How to Be Better at Almost Everything

by Pat Flynn

  That’s actually the first step in getting paid to do what you love. Look at and be a student of markets. Study how people are already spending money, and determine if and how that matches up to skills you already have. Look at the people who are most successful doing something, and try to discern what skills they have that you don’t. This is where we complete our skill stack. We identify the few remaining missing skills that will maximally convey our value to the world, skills that will cause people to want to do business with us.

  When I was starting out in fitness, I looked at entrepreneurs who were doing really well online, and a lot of them weren’t in any better shape than I was. So I knew it must have been something other than having great abs or a heavy deadlift that made them successful—again, they were generalists, not specialists. Eventually, I found a lot of them were good at things like advertising and copywriting and all these other business skills about which I knew nothing. I did have the foundation of being a writer, even if I wasn’t an advertising writer. But the more I looked, the more I saw how important the skill of writing an effective advertisement seemed to be. I decided to pick up a few books on copywriting and learned how to write compelling headlines and catchy blog titles and whatnot, and, wouldn’t you know, my audience grew.

  I also saw that people more successful than me were good at selling things. They knew how to make their messages ooze with so-called sex appeal. They knew how to speak in such a way to their audience that doing business with them would, in fact, increase their audience’s personal happiness. Whether they knew it or not, they understood that most fundamental law of economics. They knew about human action. And they knew how to attract it. They knew how to make and offer programs, services, or goods that spoke directly to the problems people looking for fitness solutions wanted. Their messages were so targeted, so precise. It’s no wonder they were successful.

  I knew I needed to learn about copywriting and how to sell things; I knew I needed to learn how to make my value known. Because that’s all selling is: it’s positioning what you have in such a way that people see it as an answer to their problem. Almost everybody has a problem that somebody with a particular skill has the power to solve—the only problem (for you, anyway) is that most of them don’t see it that way. Your job is to make them see it that way.

  I was already good at writing and fitness but I sucked at sales, so this became a need-based skill for me. It became something I needed to get better at to make a living by doing what I loved. That’s why I studied it, and maybe you’ll need to do the same. I’m not saying selling is a fundamental skill. I think it’s a need-based skill. Not every successful person is also a phenomenal salesperson—some people just create stuff that people want so badly it literally sells itself, which tells you a lot about the nature of sales. Though a lot of successful people are indeed very good salespeople. Plus, a lot of selling is baked into that fundamental skill of persuasion. Selling focuses more on specifics, like how to price goods or services and how to position yourself in a specific market or environment. But all those specifics are pointless without a more fundamental understanding of persuasion to begin with.

  Selling, to the extent it moves beyond persuasion, boils down to this: people pay only for the things they want. If you hope to be successful, you need to sell the things that people want. It doesn’t matter how persuasive you are otherwise—how many people like you and want to hang out with you or come to your birthday party—if you’re not selling something that solves a problem for people, ain’t nobody going to buy it. The best advice I can offer about selling isn’t to study high-pressure sales techniques; rather, it is to focus your salable skill in a way that will make it of interest to other people. In other words, give the people what they want and are asking for. Try to make something so attractive that it sells itself. Now, generally that isn’t going to happen, but it’ll make your sales job a heck of a lot easier. (In some cases, people may want something not because it’s entirely necessary but because it’s tied to some sort of social status—for example, the iPhone Whatever-Version-It-Is-Now. The fear of missing out is a major motivator for a lot of people. People often want what almost everybody else has, even if that thing isn’t needed for a good or happy life.)

  Think first about what you love and how you can use it to help people. If you’re a writer, what can you do to sell your writing? Because let’s be honest, it might be difficult to become famous from a novel before anybody’s ever heard of you. What if you taught writing courses or wrote advertisements or something like that? That at least offers a service to fulfill a demand and can provide the income and exposure you need to launch that novel you’ve been so desperately scribbling. You have to think creatively—just like you do in your writing. This is what generalism is about, and it’s what can help you break free: sometimes you use one skill (or subset of a skill) to subsidize another. I’ve used my more sellable skills of fitness and writing to subsidize my—I’m not gonna call it “music career,” because it’s not really a career, but let’s say—musical activity. I’ve been able to get a good amount of attention for my music, not because I started as a musician and grew an audience by playing around in grungy old bars, but because I built an audience from my stack of skills in fitness and writing. I’ve used my music on a lot of my workout videos, and over time people started asking who the artist of a song was. I’d pretend not to be too excited when I said it was me.

  Same thing with the book you now hold in your hands. There’s no way I would have been able to make this a noteworthy endeavor without first having established myself in some more specific capacity. I needed fitness to make myself known before I became the guy who talked about generalism. I guess the point I’m making is that with your skill stack you need to start by selling what people want to buy, not what you want them to buy. Then, over time, as people come to know you, like you, trust you, and so on, you can shake the system up a bit. At that point, they’ve become more invested in you as a person—at least, hopefully that’s the case, assuming you’ve done a good job and delivered the goods.

  I’ll give you another example. A friend of mine sells a lot of albums as a solo guitarist, and people are always asking how he’s been able to make a living from that. His secret was that he didn’t start by selling albums. He started by having a YouTube channel that taught people to play the songs they wanted to learn and then offered courses doing the exact same thing. Because he provided people with what they wanted (guitar lessons, in some capacity), they came to know and enjoy him and his style, and as soon as that started to happen, they began purchasing and reviewing his albums and talking about them. People on the outside think he got lucky. He didn’t get lucky. He provided value and eventually that value was returned to him. He was, and is, a remarkable generalist, very skilled in online advertising and marketing. All his skills helped build his presence on YouTube, and all his skills eventually funneled back into doing the one thing he wanted to do more than anything: create and sell his own music.

  But notice the compromise. Notice that he wasn’t content to just make it selling music online—music that was very good, but music that probably almost nobody would have ever discovered if he simply decided to put it out there. Rather, he was willing to accept reality and position his skill in the most helpful way possible to build an audience. After he did this, people discovered his music because they had already discovered him. And notice the skill stack: he was great at guitar, great at online advertising, and pretty good but not great (sorry, Bob) on camera. These few simple skills, when combined, made this once poor and shabby guitarist into a millionaire.

  Again, if there’s a hidden secret to being a generalist, it’s how you can adapt—it’s how you can use a skill stack to provide value in one area and fulfill your life’s purpose in another. The specialist doesn’t have this option. The person who refuses to adapt and insists on making a living by only selling their music is the person who typically requires a subsidized lifestyle, from
their girlfriend, boyfriend, or grandma. Maybe this is because they’re too much of a purist, too unwilling to lead with value rather than their ego. That’s the beauty of capitalism in some ways: it’ll humble you right quick if you’ve got an attitude like that. If you want to get what you want, you must be willing to give others what they want. There is very little room for ego.

  So the secret to discerning need-based skills (if there is one) is to emulate. Look at people who have what you want and are doing what you want to do. This might mean reading biographies and autobiographies, which I very, very much recommend that you do. There’s no way to figure out what a particular skill stack should look like without knowing what you want to get out of it, and to know what you want to get out of it, you should look to those who are doing the things you want to do. Just remember to look at the right things. Remember to emulate the people who are worth emulating, not those who are simply rich and famous. If you do want to emulate people who are rich and famous, do so for reasons other than their wealth and fame.

  I remember way back when I was starting out in fitness, reading articles from somebody who I always thought was so interesting, especially for a person who was in the workout profession. I always thought he made such good points and arguments. It wasn’t until I met him about a year later that I learned he was a history major, and he told me how much that helped infuse his writings on fitness with such interesting little tidbits. At that point, I realized I needed to start reading history more. People like hearing about the history of things.

  That’s just one small example of how what seems like an unrelated skill gave this person a very unique perspective on fitness. It made him stand out. You can look at more popular examples, too. Angus Young is a good one, since we’re on such an AC/DC kick, and I think what makes him appealing is that he’s not just a solid guitarist but also such an interesting showman. People who know Angus know him for his schoolboy outfit and onstage antics. His guitar playing almost comes second. It’s his duckwalk and schizophrenic convulsions on stage that make him almost impossible to ignore—that’s the stuff that people leave an AC/DC concert talking about. In fact, he often botches his guitar solos because he’s so wild and animated, but you know what, who cares? It’s a skill stack. It’s funny. You can’t take your eyes off him. He doesn’t need to be the best to be the best.

  Another example is Mark Twain, whom I became absolutely enthralled with after reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school. People know him as the Great American Novelist, thinking he probably was something of a specialist, but I would strongly contest that assertion. Twain to me was the epitome of a generalist—he didn’t just read and write. Twain studied philosophy and history and was arguably one of America’s first stand-up comedians. Someone once remarked that Twain wasn’t a writer who performed—he was a performer who wrote. Not only that, but he was trained to be a steamboat pilot and a businessperson. He was quite smart when it came to marketing and selling books; he didn’t become popular by coincidence, mind you. The man was practiced and learned in so many respects. In fact, he’s one of the reasons I became interested in more than just one thing: the more I studied Twain, the more I saw just how inseparable all his variegated skills were from his success.

  But how about somebody who isn’t a writer or a fitness person? How about someone like Benjamin Franklin? Now, does anybody need to be convinced that Benjamin Franklin was a generalist? Was there anything you can think of that Benjamin Franklin didn’t do? He created political cartoons, invented the lightning rod and bifocals, was the first postmaster general, and was a prominent (to say the least) politician. He was learned in matters ranging from science and philosophy to diplomacy and sales. All of them somehow connected for him and made him into the man he was, someone we all know about almost 230 years after he died. In fact, when you think about most of the founding fathers, you find men who were all generalists. Their skills were far-reaching and diverse, and on top of everything, most of them even knew how to duel. It was like golf to them.

  I don’t want to limit the scope or restrict the kinds of people I think you should emulate. I think you should emulate whomever you want to (with certain caveats) and then use the principles of generalism to reverse engineer whatever set of need-based skills you, well, need.

  Now for those caveats: Just keep the focus on the fundamentals, above all. Always orient your skill stack toward the ultimate outcome of success, even if the people you’re emulating never quite reached that. You can learn from those who were successful in business but failures at life—emulate what made them successful at business; discard what made them failures at life. While success and money and fame can all be good, they can also not be good, which is more typically the case. This is why we start with the end in mind—of doing things because they’re good and because we want to do them, not because we want to fill our bank accounts per se.

  It starts with enjoyment and wanting to help people and know things. People who teach and do good things for the sake of helping people will be rewarded with infinite chocolate and no weight gain in heaven. I’m not sure of a lot, but I’m pretty sure of this. Eternal rewards aside, it’s the happiness the right type of action brings you in this life that also makes it worth pursuing.

  CONCLUSION: REMEMBER, LIFE IS BEST WITH A SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

  Your brain—does it feel good yet? Is it so full that achievement and abundance are leaking out of your ears? Do you feel much, much smarter and able to conquer the world and whatever has held you back from accomplishing what you want? You know the secrets now, and you didn’t need the Knights Templar to unlock the Holy Grail. It’s probably easier than you could have imagined. The key is generalism. Learning a number of skills and stacking them: metaskills, interest skills, and need-based skills. So I hand you this golden chalice—OK, it’s a book, and the chalice appears to be green, not gold, but, well, whatever—as you begin your journey.

  Now we start with a practice plan. We treat our schedule like we would a day at school—like we’re students again, this time in the World School System. There are different subjects to learn. Which means we need to set aside the time to practice them, even if we don’t practice them all at the same time or for the same amount of time. If you ask me, I think this is tremendous fun.

  I think you will find it to be tremendous fun also, especially once you start to find enjoyment within the process. You will achieve concrete outcomes—don’t worry about whether this will happen, as they’re inevitable with the process. When you practice writing, things get written. When you practice martial arts, people get judo tossed. If people fail to produce outcomes, it’s because they fail to adhere to process. And they fail to adhere to process because they don’t enjoy it—they do it for the wrong reasons.

  I can already hear some objections burbling. How am I ever going to find the time to do this? I have a job, you know, and kids, and all these other commitments, man. But what did I say earlier? This isn’t a matter of time. It’s a matter of priority. I can’t help you find the time. I can only help you look within yourself to see that your self-actualization, your nibanna, if you will, is so important that any excuse not to make the time is simply invalid—you will always fail to make the time as long as you continue to make that excuse. It’s like the guitarist who raised his eyebrow in confusion when somebody asked how he found the time to practice as much as he did. He found the time to play the guitar because he wanted to play the guitar. It’s not a tautology so much as a truism.

  Before we go on, this is something you need to answer for yourself: Do you want to be better at things? Are you willing to make a mess and get lost?

  If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter how little or how much time you have. People get things done with full schedules and busy careers and a lot of kids. They get up early and stay up late and use instant coffee when they need to. Because they want to be better and they want to do things. Now, I can’t get you to see that being be
tter and doing things is important; I can only tell you it’s important and hope that you see my point and don’t have to learn these lessons by putting off life until you’re ninety-seven and regretting everything. I don’t want you to regret everything. I don’t want you to regret anything. I want you to finish your life knowing you did the best you could with what you had. Because that’s enough. But anything less isn’t enough—then you’re not fulfilling your nature; you’re not acting according to reason; you’re not doing the things that God put you on the planet to do. This, of course—to pursue our own human flourishing—would be your ontological duty.

  As for the fundamentals, you should start the day with meditation and reflection and prayer. You could also exercise. Then you should do whatever you’re specializing in. Devote your biggest and most productive chunk of time to that. Often, this will be an interest skill, but not always. Sometimes you need to specialize in the fundamentals or need-based skills, especially at first. Not every “class,” in other words, needs to be the same length. Especially not since you’re essentially homeschooling yourself. Classes should be whatever length they need to be to maximize efficiency and effectiveness of practice. Sometimes shorter is better; sometimes longer is better. But it should always be the least you need, because if you give yourself too much time to do something, you might spend a lot of that time with your hand in your pants. Do you think Aristotle would be happy to hear about that? I don’t think so. Personally, I think Aristotle would be very displeased.