innovating), delivering (marketing) and capturing value (getting paid).

You have to strategically offer your inner assets on the markets, be it as an employee, self-employed individual or business owner.

The last step to becoming the best version of yourself is to strategically start acquiring and managing outer assets. In other words, you have to start thinking and acting as an investor.

If you want to be really successful in life, get to your peak performance and achieve massive success, you have to employ outer resources as your leverage, because they can grow much faster than your inner assets.

The main problem is, of course, that acquiring inner assets is already damn hard. But acquiring and managing outer assets is even harder. You need to better understand markets, media, people, money management, and you need to know how to create things that people want. And the competition is crazy.

But that’s what you have to do to become the best version of yourself.

Because only by having enough outer resources, you can invest so much more back into yourself and the people around you. And you actually have enough power to change the world and make it a better place and thus leave a visible legacy behind.

It’s not easy to become the best version of yourself, but it’s definitely worth it. And if everything sounds like too much, here’s where you can start easily – start by taking care of your body and the rest will follow.

Top 10 ways to learn or improve any skill fast

If it’s knowledge, it can be acquired. If it’s a skill, it can be learned or improved. Period. Even if you don’t have the talent or IQ of a genius, you can get dramatically better at almost anything you want in life.

It might take a lot of willpower, persistence and deliberate practice, but you can do it. There’s nothing that can stop you, if you’re determined enough.

A tremendous help when it comes to knowledge and skills acquisition is to do it the right way. You want to shorten the learning curve as much as possible.

When you’re going for new knowledge, it’s good to know the best learning practices; and when it comes to skills, you want to know the best tips and tricks for learning and improving any skill fast. In this article, you will learn exactly that.

Let’s start with the initial and hardest requirement for acquiring any new skill.

Learn or improve any skill

1. Get emotionally, financially and timewise invested in the skill

For every single thing you want to achieve in life, first ask yourself why. Always start with why.

Because only when you have a strong why (the emotional drive to improve yourself) can you conquer all the obstacles on the way to your goal. Skills are no exception to that. Imagine your emotional drive like an elephant that can’t be stopped when properly directed.

There are many different “whys” that can drive you when it comes to acquiring new skills. Here are a few most common ones:

With every new skill, you double your odds of success.
Most skills bring better earning potential.
You make sure your talents don’t go to waste.
To keep you mind, body and soul sharp.
To enter a new industry.
To be more respected.
New skills bring more ways to create.
Life is much more fulfilling and interesting.
It’s fun to master many things, and so on.
Find your why first!

Sometimes you can have a strong why, but somehow still lie on the couch and feel sorry for yourself. In practical terms, that means you have to direct your why into concrete action, not towards self-pity. The best thing you can do is to schedule (or timebox) regular weekly practice session. If it’s not on your calendar, you probably won’t do it.

For many people, putting money where their mouth is helps a lot. I’m not one of them. I can buy an online course and forget about it if I’m not strategically and emotionally engaged.

But for many people, buying something leads to solid commitment. If you’re one of them, enroll in that class, buy that online course or book, get a coach or make any other type of serious financial commitment.

Everything that gets in the way of focused, deliberate practice is an enemy that needs to be crushed completely and destroyed forever.

Talent is overrated

2. Make sure a lack of talent isn’t your excuse

Talent absolutely helps. It can help a lot. But you can’t be talented for everything. Even more importantly, talent is not an “all-or-nothing” game.

If you don’t have the talent, it doesn’t mean you can’t get better at something. So make sure a lack of talent isn’t your excuse for not getting better at something or acquiring a completely new skillset.

Let me give you a few examples from my life.

I’m very talented for everything analytical. My analytical skills are really strong. I can structure an article, a presentation or a mind map at the drop of a hat. Self-reflection is instinctive. Through conversation, I can understand people really quickly, and so on. Improving my analytical skills is a breeze. When it comes to applying analytical skills to new domains, I can learn it lightning fast. Business planning, life strategizing, process optimization, market analysis, stock analysis, book summaries, it all comes naturally to me.
I’m very untalented for grammar. In high school when it came to language subjects, I was extremely good at writing essays, expressing my opinions or extracting the main points out of literature. But I really sucked at grammar. I barely passed grammar exams. That didn’t stop me from writing and publishing more than 2,000 pages of text in my life. I’ve been very slowly improving my grammar throughout the years. I’m still struggling to understand many grammatical concepts, but that doesn’t stop me. My improvements are slow, but I’m not standing still. That’s what matters.
There is one thing I’m even more untalented for than grammar. That’s sports. Again, in primary school and high school I was the one who couldn’t catch the ball. So instead I skipped gym classes. But for the last three years or so, I’ve been heavily investing into my motor and sports skills. It often sucks that most people can do some exercises by default, while I’m struggling. But that never stopped me. I’m getting better, I’m catching up. Comparing myself three years ago and today … what a difference in mastering athletic moves.

Thus, having double standards when it comes to talent makes sense. If you don’t have the talent for a skill you want to learn, think of talent as being overrated. Hard work beats talent every time. With all the hard work, you’ll develop more stamina, willpower and persistence. Lucky you.

There is one big value added if you don’t have a skill. You understand how life looks like when you’re not talented for something and you know what it takes to learn it the hard way. People who are talented for something usually don’t have that unique perspective. By possessing a unique perspective, you can always write a book or become a teacher or a coach.

How to find a mentor

3. The best advice ever is to get a mentor or a coach

I experimented with dozens of different tips, tricks and recommendations when it comes to learning and acquiring a new skill. There is one pattern that stands out. It’s the most important recommendation when it comes to learning a new skill – get a mentor or a coach.

But don’t get just anybody. Get somebody who is really good at coaching – the best you can afford. Make sure that the person you choose for coaching acquired their skills the hard way. Even more importantly, analyze their track record, make sure that in the past the coach successfully taught several people the same thing you’re trying to achieve.

My personal trainer is the most talented guy for sports and training other people. He sees every detail when it comes to performing exercises the correct way. He knows which weak points needs to be abolished, he can properly direct my practice and improvement etc.
Each of my published articles in English is copyedited. But it’s not just copyedited. My proofreader writes me comments, warning me about the common mistakes that I make, expressions that can be improved, and so on.
I recently just started working with a pronunciation coach. In a few lessons, I learned more than in weeks of doing research by myself. What also happened to me was that I practiced things the wrong way, reinforcing wrong pronunciation. What a waste.

These are just three examples from my life. I had many mentors before that taught me many different skills – from sales to innovative thinking.

If you hire a professional coach, it can be quite expensive, but most often definitely worth the investment. At least if you know why you’re doing it and if you find the right coach. The only investments I never regret are investments in myself.

There are many benefits when it comes to coaching:

You usually progress based on a carefully prepared plan that already worked for others.
They immediately see poor or wrong execution. Practicing the wrong way is the worst thing you can do.
A good coach makes sure you’re always at the edge of your abilities.
They know how to interleave practice correctly.
You get immediate feedback on your performance and improvement.
They can always push you in the right direction.
You can model the coach.

Last but not least, having a coach is a solid financial and time investment. You strictly set the dates when you’ll have practicing sessions. You have to pay for those sessions. All that gives you additional motivation. It’s hard to say to your coach: “I will give up now”.

Role models can also be a great help

Besides getting a coach, finding a few role models can help a lot. You can model the success of people who have already achieved what you want to achieve, at least to a certain extent. Finding role models is not only excellent way for speeding up the skill acquisition process, it’s also very motivating.

Thus, find a few people you admire and respect who have mastered the skill that you want to master – read interviews with them, watch videos of how they perform, examine their road to success, read about their (humble) beginnings, and so on.

Skill improvement chart

4. Have realistic expectations when learning a new skill

There’s nothing that will stop you from acquiring a new skill faster than big disappointments. If you have unrealistic expectations of how fast you can learn a new skill, you’ll start falling behind your expectations sooner or later, and then you’ll quit. I had such unrealistic expectations for learning how to code.

If you don’t manage expectations properly, the excitement of skill acquisition can quickly turn into bitterness. But what are realistic expectations? There is no one right answer. Even performance psychology researchers have different opinions.

But we can definitely set some soft limits and hard facts about the investment needed for new skill acquisition:

You can master the pure basics of any skill in around 25 – 30 hours of deliberate practice. That’s enough to orientate yourself and execute a few basic moves.
To reach the global mastery level, approximately 10,000 hours of practice is the big investment needed. But the hours invested account only for around 10-20 % difference in performance. Only practice isn’t a sufficient condition for mastery.
There are many other factors that determine how far you’ll get. Talent, quality of practice, stability of the curriculum structure, possible shortcuts (like participating in reality shows) and other similar leverages have a big influence on how quickly you can become good at something. But you don’t need to be a global master, all you need to do is become so good that they can’t ignore you.
The time it will take you to become good enough at something is somewhere between 25 and 10,000 hours. By respecting the best learning practices, you can get much closer to 25 than 10,000.
The beginnings are slow and very frustrating with every skill. After initial frustrations, steep learning acceleration takes place. Then at some point, you reach a plateau and it’s harder to get better and better. When it comes to skill acquisition, getting through conscious incompetence and plateaus is the hardest. That’s where your willpower, stamina, determination and “whys” come into play.

These are the facts you must consider when managing your expectations. The beginnings are always hard and frustrating. The first few hours of deliberate practice suck when you realize how incompetent you really are at that particular initial moment.

But then the next 25 – 50 hours are extremely important. If you have the right plan in place and if you practice the right way, you can progress extremely fast.

Make sure that 25 – 50 hours is the minimum commitment you’re prepared to invest in acquiring a new skill. If you do the math, that’s not that little. You must practice between 45 and 90 minutes, 3 times per week for 3 months. That’s the investment needed for mastering the basics.

If you don’t know where and how to start or how to organize yourself, do the following: Combine the 30-day challenge and Hour of power concepts. For the next 30 days, commit to practicing 1 hour per day. If you’re not prepared to make such a commitment, forget about acquiring any new skill.

Practical examples

My personal experience is in line with that. With any new skill, making the first step and orientating myself is always extremely frustrating. We live in the post-information age and the body of knowledge for any skill is huge, complex and comprehensive. You must push yourself to focus on the best information and it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. It took me 6 months to orientate myself when it came to internet marketing.

Then in 30 hours of deliberate practice, you can understand the basics. Photoshop, blogging, SEO, HTML, CSS, cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, the lean startup, proper exercise form etc., it took me around 30 – 50 hours to understand the basics of these skills (or knowledge). With an online course, books, personal coach or YouTube tutorials, that was an investment needed for understanding the skill and properly executing the basics.

But when it comes to mastering something, we can definitely talk in years. It took me 5 years to become a master of lean startup methodologies. It took me 5 years in venture capital to really understand what makes a good startup investment, term sheets, and so on.

It goes the same for my friends who excel at specific skills. The best programmers have been writing lines of code since they were 10. The best athletes have been doing sports from when they could walk. Any kind of mastery requires years of hard work. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule.

5. Set very specific goals for what you want to master

For every new skill you want to master, you can find hundreds of books, online courses, coaches and other resources. That can be very intimidating. In a tyranny of choices and options, we tend to do nothing in the end. That’s something you want to avoid.

One good way to avoid the tyranny of choice is to define what kind of a skill you want to acquire very narrowly and in detail; and then find the best resources for that. Additionally, defining practical value is a big plus. Make sure there is always a problem you’re trying to solve by acquiring a new skill. Let me give you a few examples.

Vague skill acquisition goal	Smart skill acquisition goal
I want to learn how to program	I want to learn HTML/CSS and basic JavaScript so I can build landing pages for my products.
	I want to learn one of the backend languages that is in high demand so I can easily get a job.
I want to learn how to sell	I want to be able to confidently and clearly present our company’s products to the target market, manage main objectives and close sales.
I want to be better at sports	I want to learn the proper form of the main complex fitness exercises, like squats, pull-ups and deadlifts.

Once you master one narrow definition of a skill, you can of course add a new one. The only point of this approach is to not get overwhelmed. Besides having no emotional drive and unrealistic expectations, being overwhelmed and lost in the information overflow is the biggest danger that can stop you on your way to acquiring a new skill.

6. Preliminary research and a skill acquisition plan

Once you have a specific goal for which skill exactly you want to learn, it’s time for preliminary research and a skill acquisition plan. Preliminary research is about finding the best resources.

For every skill, if you invest several hours into research, you can find the best books, tutorials, online courses, coaches (and interviews with them) and other resources. You can drown in resources, so make sure you go to the best knowledge and find the resources that fit your character and the narrow definition of what you want to master.

Then you want to make a skill acquisition plan. Every skill usually consists of several sub-skills, which are the core building blocks for performing that skill.

Thus, the first step is to parse every skill into small manageable sub-skills. Again, the main point of deconstructing a skill is to make learning manageable and to not feel overwhelmed. Deconstructing a skill can also help you identify and focus on the most important sub-skills.

At this point, you should have everything necessary for preparing a skill acquisition plan:

A very exact definition of what you want to learn and why
An overview of what mastering a certain skill really means (a semantic map with a list of sub‑skills)
The best resources for learning a new skill or, even better, a coach
Scheduled weekly practice for several months with enough space between practicing sessions for the new skills to sink in
A few role models for additional motivation and for modelling them

An example of a skill acquisition plan

To get more practical, here is how a simple skill acquisition plan would look like:

Category	Description
What?	I want to master HTML/CSS to build my own landing pages for infoproducts and consulting services.
Why?	To present my products exactly as I want them, experiment with new landing page building blocks quickly (A/B testing) and make money blogging.
Time commitment	One month, three hours per day.
Sub-skills	Coding editor (Sublime Text 3) Hosting, FTP and uploading files Git & Github HTML Syntax and elements HTML Page structure and grouping content HTML Formatting page content HTML Links, images, tables, links, forms CSS Syntax CSS Selectors CSS Box Model CSS Cascade and inheritance CSS Formatting CSS Transforms, transitions and animations CSS Page layout, grid system and flexbox Sass & Post CSS Bootstrap WordPress & Plugins
Resources	Lynda Photoshop/HTML/CSS/JS courses Head First HTML/CSS book The missing manual HTML, CSS W3School WordPress plugins for landing pages (as an alternative)
Coach	A friend who mastered these languages and builds landing pages. Front-end development meetup group.
Practical application	I will build two landing pages, one for my coaching sessions and one for an online course.
Models	Examples of the best landing pages for infoproducts.
Financial investment	$100

Supportive environment for skill acquisition

7. Build yourself a supportive environment

You can’t succeed in anything alone. You always need strong support from your environment. Acquiring a new skill is no exception.

You need to organize your environment in a way that supports your training, and you need to surround yourself with people who believe in you and know how to motivate you when thoughts of giving up pop up in your head.

The best approach when organizing your environment is to assume the worst about your self‑discipline. Assume that at some point you’ll be lazy, unmotivated and ignorant.

At that point, you’ll need a supportive system that pushes you back on the right track. Here are a few examples of what you can do:

Set up a series of reminders for a timeboxed practice session (on your desktop, phone etc.).
Put books and other resources at the reach of your hand (desktop table, your bed etc.).
Change your desktop wallpaper into one big motivational reminder.
Rearrange your software icons and bookmarks to support skill learning (bookmark the resources, if you’re using an app for skill acquisition make it easily accessible etc.).
Join meetups, make new friends, make sure you’re surrounded by people who want to achieve the same thing as you or who have already achieved it.
Reward yourself with something small every time you perform the practice.
Get a client or commit to a project at your job, so you will have a deadline to really master the skill. But make sure you have realistic expectations. Always under promise and over deliver.

Don’t rely solely on self-discipline. Build yourself a supportive environment. That’s really important, it’s half of the success equation.

Feedback system

8. Immediate implementation and feedback system

You can read 100 books about swimming and it can’t compare to jumping into water once.

You absolutely want to do research, prepare a learning plan and understand the skillset from a logical perspective, but it’s even more important that you simultaneously put the skill into practice as soon as possible. That’s how you learn the most. A practical project will also help you not get stuck in the analysis-paralysis.

The good news is that most skills are about solving practical problems. That also means that most skills are in high demand. Consequently, it’s really easy to join different projects and slowly brush up on your skills with practical work. The simple rule is to practice your skills wherever possible.

If you want to improve your writing skills, open a blog and start writing, if you want to learn web design, design a blog, if you want to learn how to sell, open a lemonade stand.

Working on practical projects has another additional benefit. You get immediate feedback on your work and new ideas on how to improve. You can always engage experts and peers to show you how to do things better and give you additional recommendations.

As additional help, you can get valuable feedback in other ways:

Record yourself
Observe yourself in the mirror
Benchmark your performance to the performance of your models
Crowdsource improvement ideas, and so on

When it comes to skill acquisition, make sure you have a really good feedback system.

Best learning practices - skills

9. Respect the best learning practices

When it comes to acquiring a new skill, the same rules apply as they do for acquiring new knowledge. The problem is that the best learning practices are most often counterintuitive.

We assume that crammed learning sessions where we repeat the same thing over and over again and practice in the same way work best. But that’s not true. That kind of an approach is the least effective.

In summary, the best learning practices are:

Chunking strategy: Break down the learning material into manageable chunks (sub-skills in this case).
Focused attention: Have zero distractions when you’re learning something new and be completely focused. Your working memory must be focused on learning.
Take breaks: After a session of 45 – 60 minutes, take a small break to restore your attention.
Spaced repetition: It’s better to practice for 1 hour 5 times than for 5 hours 1 time.
Deliberate practice: Do focused drills and exercises until you get better at a particular chunk.
Interleaved practice: Use different concepts, approaches and techniques in the same learning session, mix your practice – speed up, slow down learning, take tests, practice different things, and so on.
Get out of your comfort zone: Don’t practice the thing you already mastered, practice things that are a little bit out of your comfort zone. Always be at the edge of your abilities.
The point where you master a chunk: You master something when practice turns to boredom. Practice a chunk until you get bored.
Rest: If you want to improve, you need to get enough sleep and you must rest between the practicing sessions. There is no improvement without rest. When acquiring knowledge or skills, you’re making changes to your brain. That requires time and rest.

Four stages of learning a new skill — Noel Burch – Four stages for learning any new skill, graphics GWS Media

Four stages of the learning process and the dip

Another very useful thing to know when it comes to learning are the four stages of the learning process. The first stage is unconscious competence, where you don’t even know what you’re doing wrong. That’s the calm before the storm, where you can have unrealistic expectations and self‑assessment.

Then comes conscious incompetence and big frustrations with it. It’s the hardest stage that you have to persist through, as we’ve talked about. The next level is conscious competence. At this stage, you are aware of your mastery level, you know what you’re doing well but you also know how you can improve.

The last stage is unconscious competence. You achieve this final stage when you can perform a skill without thinking. That’s where the mastery level resides.

Seth Godin - The dip

When you enter the conscious incompetence you have to face the dip. There are five main reasons why you might quit when you find yourself deep in the dip:

You run out of time
You run out of money
You get scared
You’re not serious about it
You lose interest

Make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

10. List the skills you want to master and rank them properly

Sit down, take a piece of paper, and list all the skills you would currently like to master. You can probably easily list 10 – 15 skills. Logically, you can’t master all of them at once. At best, you can learn 2 – 3 skills simultaneously, one or two at your job and one or two in your free time. Which skills to pursue first

So, the final question is how to prioritize the skills you want to master. There are several criteria that can help you do that:

Point of the skill: Firstly, there are several categories that skills can fall into. The point of acquiring a new skill can be to increase your earning potential, have a hobby (something you like but won’t be paid for) or improve your overall quality of life (relationship skills, fitness etc.).
Supply and demand: When it comes to the skills’ market value, you want to develop skills that are in high demand and low supply. These are the skills that will dramatically increase your earning potential. Hobbies, on the other hand, usually have zero market value.
Talent: Your talents must not go to waste. That’s a lesson that was already written in the Bible. Categorize skills into those for which you’re talented, neutral and untalented.
Your goals and yearly focus: Your skills acquisition plan must be part of the long-term goals you’re trying to achieve. For example, changing a job or improving your health can be connected to specific skill acquisition.
Current opportunities: Assess the current opportunities you have in your environment. Can the company you work for pay for your skill acquisition? Do you have a friend or a spouse that mastered something and they are prepared to coach you? Can you easily join a paid project?
Resources you have: As we’ve seen, every skill acquisition requires emotional, financial and time commitment. Skills that are harder to acquire demand more resources. Realistically assess what kind of skill acquisition you can currently afford.
Life situation: Sometimes life forces you into a situation where you must acquire new skills. An injury, job loss, breakups, promotions, migrations, these are all situations that usually require and push you into developing new skills. When it happens, accept that, don’t resist, and improve yourself.

Build an array of skills you want to acquire and all the mentioned criteria. Then rank the skills from the best ones to acquire at the moment to the least attractive ones. After that, it’s time to put everything you learned about skill acquisition into practice.

From unqualified to qualified

In summary – the best tips, tricks and recommendations to learn or improve any skill fast

In summary, the best tips, tricks and recommendations for learning any new skill are:

Find a strong emotional reason why you want to learn a new skill.
Timebox regular practice sessions in your calendar and don’t miss them no matter what. Start with a 30-day challenge where you practice a skill one hour every day for a month.
Have double standards when it comes to skill acquisition. When you’re not really talented for something, see talent as overrated.
Have realistic expectations. Beginnings always suck big time and the hardest thing to do is to pass the conscious incompetence stage. But you can master the basics of every skill if you invest around 20 – 50 hours. Then things get a lot easier, until you reach a plateau.
If possible get a mentor or a coach or at least find a few role models you can model and look up to.
Very narrowly define what you want to master, parse the skill into small manageable chunks (sub-skills), prepare a learning plan for yourself, and go straight to the best resources.
Practice at the edge of your abilities. Do spaced repetition. Focus your working memory (or attention) with deliberate practice with zero distractions. Interleave practice. Rest.
Build yourself a strong supportive environment (people, habit triggers), apply for practical projects and have many feedback loops. With feedback loops, you will make sure you’re not reinforcing wrong execution.
Develop highly valuable skills that are in high demand but short supply. Make sure none of your talents go to waste.
Finally, enjoy the learning process!

Different types of intelligence and why your IQ is not fixed
One of the greatest assets you can have in today’s post-information society is being smart.

Intelligence is an important resource that can bring you status, respect, academic and career advancements, better earning potential, new ways to create and contribute to the world and let’s not forget the capacity to forge better strategies and make smarter decisions.

Being intelligent doesn’t guarantee these things and it’s sometimes not even a mandatory factor, but it absolutely does help.

In general, intelligence refers to the ability to learn new things quickly, solve logical problems, think abstractly, comprehend new ideas, learn from experience, and even to the overall mental adaptability to new situations.

Components of intelligence are at least the following:
- Curiosity – the desire to know various phenomena
- Depth of mind – the ability to separate the important from the secondary
- Flexibility and mobility of mind – the ability to use experience widely in different situations
- Logicality of thinking – the ability to follow a strict sequence of reasoning
- Conclusiveness of thinking – the ability to use facts, regularities and correct judgment
- Criticality of thinking – the ability to discard incorrect judgements
- Breadth of thinking – the ability to comprehend the whole coverage of intellectual activity
Since intelligence is an extremely important asset, there is always one question in the forefront – is intelligence inherited and fixed, or can it somehow be improved with the right resources and environment, even when you’re older? As we will see, there is no simple answer to that, and the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

The most popular test of intelligence is the IQ test, which measures the ability to solve problems, reason logically and use the vocabulary. IQ tests are strongly connected to the g factor, which measures general intelligence. And the g factor is hard to improve, especially when tests are focused on fluid intelligence. But that’s only one part of the story.

Your genes and early development did have a huge influence on your general intelligence development that’s hard to improve in the adult age. At most it can be fine-tuned. But that doesn’t mean you are completely limited at becoming smarter. There are many ways you can maximize your intellectual potential.

Is IQ really fixed or can you become smarter somehow?

Let’s go straight to the main question – is IQ fixed or not? The answer is unfortunately not very straightforward, but more like yes and no. Studies show that people who are at the top of intelligence tests when young, stay at the top in their adult and senior age. But … (you see, there is a but).

Overall, people show a higher IQ with age. That means, your IQ improves (linearly) with age when you learn new things and improve your skills. It can also start to decline fast in the old age. Thus, your IQ is a relative measure that represents your standing among your peers at a certain age.

You absolutely have some influence on how big your improvement will be. If you take good care of your brain, deliberately practice and learn a lot, you might progress faster than average. And if you don’t take care of your smarts at all, you might decline much faster than average.

The test showed that there are outliers when it comes to IQ tests. Much like some people lost their cognitive abilities (due to a mental illness, for example), so did a few people show greater improvement than average.

Changes in intelligence can be very big, especially at a young age and in adolescence when brain’s plasticity is not yet reduced. That’s why babies can learn languages faster than adults.

On the other hand, regular learning and brain training can prevent cognitive decline in the old age. And you can at least fine-tune biological intelligence that is limited by the neural efficiency of your brains.
What we do know for sure when it comes to intelligence is the following:

At a young age (up to the age of 16) the environment has a great influence on the development of intelligence. IQ can be increased or decreased during childhood. What happens during pregnancy and afterwards (diet, stress) also has a great influence on child’s intellectual development.

If you practice a particular intellectual skill you get better at that skill, even if your overall intelligence doesn’t improve. In the same way, you can develop crystalized intelligence (knowledge) faster than your peers at any point in your life if you devote yourself to regular learning.

Most people don’t reach their intellectual potential. That means they don’t use all the intellectual capacity they possess. Curiosity, good learning skills, applying knowledge in new situations, developing new competences, seeking complex intellectual environments, all that leads to reaching intellectual potential.

The fluid intelligence and working memory can be improved at least in the short term with different brain games, exercises and learning. Even in the adult age you can develop new brain synapses, but it’s much harder than at a young age. In the old age, intellectual effort and different brain games can prevent cognitive decline.

People with the growth mindset don’t limit themselves with a fixed IQ, but rather accept the fact that they can grow and improve in any skill. With that attitude, they often overcome the limits of average general intelligence and become more successful and even smarter.

Children without an extremely high IQ that are exposed to certain knowledge domains (and practice that domain regularly from a young age on, for about “10,000 hours”) in combination with encouraged creativity can become geniuses.
Here is the most important fact – we do know for sure that most people don’t reach their intellectual potential.

What an individual can achieve with a combination of practice, hard work, assets and savviness, is completely different from what most people do achieve. Most people prefer to settle in a certain intellectual standing backed by the fixed mindset and stay in that intellectual comfort zone for the rest of their lives.

That kind of thinking absolutely leads to cognitive decline and loss of IQ points (they don’t catch up with their peers), and especially slow development of crystalized intelligence. Thus, a much better question rather than if the IQ is fixed or not is: how can you make sure that you employ all of your brain potential and maximize your smarts?

If you are mentally active, your cognitive abilities improve, and if you neglect your smarts, you are in cognitive decline. You lose what you don’t use.

How improving your intelligence might work

Taking care of your health and body is a very good analogy for becoming smarter. How you look is very much determined by your genes and early development. Like with intelligence, the inheritance and early environmental factor is very strong.

Nevertheless, there is a big difference between maximizing your looks with a good diet, regular exercise and taking good care of yourself (grooming, outfit etc.) and being careless about your body and appearance and becoming slovenly. I’m sure you saw many before and after photos, where people decided to take better care of their body and health. It’s like looking at a completely different person.

No fat and full face with double chin, better skin, more charming energies and better self-confidence, a whole new person. The beauty of an individual is still somehow fixed, but taking good care of yourself does make a huge difference.

It’s the same with intelligence. There are definitely biological limits you can’t cross. But the difference between maximizing your intelligence and neglecting your potential can be colossal; like on those before and after photos.

The problem in both cases (becoming fit or maximizing intellectual potential) is that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication. There must be a growth mindset present backed by persistence and regular deliberate practice.

If you want to improve your smarts, here are the things you can do:
- The brain manual: The first thing you can do is to know how your brains work and treat them according to what works best proved by science. From improving your learning style to regularly developing creative and analytical skills, maintaining your brain cells with proper brain diet and regular physical exercise.
- Optimizing working memory: A very important part of the brain’s operational manual is understanding how the working memory works. Smarter people usually have a greater working memory capacity or know how to use it better. There are several things you can do to improve your working memory – from learning to manage negative thoughts to training your attention span and practicing a dual n-back game.
- Crystalized intelligence: If you practice a particular skill (or knowledge domain), your overall intelligence might not improve, but you definitely become better at that particular skill. But that’s the only thing that really matters. You can improve the intellectual skills that you can use in everyday life. In the end, nobody will ask you what your IQ score is, but what kind of skills do you possess.
- A smart attitude: You can always develop the right attitude to maximize your intellectual potential. Curiosity, growth mindset, seeking complex environments, practicing knowledge transference, applying knowledge in new situations, learning new languages, these are all the things that help you achieve your intellectual potential and prevent cognitive decline.
As you can see, there absolutely are ways to improve your smarts. If you practice certain types of intellectual tasks, you become better at those tasks. Similarly, when you learn something new, it takes up less of your working memory when recalled, so you can manipulate more information at the same time. And if you know how to learn properly, you can learn more things in a shorter time.

Good genes and general intelligence might be given. But that shouldn’t be your excuse. Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist most known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics (whatever that means) wore his low IQ test result of 125 as a badge of honor. He wanted everyone to know about it as a sign that showed how absurd the notion of an IQ test is.

How improving your IQ absolutely doesn’t work and what hinders your intelligence

Before we go to different types of intelligence, a word of caution. Knowing different types of intelligence might quickly give you an excuse to be intellectually lazy. You know, you find a type of intelligence that you know you’re good at and then you say to yourself that you are obviously smart enough and life goes on.

It’s appealing to think that everybody is smart in a certain way. While we all do have different abilities, being strong in one ability shouldn’t give you an excuse to not work hard on all different types of intelligence, maximize your intellectual potential or accept some of your intellectual limitations (overall intelligence or some domains where you have to work harder) and make the most from your individual situation.

A unique personal style always comes out of limitations, thus you have to use them to your advantage.

We also know many factors that hinder your intelligence. Stress is one of them. Stress kills your working and long-term memory. Stress can wipe out your brain cells, wither the connection between neurons, and by changing the blood flow in your brain the emphasis is more on animal instincts (4F response) than on being a reasonable empathic human being. A lack of sleep has the same negative effect on your smarts.
- Head injuries
- Traumatic situations
- PTSD
- Regular drug use
- Bad diet
- Dehydration
- Too much alcohol
- Having a stroke
- Avoiding exercise
- Chronical negative thinking
- Smoking
- Taking steroids
- Extreme anxiety and panic
- Exposure to toxic elements and pesticides
- Air pollution
- Too high sugar consumption
- Isolation
- Depression
- Multitasking
- Obesity
- Burnouts
They all have a very negative effect on your brain performance.

Nine independent and different types of intelligence

The idea of one general intelligence that is inherited and fixed was always challenged. One of the first people to challenge it was Robert J. Sternberg who developed the triarchic theory of intelligence.

He argued that there are three important parts of intelligence – analytical or componential, creative or experimental, and contextual or practical.

Howard Gardner took a step further and developed the theory of multiple intelligences. In the theory, he presented the idea that there are nine independent types of intelligence and argued that people who fall short in some of the types might excel at others.

He also argued that schools focus on logical and linguistic abilities and neglect other types of intelligence. The nine types of intelligence are:
- Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”) – understanding how nature works, together with materials, plants and animals.
- Musical Intelligence (“Musical Smart”) – recognizing, creating, reproducing and reflecting on everything connected to tones and music.
- Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (“Number/Reasoning Smart”) – it’s the ability to do mathematical operations, perform experiments, think in abstract and symbolic dimensions, identify patterns, categories and relationships.
- Existential Intelligence (“Spiritual Smart”) – the capacity to tackle questions about the human existence, the meaning of life, why we die and what happens after life.
- Interpersonal Intelligence (“People Smart”) – all the skills related to understanding and interacting with other people, from verbal and non-verbal communication, showing sympathy and empathy, to motivating and leading others.
- Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (“Body Smart”) –physical and sports capabilities together with the ability to manipulate objects and to apply a variety of physical skills. It also includes the sense of timing and strength of the connection between mind and body.
- Linguistic Intelligence (“Word Smart”) – the ability to express complex meaning with words and applying meta-linguistic skills to reflect on the use of language.
- Intrapersonal Intelligence (“Self Smart”) – the capacity to understand yourself, together with all the thoughts and feelings, and use of that knowledge to plan your life’s direction.
- Spatial Intelligence (“Picture Smart”) – the ability to think in three dimensions, together with spatial recognition, image manipulation, artistic skills and active imagination.
The idea that everybody is smart in some way is very attractive. But research shows that supposedly independent domains are highly correlated. As we said, there might be a type of intelligence where you really excel, but we must not neglect the empirical evidence on general and fluid intelligence.

Source: Wikipedia

The g factor and ten different intelligence domains

We know a term for general intelligence – the controversial g factor, which is supposed to be more or less fixed (scientists are not uniform on that). You can’t influence it with education, brain games, diet or by any other means.

The g factor is your biological limit in intelligence, especially fixed in the adult age. It’s the general intelligence on top of all the cognitive abilities. Full scale IQ scores show the general intelligence.

The g factor was developed by Charles Spearman in the early years of the 20th century. His observation was that children’s performance across different unrelated subjects was positively correlated.

The underlying mental ability, or the g factor, has an influence on how you do on most intellectual tests. In other words, individuals who tend to do well at one type of tests, tend to excel at other types of tests as well. The influence of the general intelligence on performing a cognitive task is around 50 %.

Interestingly, genes contribute 20-40 % of the variance in intelligence in childhood and about 80 % in the old age. The older you are, the more difficult it is to improve your g factor. A complex intellectual environment that encourages brain activity has a great influence on brain development and intelligence until the age of 16 and then declines fast.

CHC model of intelligence

The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory is today the most widely accepted theory of cognitive abilities that is also supported by empirical evidence. It supports and integrates everything we’ve talked about intelligence until now. It’s a very complex theory that incorporates the g factor and different types of intelligence.

The g factor consists of 10 broad intelligences that are further divided into narrow intellectual abilities. Here are all the broad and narrow intellectual abilities that are measured in the CHC model:
- Fluid intelligence – broad ability to reason, form concepts, and solve unique problems using new information and novel procedures
  
  Deductive reasoning – solving a problem by going from general knowledge to specifics
  
  Induction – reasoning from specific cases to general knowledge
  
  Piagetian reasoning – seriation, conservation and classification
  
  Speed of reasoning – speed or fluency in performing reasoning tasks in a limited time
- Crystalized intelligence – Acquired knowledge with the ability to communicate that knowledge and the ability to reason using previous abilities and knowledge
  
  Language development – general understanding and application of words and sentences
  
  Lexical knowledge – extent of vocabulary
  
  Listening ability – the ability to receive and understand spoken information
  
  General information – general stored knowledge
  
  Information about culture – general stored cultural knowledge (music, art etc.)
  
  Communication ability – the ability to speak in everyday life situations
  
  Oral production and fluency – specific and narrow oral communication skills
  
  Grammatical sensitivity – proper construction of words and sentences
  
  Foreign language proficiency – language development for foreign languages
  
  Foreign language aptitude – rate and ease of learning a new language
- Quantitative reasoning – the ability to comprehend quantitative concepts and relationships and the ability to manipulate numeric symbols
  
  Mathematical knowledge – range of general knowledge about mathematics
  
  Mathematical achievement – tested mathematical achievement
- Reading and writing ability – basic reading and writing skills
  
  Reading decoding – the ability to recognize and decode words or pseudowords in reading
  
  Reading comprehension – the ability to attain meaning during reading
  
  Verbal language comprehension – general development or the understanding of words, sentences, and paragraphs measured by reading vocabulary and comprehension
  
  Cloze ability – the ability to read and supply missing words from prose passages
  
  Spelling ability – the ability to form words with the correct letters in accepted order
  
  Writing ability – the ability to communicate information and ideas in written form
  
  Language usage knowledge – knowledge of language mechanics such as capitalization, punctuation, usage, and spelling
  
  Reading speed – the ability to silently read and comprehend connected text
  
  Writing speed – the ability to copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
- Short-term memory – the ability to hold information in immediate awareness, and then use it within a few seconds
  
  Memory span – the ability to attend to, register, and immediately recall temporally ordered elements and then reproduce the series of elements in correct order
  
  Working memory – the ability to temporarily store and perform a set of cognitive operations on information that requires divided attention
- Long-term storage and retrieval – the ability to store information and retrieve it later in the process of thinking
  
  Associative memory – the ability to recall one part of a previously learned but unrelated pair of items when the other part is presented
  
  Meaning memory – the ability to note, retain, and recall information where there is a meaningful relation between bits of information
  
  Free recall memory – the ability to recall as many unrelated items as possible
  
  Ideational fluency – the ability to rapidly produce a series of ideas, words, or phrases related to a specific condition or object
  
  Associational fluency – a specific ability to rapidly produce a series of words or phrases associated in meaning when given a word or concept with a restricted area of meaning
  
  Expressional fluency – the ability to rapidly think of and organize words or phrases into meaningful complex ideas under general or more specific cued conditions
  
  Naming facility – the ability to rapidly produce accepted names for concepts or things when presented with the thing itself or a picture of it
  
  Word fluency – the ability to rapidly produce isolated words that have specific phonemic, structural, or orthographic characteristics
  
  Figural fluency – the ability to rapidly draw or sketch as many things as possible when presented with a non-meaningful visual stimulus
  
  Figural flexibility – the ability to rapidly change set and try out a variety of approaches to solutions for figural problems that have several stated criteria
  
  Sensitivity to problems – the ability to rapidly think of a number of alternative solutions to practical problems
  
  Originality and creativity – the ability to rapidly produce unusual, original, clever, divergent, or uncommon responses to a given topic, situation, or task
  
  Learning abilities – general learning ability rate
- Visual processing – the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize and think with visual patterns
  
  Visualization – the ability to mentally imagine, manipulate or transform objects
  
  Spatial relations – the ability to perceive and manipulate patterns and maintain orientation
  
  Closure speed – the ability to identify a familiar visual object from an incomplete representation
  
  Flexibility of closure – the ability to identify a visual figure or pattern embedded in a complex distracting array
  
  Visual memory – the ability to form and store a mental representation or image of a visual shape
  
  Spatial scanning – the ability to quickly and accurately survey a wide or complicated spatial field or pattern and identify a particular configuration through the visual field
  
  Serial perpetual integration – the ability to identify a pictorial or visual pattern when parts of the pattern are presented rapidly in serial order
  
  Length estimation – the ability to accurately estimate or compare visual lengths or distances
  
  Perceptual illusions – the ability to resist being affected by the illusory perceptual aspects of geometric figures
  
  Perceptual alternations – consistency in the rate of alternating between different visual perceptions
  
  Imagery – the ability to mentally encode and manipulate an object, idea, event or impression in the form of an abstract spatial form
- Auditory processing – the ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize and discriminate auditory stimuli
  
  Phonetic coding – the ability to code, process, and be sensitive to nuances in phonemic information in short-term memory
  
  Speech sound discrimination – the ability to detect and discriminate differences in phonemes or speech sounds under conditions of little or no distraction or distortion
  
  Resistance to auditory stimulus distortion – the ability to overcome the effects of distortion or distraction when listening to and understanding speech and language
  
  Memory for sound patterns – the ability to retain auditory events such as tones, tonal patterns, and voices
  
  General sound discrimination – the ability to discriminate tones, tone patterns, or musical materials regarding their fundamental attributes
  
  Temporal tracking – the ability to mentally track auditory sequential events to be able to count, anticipate or rearrange them
  
  Musical discrimination and judgment – the ability to discriminate and judge tonal patterns in music
  
  Maintaining and judging rhythm – the ability to recognize and maintain a musical beat in the short-term time period
  
  Sound-Intensity and duration discrimination – the ability to discriminate sound intensities and to be sensitive to the rhythmic aspects of tonal patterns
  
  Sound-Frequency discrimination – the ability to discriminate frequency attributes of tones
  
  Hearing and speech threshold factor – the ability to hear pitch and varying sound frequencies
  
  Absolute pitch – the ability to perfectly identify the pitch of tones
  
  Sound localization – the ability to localize heard sounds in space
- Processing speed – the ability to perform automatic cognitive tasks, especially under pressure
  
  Perceptual speed – the ability to rapidly and accurately search, compare and identify visual elements presented side-by- side or separated in a visual field
  
  Rate of test taking – the ability to rapidly perform tests which are relatively easy or over‑learned
  
  Number facility – the ability to rapidly perform basic arithmetic and accurately manipulate numbers quickly
  
  Speed of reasoning – speed or fluency in performing reasoning tasks in a limited time
  
  Reading speed – the ability to silently read and comprehend connected text rapidly and automatically
  
  Writing speed – the ability to correctly copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
- Decision speed and reaction time – how fast can an individual react to stimuli or task
  
  Simple reaction time – reaction time to the onset of a single stimulus that is presented at a particular point of time
  
  Choice reaction time – reaction time to the onset of one of two or more alternative stimuli, depending on which alternative is signaled
  
  Semantic processing speed – reaction time when a decision requires some encoding and mental manipulation of the stimulus content
  
  Mental comparison speed – reaction time where stimuli must be compared for a characteristic or attribute
  
  Inspection time – the ability to quickly detect change or discriminate between alternatives in a very briefly displayed stimulus
Besides mental intelligence, we also know body intelligence (independent or connected to cognitive abilities) that includes:
- Psychomotor speed – the ability to rapidly and fluently perform physical body motor movements largely independent of cognitive control
  
  Speed of limb movement – the ability to make rapid specific or discrete motor movements of the arms or legs
  
  Writing speed – the ability to correctly copy words or sentences repeatedly, or writing words, sentences, or paragraphs, as quickly as possible
Speed of articulation – the ability to rapidly perform successive articulations with the speech musculature
- Movement time – the time taken to physically move a body part to make the required response
- Psychomotor abilities – the ability to perform physical body motor movements with precision, coordination or strength
  
  Static strength – the ability to exert muscular force to move (push, lift, pull) a relatively heavy or immobile object
  
  Multi-limb coordination – the ability to make quick specific or discrete motor movements of the arms or legs
  
  Finger dexterity – the ability to make precisely coordinated movements of the fingers
  
  Manual dexterity – the ability to make precisely coordinated movements of a hand, or a hand and the attached arm
  
  Arm-hand steadiness – the ability to precisely and skillfully coordinate arm-hand positioning in space
  
  Control precision – the ability to exert precise control over muscle movements, typically in response to environmental feedback
  
  Aiming – the ability to precisely and fluently execute a sequence of eye-hand coordination movements for positioning purposes
  
  Gross body equilibrium – the ability to maintain the body in an upright position in space or regain balance after balance has been disturbed
- Olfactory abilities – the abilities that depend on sensory receptors of the olfactory system
  
  Olfactory memory – memory for smells
  
  Olfactory sensitivity – sensitivity to different smells
- Tactile abilities – the abilities involved in the perception and judging of sensations that are received through touch sensory receptors
  
  Tactile sensitivity – the ability to detect and make fine discriminations of pressure on the surface of the skim
- Kinesthetic abilities – the abilities that depend on sensory receptors that detect bodily position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints
  
  Kinesthetic sensitivity – the ability to detect, or be aware, of movements of the body or body parts
Source: Wikipedia and CHC – Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) Broad and Narrow Cognitive Ability Definitions

As you can see, there are many different types of intelligence. There are absolutely certain areas where you excel. But even though the g factor on top is more or less fixed, there are several ways how you can transcend this limitation at least to a certain extent (probably enough to be successful in any field in life):
1. Building up crystalized intelligence
2. Leveraging the power of a motivational environment
3. Possessing the growth mindset
Fluid and crystallized intelligence – that’s what really matters

As we have seen, many researchers reject the idea of a single measurement of intelligence such as the g factor. They argue that there are at least there two independent domains of cognitive performance of an individual – crystalized and fluid intelligence. And crystalized intelligence has its own important place in the CHC model.

Fluid intelligence is the capacity to figure out novel problems, and it’s more or less fixed. It’s limited by the brain’s biological traits. Crystallized intelligence is, on the other hand, defined by how much you know, by your knowledge and experience. It’s influenced by education and acculturation. Crystalized intelligence is the knowledge and skills that you possess. It’s what matters at the end of the day.

While crystalized and fluid intelligence are correlated, they change at different levels when you age. Fluid intelligence tends to peak at 20 and then slowly decline after. On the other hand, crystalized intelligence is stable and increases over your lifetime; and you have a huge influence on how your crystalized intelligence will advance.

The more you study, learn and expose yourself to new things, the smarter you become by increasing your crystalized intelligence.

There is also a possibility that acquiring additional knowledge can fine-tune your fluid intelligence by using your working memory better.

When you bring something from the long-term memory into the working memory (by bringing something to mind), it occupies fewer working memory slots than it did initially when you were trying to memorize it. It gets kind of compact (like zipping a file), and that enables you to play with more ideas at once and connect knowledge in new ways.

Smooth physical repetition creates muscle memory, and smooth mental repetition creates knowledge chunks that take up less working memory; you don’t have to relearn or re-explain pieces of information to yourself. You just know it and can intuitively do it; you know it from memory. And that’s how you become smarter by knowing more.

Environmental influences

Your development, actions and intelligence are always a product of your genes and your environment. Your genes activate or react differently in various environments. In other words, every inherited trait, even intelligence, can be enhanced, decreased, woken up or eliminated by repeating life experiences or functioning in a specific environment.

When it comes to intelligence development, the environment is especially important in the pre-natal period and in youth all the way up to the end of adolescence. But it can have a positive influence on your smarts even later.

When it comes to intelligence, the following elemental variables are important:
- Family – home resources, parents’ use of language, birth order, amount of praise etc.
- Peer group – stereotypes, complex intellectual environments etc.
- Education – in general, IQ decreases during summer breaks, children with delayed schooling and dropouts have lower IQ, less schooling usually equals lower IQ.
- Training – fluid intelligence can be increased through training, at least in the short-term, by improving the working memory. The growth mindset also has a great influence on intellectual abilities.
- Environmental enrichment – more stimulating environments can increase the number of synapses in the brain, especially at a young age, but also later.
- Nutrition – nutrition has an effect on intelligence even before birth, as well as afterwards, where sufficient protein intake is especially important.
- Stress – maternal stress, traumatic life situations and constant pressure have a negative influence on intelligence.
- Exposure to toxic chemicals – exposure to some toxic chemicals can reduce mental abilities of a child during pregnancy and at a young age. Similarly, alcohol, drugs and tobacco can have a negative influence on the child’s intellectual development.
- Perinatal factors – complications at birth or low birth weight can have serious implications on the child’s intellectual development.
- Environmental exposure – if a child is exposed to a specific knowledge domain and creativity is encouraged at the same time, the child can develop exceptional understanding of that field. That’s how geniuses are born, even if they don’t have a really high IQ.
With age, the potential positive influence of the environment declines, but an influence still exists. It’s been proven that your brain synapses can grow in the older age as well.

Thus, seeking complex intellectual environments, lifelong learning, regular reading and developing competences, proper nutrition, building yourself a motivational environment and avoiding severe stress does have a positive influence on your cognitive abilities.

Graph content: Carol Dweck, Image: Nigel Holmes

If you can influence your intelligence, that means only one thing – grow

I’m pretty sure you don’t like the idea that the IQ is completely fixed. Neither do I. A fixed IQ would be a very unfair thing. While biology and primary socialization absolutely impose limits on us, as we’ve seen, you can fine-tune your overall intelligence, and even more dramatically improve your crystalized intelligence.

Actually, only being able to improve your crystalized intelligence and optimizing your working memory is not enough. You must constantly improve both, otherwise you are falling behind. If you’re not going forward, you’re going backwards. And you’re wasting your potential and resources. That’s where the right attitude and the growth mindset come into play.

Stanford professor Dr. Carol Dweck has found out that the biggest difference between successful and unsuccessful people lies in their mindset. The right mindset is more important than IQ.

You can either have a fixed mindset or a growth one. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that your character and potential are unchangeable, have been “written in stone” since birth. You assume that they cannot be modified or improved in a meaningful way.

The second option is a growth mindset. It means that you believe that you can improve your character by working on yourself. If you have a growth mindset, you see yourself as being at a specific starting point with the option to improve yourself through hard work – your skills, beliefs, competences and intelligence.

The fixed mindset leads to hiding your flaws, doing only things that you are naturally good at, feeling defined by failures, being unwilling to improve your relationships, and feeling bad if everything doesn’t go as planned, even if you’ve learned something new.

On the other hand, with a growth mindset, flaws and problems are only opportunities to improve. The new and the unknown bring learning opportunities, mastery leads to passion and purpose, and every failure is only a temporary setback. Nothing is given and everything can be improved.

When it comes to intelligence, you can at least fine-tune your fluid intelligence, dramatically develop your crystalized intelligence over the years, excel at specific cognitive tasks (that other people will pay you for), make sure you reach your intellectual maximum, apply your skills in various life situations, and prevent your cognitive decline.

You can achieve all that with the right attitude powered by the growth mindset, curiosity, deliberate practice and hard work.
How to become more creative – the secrets nobody told you about
Every single human being possesses a flow of creative energy, including you. It’s not even a question of whether you can be creative or not, since the answer is absolutely yes.

The much more sensible question is how to learn to identify, nurture and express the creative energy that resides in you.

In this article, you will learn exactly that – how to become more creative.

No matter if you see yourself as a creative person or not, whether you are terrified of expressing yourself or you are the boldest artist there is, after reading this article you will acquire many ideas for how to completely awaken the creative part of your personality and then leverage it to your advantage.

It’s impossible to feel complete without being creative

First, as with anything that requires effort in life, you need a strong reason why you should even bother igniting your creative spark.

Without a strong “why” you rarely have the stamina needed to start a new habit, project or learn a new skill. And creativity is exactly that – a combination of a habit, skills and little projects.

Emotions drive attention. Emotions direct the creative juice.

Among many ways you can benefit from creativity, there are two major ones. The first one is that in the creative society, creativity is well-cherished. Brilliant ideas are the drivers of success.

By being more creative, you can skyrocket your career. It’s that simple. Having only brilliant ideas is of course rarely enough to succeed, but it’s definitely the best start.

The second, even more important reason to develop your creativity is to give additional meaning to your life. You are here on this planet to grow, connect, enjoy and create.

Without creating in one way or another, it’s hard to feel complete. Finding yourself in the creative flow is one of the most divine experiences you can have as a human being.

Creativity gives you a chance to shine bright, to express your true self and to transform raw energies into subtler ones (in psychology, it’s called the sublimation of needs).

With creativity, you can even leave a legacy if you manage to impact the masses with your brilliant ideas. And there’s more. Creativity can empower your growth, gives you new ways to connect with other people, and provides a unique way of enjoying life. What more could one ask for?

The four paths to finding and developing your creative self

There are four completely different paths (based on two variables) to the development of your creative self. The first variable is about possessing obvious traditional artistic talent or, on the other extreme, considering yourself as not possessing creative personality at all.

The second variable concerns your environment. Every personality trait (including creative talent) can be enhanced, decreased, woken up or eliminated by life experiences. Your creativity can be encouraged or stifled based on your functioning in a specific environment.

Individuals in a supportive environment

Some people are lucky to discover their medium for creating at a young age while their parents provide a supportive environment for their talents to be developed. If a child shows drawing, singing, acting or any other kind of artistic capabilities that are constantly encouraged, we get “natural born artists”.

A combination of talent and the environment that enables at least 10,000 hours of practice is what creates outliers, the most successful people of humankind. There are rare exceptions, but this is the safest success formula when creative talents are involved.

Outliers = Talent + Supportive environment that enables 10,000 hours of practice + Other factors

Then we have people with no obvious artistic talent, but being in a supportive environment helps them find a way to express their creativity. These are the individuals with a very strong growth mindset.

The core of their belief system is that talent is overrated and that they can learn any skill (artistic or not) if they put in enough effort. They are hard workers who learn how to be creative with enough time and effort. They absolutely have to work much harder than the talented people to achieve the same level of mastery.

These two groups rarely have a problem being creative.

Individuals in a non-supportive environment

Then there are two groups of people who do have challenges with expressing their creative self.

People that have traditional artistic talent and are in a very critical and non-supportive environment develop strong mistrust in themselves and life, together with severe feelings of shame, guilt, doubt and inferiority.

Their true self and creative talents get stifled and the desire to shine is suppressed. They know what their talents are, they have the urge to express themselves, but they are keeping themselves locked in an emotional cage.

The last group of people are the ones with no obvious artistic talent combined with a non-supportive environment. These people most often see themselves as not creative at all and they aren’t particularly bothered by that fact.

They don’t believe they can express themselves in a creative way, so they don’t even try. But they are just letting parts of their personality go undiscovered, and the creative urges is buried deep in the unconscious mind.

In which quadrant do you fall?

Creative crisis – In the dark, the stars shine the brightest

Creativity and a strong healthy ego are very closely interconnected. If you want to express your creative self, you need to believe in yourself.

Because only then can you take initiative and put your creations in front of others to be judged, while not really being affected by the judgements. Without a healthy ego, the fear of not being accepted is just too strong.

There are many ways how self-expression can be blocked. One extreme is symbolic self-castration, with common examples like laziness, procrastination and denial. The other extreme is creative aggression where good taste extends into neediness, exaggeration and narcissism.

Creative doing is a natural human desire and tendency. When suppressed, it always backfires.

If you don’t consider yourself creative or if you don’t express your creative talents, you always suffer from some type of existential crisis.

How does creativity get stifled?

The question is how creativity even gets stifled. Usually it happens during a child’s upbringing.

Here are only a few very common examples:
- You create something and nobody gives you any praise or they focus on the mistakes
- You are constantly criticized for everything you do (“it’s good, but it could be better”)
- When you want to explain something, you are shut down (“don’t speak while we eat”)
- You are not allowed to have your own style or opinion or do things your own way
- Nobody encourages you to go through failure and to regularly practice to develop your talents
- You are not allowed to play and you have to grow up too quickly
- You are labeled as being childish when you don’t act grown up and aren’t serious
- Nobody is mentoring you and showing you how you can progress in developing your talents
- Nobody asks you about your wishes, needs and opinions or what you want
- Your imagination is not nurtured with stories, answering your questions and being open-minded in general
Resolving the inner crisis with reframing

There are two resolutions to this conflict. The first one is best illustrated with the quote: “in the dark the stars shine the brightest”. Research has shown that rejection and isolation can be great fuel for creativity.

By definition, being creative means being different, and being different very often leads to being rejected, at least in the beginning. A non-supportive environment does exactly that, it rejects your potential instead of encouraging it, merely because you are different.

If you want to be creative, you must be rejected.

How can you be creative, if you want to fit in (and gain some approval) at all costs? Creativity means being or finding something that is different, something that doesn’t fit in.

That means you need a new context for feeling rejected, you need to reframe your thinking in a way that rejection doesn’t dry your creativity (with the desire to fit in), but fuels it (with the desire to stand out).

In the new mental frame, you must see the need to individuate stronger than the need to belong. Your urge to stand out must be stronger than the need to fit in.

You have to make your mission to express your creative self greater than any rejection or criticism you might encounter on you path to self-actualization by the society. You need to disinvest yourself from the society’s opinion and invest more into yourself and your independence.

Society feels threatened by everything different, but the moment you become like them, nobody notices you anymore.

An inner and outer environment that support your creative expression

The second way to become more creative is to provide yourself the supportive environment you didn’t have when growing up. That can be achieved from within and by changing external circumstances.

Providing yourself the supportive environment from within is the so-called self-mothering and self-fathering concept. It might sound a little bit ridiculous, but it works.

Self-mothering and self-fathering means developing a compassionate and encouraging relation with yourself, where you start to slowly encourage your creative expressions.

Mindfulness, properly managing your mind, creative visualization, bibliotherapy, exploring your subconscious and play are only a few of the mechanisms how to make a step further in this direction.

Often the best first step to reconnect with your creative part is to start playing.

Videogames, sports, dancing, flirting, playing with children, reading fiction books and telling jokes are examples of good ways to loosen yourself up and see that your relaxed and creative nature doesn’t always lead to rejection, but rather to the thing you crave the most – being loved and admired.

Besides the internal environment, your external environment greatly influences your creativity. If you want to be more creative, you must build yourself a motivational and supportive environment. In the adult age, many external circumstances are under your control.

You can surround yourself with people who support your creative talents, you can join meetup and hobby groups, you can work in a company with many smart and creative people and provide everything else necessary to nurture your creativity.

It’s impossible to become more creative if you aren’t willing to make some changes in your life, internal and external.

To deeply connect with others, you have to polarize. If you want to polarize, you must express your unique creative self. There is no other way.

Undiscovered self – It’s time to find a fitting medium and the right context

People with no obvious creative talent have the same issue as people with the talent in a non-supportive environment, with one additional burden.

They are not aware of their desire to create and even if they wanted to create, they have no idea how. Art, innovation and ideas are completely alien to them.

Usually their conflict seems less severe, at least on the conscious level. They are not creative types, so why bother to creatively express themselves at all.

To live a full, complete and integrated life you must find a way to creatively express yourself. Either you find a way at one point in your life, or your needs are suppressed in a nasty way; and that always brings some form of negativity in your life.

If you consider yourself non-creative, the first step you must make is to find the right medium and context that sparks your creativity. The first step is to use the search mode and experiment in what situations and with what kind of channel you can creatively express yourself.

In other words, if you fall in this group, you have to try dozens of different arts to find the one that best suits your creative self.

Logically, if you don’t possess traditional artistic talent, you have to find some uncommon one. I helped hundreds of people discover their unusual creative talents. Here are only a few ways how the people I mentored found their creative selves:
- Connecting difficult family members in a creative way
- Telling jokes or creating memes
- Cooking, baking, making sweets
- Playing games with children
- Flirting in a creative way or applying bed skills
- Improving processes in the company in completely new ways
- Interpreting death or spirituality in a new way
- Combining knowledge from two different industries
- Finding new ways to solve big humanitarian problems
- Organizing unique events
- Making educational videos
- Hacking mathematical equations
- Tattoos, fashion etc.
In addition to that, there are hundreds of different hobbies you can try. And don’t forget to try all the traditional artistic professions.

I can guarantee you that if you try hundreds of different things you will find the one that is your perfect fit. All you need is a little bit of courage. After that, your life will never be the same again. You will open the doors to higher vibrations and divine realms.

Finding a way to express your creativity means finding the right medium. It can be connecting words, colors, moves, curves, numbers, relationships, tones, facts or anything else in new creative ways. But once you find your medium, you also need to find the right context that regularly sparks your creativity.

Creativity is a habit and a skill, not a special gift

Creativity is not a magic wand a few possess. It’s not an unlimited resource that some people have at their own disposal and advantage when they need it to dominate others, without any cost.

Creativity is a habit. You have to practice to be more and more creative, and you have to nurture your creativity. That means you can be creative only in a specific context, with specific life circumstances and big investments in the form of time and effort.

The context is everything that encourages your creative routine.

It includes everything from reminders (habit triggers) to how you organize your environment (minimal transaction costs) and finally to deliberately practicing creative tasks with pure self-discipline and stamina (timeboxing time for practice). And we must also not forget the rewards you enjoy in the end.

The context is about organizing your life in a way that you regularly find yourself in front of the medium while you can forget about everything else and just create.

If you want to be creative, you must put in the effort to organize your life circumstances in a way that you can create in the flow without any distractions for a few hours every day.

You can be the most talented person in the world, but without practice the talent goes to waste. Hard work beats talent every time. Don’t assume some people have a gift that is only a great resource without any investment and costs. There are no shortcuts in life (or only a few).

Knowing that creativity is only a habit, here are a few ways to nurture and develop it:
1. Create many different things every day
2. Regularly practice opening your mind
3. Practice makes your skills perfect
Create many new things every day

Once, I visited Leonardo Da Vinci’s exhibition. I was surprised at how many unsuccessful inventions and “ugly” pictures he drew. And he is one of the biggest inventors and artists of all time. I had thought that everything he touched became a masterpiece.

But I was wrong. He had to sketch hundreds of ideas to develop a few brilliant ones. Pablo Picasso was no different. He created more than 50,000 pieces of art in his lifetime.

An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cells it occupied. – A.G.

That leads us to a simple conclusion. If you want to be more creative, you have to create every single day. And you have to create a lot. Here are a few ideas how you can achieve that:
1. Brainstorm ideas every single day. If you don’t write down at least 10 ideas every day, don’t go to sleep. Much like you don’t go to sleep if you don’t read at least one page of a book.
2. Don’t judge your ideas when you brainstorm. Write down every single ridiculous idea you can think of. Kick your inner critic’s ass if s/he wants to interfere. New ideas are fragile.
3. Rank your ideas and then start prototyping. Use your medium and prototype like crazy. Prototyping is the first step to materializing your ideas. Nothing kills a brilliant idea faster than dull execution.
4. Try to combine new ideas, all the knowledge you possess, and play with ideas in all the ridiculous ways possible. Every day, try to think in a new creative way.
5. Make sure you use the diffused mode of thinking between creating time. Go for a walk or take a nap. Your mind will still be creating, and soon brilliant ideas will come out of nowhere.
6. Don’t have problems being wrong. Mistake shouldn’t be the word you’re too embarrassed to use. You’re the product of a trillion mistakes. Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake (it’s a quote from Westworld). You should use it too.
7. Exercise and eat brain foods! Both really do stimulate your brain and creativity.
8. Last but not least, know that your unique style comes from your limitations, not your strengths. Your unique style gets developed by finding a way of working around your shortcomings.
9. Mae sure you free your working memeory as much as possible
Disinvest yourself from the society’s opinion, invest yourself into examining your soul to find the creative spring in you, and then create like crazy.

Regularly practice opening your mind

Your mind is like a parachute. It only works when it’s open. You learned and inherited hundreds of limiting beliefs that you have to unlearn. The only way to unlearn limitations is by practicing and regularly breaking the rules (in a healthy way).

Here are a few ideas how you can achieve that:
1. Always be curious and ask yourself and others “why” thousands of times.
2. Know that everything can be improved and everything can be done in a better way. There is no such thing as a best practice.
3. Regularly ask yourself: what would happen if I created, did, believed… the opposite. Every single belief you currently have is a cold blocker of imagination, innovation and improvements.
4. Don’t get stuck on fixed ideas – stay flexible. There are many ways to achieve the same thing.
5. Sometimes imagine that life is just a dream without any limitations. Imagine how the future will look in 10, 20 and 100 years. Imagine that there are no physical laws.
6. Always try new things, never chain yourself by sticking solely to things you already mastered.
7. Think about how you can do everyday tasks you already mastered in a new different way.
8. In the beginning, be satisfied with good enough, with small first steps, and then you can scale up the quality of your work.
9. Spend time with smart people, they will further help you develop your creativity.
10. Constantly learn and read a lot.
Every creative masterpiece contains an element of surprise. If you want to surprise people, you must create something unexpected. To create something unexpected, you must think in uncommon ways. Dare to be different.

Practice makes things perfect

Talent isn’t something you possess, it’s something you do. And it all starts with mastering the basics. The more you master the basics, the more creative you can become.

Because when you master the basics, you can devote more working memory to connecting ideas in a new creative way. That’s why you want to always master many different basics – “knowledge chunks” that you store in your long-term memory.

It might sound complicated, but it’s actually quite simple. Knowledge chunks stored in your long-term memory include information, experiences, motoric skills, cognitive skills and conditioning effects (habits, patterns).

These are the building blocks that enable you to mix ideas together in a new creative way. The more of these building blocks you possess, the more creative you can be.

That’s where the 10,000 hours rule (or daily hard work, in other words) comes into place. The more you master the basics and correctly practice new things, the more creative you can become. It’s a double benefit.

Not only does the practice make you master a specific skill, you can also come up with more creative ideas in that domain.

The end formula for being more creative is thus pretty simple. Make sure you master different basic blocks of knowledge (practice them until you get bored) and then put in the effort to mix them in new creative ways.

And don’t forget that keeping your mind open and regularly stretching it will help you more easily find new connections between the building blocks. That’s it.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

Ira Glass

The last thing you have to know about creative endeavors is, as the quote above illustrates, that beginnings suck. The first steps are usually the hardest, but they also keep the people who are not serious about self-actualization away from creativity.

Don’t be one of them. Every next step you take becomes much easier. And make sure you don’t compare your beginning with someone else’s middle or the top of their career.

The summary – how to become more creative
1. Make expressing yourself in some creative way, no matter what it is, part of your life mission. Find your “why” to create. Your life will be greatly enriched and your existence here on this planet much more fulfilling.
2. Reframe your creative crisis if you have issues with mistrust, doubt, guilt and shame. Make the desire to individuate stronger than the need to belong. Foresee that expressing your uniqueness will probably lead to the most honest belonging in the end.
3. Experiment with hundreds of creative things to find the medium that is your perfect fit. Then learn to organize your environment and life circumstances in a way that you will be able to create in the flow with the right medium every single day.
4. If you want to be creative, you must produce many new things daily – without judging yourself or minding what the society will think. In hundreds of average ideas, a brilliant one will be born. Have a goal to create at least 50,000 creative pieces in your lifetime.
5. Ideas are never enough. When you find the right idea, have the courage to materialize it with prototyping, and then finalize the best ones. All you need is a little bit of courage. First be open-minded, then be satisfied with good enough and in the end, create a unique masterpiece.
6. Every single one of your beliefs is a creativity killer. Thus, you have to constantly practice open‑mindedness by challenging yourself, thinking and doing the opposite, and stretching your ideas to ridiculous proportions.
7. Creativity is a habit and a skill, which means you have to practice it daily. You have to learn to master the basics and then strive to connect the things you master in a new unique way. It only takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve that.
8. Last but no least, the best first step to unleashing creativity is to learn how to play again and to not compare yourself with others. Individuate!