What are the top skills that should be taught to every man, woman, and child who enters our education system? Here are a few that aren’t taught at all:

1. How to Make People Like You and Network

For a skill that affects every area of your life (from dating, to family, to work), it’s amazing how little people know about this. There is great power in knowing you can reach out to your network whenever you have a problem to solve, to be able to reach key influencers at conferences and meetings, to make an impression on audiences, to project confidence and trustworthiness, and to make friends with other successful people.

Required reading: How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships.

2. How to Speed Read and the Power of Audio Books

Speed reading and speed comprehension is real. The nominal investment of time it takes to learn pays off in spades for the rest of your life. The same goes with audio books. If you spend an hour per day in the car learning instead of cursing at other drivers, you will have attended the equivalent of an entire semester course.

Required reading: The Psychology of Achievement by Brian Tracey

3. How to Set Goals and Manage Time

Want to know how to get anything done in life? Our school system doesn’t feel that this is worth teaching. If you have ever found yourself being busy all day only to wonder what you accomplished at the end of it, then you need to learn this.

Required reading: Getting Things Done, Eat That Frog, No B.S. Time Management For Entrepreneurs

4. How to Read a Financial Statement

Robert Kiyosaki is fond of saying that the rich teach their children how to read financial statements and the poor do not. Schools have never been very good at teaching people how to get rich, probably in no small part because professors are generally poor and wouldn’t know how to teach it.

Required reading: Cash Flow Quadrant, or this blog article

5. How to Negotiate and Use Contracts

If you want to accomplish anything of significance you’re going to have to work with other people. There is a certain art to structuring good contracts and measuring results. School teaches you none of this and most people have to learn it from the school of hard knocks.

Required reading: Donald Trump’s The Art Of The Deal

6. How to Save and Invest

People are never taught how to build wealth, which is why the nation is in credit card debt. Moreover, people are never taught the power of passive income streams and how to really break free from the rat race of working 9-to-5. There is a whole body of literature on this topic which is never even touched upon in traditional education.

Required reading: The Richest Man In Babylon, The Millionaire Next Door, or Ben Franklin’s The Way To Wealth

7. How to be Successful in Life

Some people have devoted a lifetime to understanding what makes people happy and successful. There are the big three: health, wealth, and relationships. People need to find what they really want to do with their life. There is a lot to learn here!

Required reading: What To Say When You Talk To Yourself, When I Say No I Feel Guilty, Think and Grow Rich, The Way Of The Superior Man

8. How to Spread an Idea and Basic Marketing

The basics of marketing are something everyone should understand. Even if you don’t think you’re in marketing, you’re in marketing. If you have an idea at work, or want to get a raise, or want to convince your kids to go see a movie, then there is something applicable from the marketing world.

Required reading: Dan Kennedy’s The Ultimate Sales Letter, CopyBlogger, The Psychology of Influence

Source:
Lifehack.org August 15, 2008

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8 Essential Skills They Didn?t Teach You In School

President Barack Obama’s  comments, made with new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at his side, came in swift response to a New York Times report, which reported employees of the New York financial world garnered an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses last year. The figure, from the New York state comptroller, drew prominent news coverage.

“Outrageous.”

That’s President Barack Obama’s one-word reaction to a report that Wall Street employees got more than $18 billion in bonuses last year.

Said Obama: “That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful.”

The president said he and new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will have direct conversations with corporate leaders to make the point.

Obama said there is a time for corporate leaders to make profits and get paid bonuses but now is “not that time.”

“Outrageous” is precisely the word. The same people who two months ago came to Congress with hats in hand and took a boatload of taxpayer money are now doling out billions in “bonuses”? Bonuses? Aren’t you supposed to get a bonus when you do something well?

More:
Obama slams outrageous Wall Street bonuses

OK, here’s your pop quiz of the week. The terms: inflation, recession, deflation and depression. Are they economic terms or are they psychological terms?

Answer: When you let them operate together as the “little voice” between your ears, they become the same thing and you lose. The key phrase is, “when you let them.”

It is no secret that in any difficult economic period, a lot of people get hurt and some people get very rich. Either way, it is the same economy, but a different psychology. The question is, Which person are you going to be?

Let’s look at the terms and see how they apply.

Inflation: How many times have you been overconfident, or even arrogant? What happens? Sooner or later, like an asset with value pumped out of proportion, the bubble bursts.

Correction: Stay humble and connected to clients, associates, friends and their needs. Continue to always serve first.

Deflation: Ever been disappointed? Not gotten the outcome you wanted? All your effort into a deal goes for naught when your prospect chooses another vendor or alternative. The money in your bank account is deflating. Do not rest on the laurels of yesterday. The best way to keep from deflating is to keep inflating through nonstop promotion, serving and selling. Keeping the pipeline and your daily calendar filled with revenue-generating activities keeps your energy up.

Recession: Even though the government is undecided about whether this is happening or not, you and I know it’s old news. How about you? Ever feel like pulling back? Ever get tired of doing the same old thing? Ever have your energy level and passion level recede? And when it gets bad enough, have you ever felt like going back to bed and turning the electric blanket up to “womb” and forgetting about it? If you said no, you are lying. We have been there more than once. Now we are talking Depression.

The No. 1 strategy to stave off all of these little voices and economic conditions is the same. It’s called Little Voice Mastery. It is gaining control of the war between your ears that takes you on an emotional roller-coaster ride every time you watch the market swing or hear the next politician or economist profess their confusing and alarmist rhetoric.

There are more opportunities than ever. Weak competition is getting eliminated. That’s good for you and me because those of us who continue to educate and train on how to sell, how to communicate, how to recruit awesome teams and mostly how to manage our own emotions and “little voice” dialogue will WIN and snap up huge chunks of market share.

It’s happening already. But it’s really up to you.

So here is my list of the Six Ways You Can Go Down With the Economy (If You Want To!):

1. Stay glued to the news. You can be like people watching a natural disaster and letting the “spin” of gloom and doom drive their little voice crazy, or you can focus even harder on doing the right things for your income: training, selling, promoting, contacting, expanding.
2. Stay confused. You can allow yourself to operate in a fog when it comes to money, economics and income. The subject of money used to be simple. Once it got fractionalized, fiat-ized and politicized, it got confusing. Learn to read a financial statement. Master the process of sales and exchange. Know the difference between a real asset and a liability. Learn how to create real income in any economy.
3. Believe you cannot sell or you don’t have to sell. You can be deluded that you do not have to sell to be successful. That is a lie. The Small Business Administration said on April 22, 2008, that 82 percent of all small businesses formed in 2008 will fold by 2012. (That was before the credit crunch!) The biggest fear for anyone in business is that no one will show up, call or buy and that income will evaporate. That is a real possibility unless you know how to sell. P.T. Barnum said it pretty well: “Without promotion, something terrible happens—NOTHING!” People struggle financially, not because of lack of hard work or good products, but because they do not know how to sell, how to raise capital without going to a bank, or how to market themselves. Whether it is selling products, ideas, recruiting or obtaining funds, the skill is the same. Learn it!
4. Look for quick fixes instead of mastering your “little voice.” Before, everyone was looking for a way to get rich quick. Now, everyone is looking for an escape hatch. It’s the same issue—believing that there is a silver bullet to every challenge or problem. The best investment you can make in yourself and your team is to master the little voice in your head that either drives you to success or to depression. Seek books, audios, teachers and mentors that can teach you how to drive toward success. It will not only improve your income, it will change your life. It is the single best investment.
5. Blame Wall Street, the government or bankers. If I have learned one thing in all my years of personal development, it’s that when I blame others for my situation, I lose. Be clear: Public Enemy No. 1 is not those guys—it’s your little voice! It’s the one that doubts you. It’s the one that doesn’t want to take responsibility. It’s the one that did not want to spend the money or time on training when you should have. It’s the one that is afraid. As my friend Robert Kiyosaki says, “Poor people look to government, middle-class people look to the banks and rich people focus on their own businesses.” And business is a full-contact sport.
6. Believe the government or the Federal Reserve will fix everything. Interesting thought, considering they are the ones that orchestrated the mess. Fed chairmen, presidential candidates, treasury officials, politicians—it’s like scrambling for deck chairs on the Titanic! Every business owner knows that to succeed you have to take control of your own life. You cannot change the economy, oil prices, the value of stock or a president’s agenda. But you can control your income and your lifestyle. You can control your response to your environment. You can choose how to play the situation. You can stay confused and stunned or take some additional advice from our friend P.T. Barnum: “Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business.”

Regardless of your economic condition, you can choose not to allow the economic condition to become your psychological condition. Be awesome.

Blair Singer is a trainer, speaker and creator of SalesDogs, a methodology that offers sales and communication success, and has helped thousands increase their income worldwide.

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Don?t Believe Everything You Hear

By Marcia Griffin

The whole financial world seems to be in turmoil, but any superficial analysis of the problem seems to come up with one reason for this chaos – bad debt.

Bad debt is not only the sum total of debt but also the type of debt – risky debt, debt that can’t be collected on – and if we dig further it seems that banks and lending institutions have been allowing customers to borrow more than they should have. In turn consumers have become addicted to debt and now the crunch has come.

So the lessons are there – really tough ones, and as consumers and business leaders know there are all sort of ratios that guide debt management. But it has not prevented some major meltdowns.

As consumers there is very little advice available about debt. Is that because it is in the interests of financial institutions and businesses to encourage spending and not to warn about over-exposure to debt?

You could say “buyer beware” – but looking at the level of consumer debt it is apparent that the consumer has not been sufficiently aware and those buy now, pay no interest advertisements continue not only to go to air but also to work.

It seems as a society we are addicted to so many must-have items that we simply continue to live above our means, borrow beyond our means and are beholden to institutions who are doing the same thing!

The adage from Robert Kiyosaki to borrow only for assets and cash flow seems very sound in these times – we just need to be clear about the true value of the assets.

There are some truly sad stories that emerge in such difficult times, and it is so easy to be caught in the debt trap. But I feel as consumers we need to seek better value and, without wanting to sound like a total puritan, put the brakes on unnecessary expenditure.

For business the same principles should apply, but be careful not to cut down in areas that add value to your business. I hear CEOs say “we will need to cut marketing, cut people, cut training”, but I think we need to cut waste and get very clear about what we need to stop spending on and what we should be investing in.

It can be a great mistake for a business to slash its marketing budget; a bit like a consumer cutting down on healthy food.

Many well run businesses can use this time to gain market share as poorly run businesses do not survive tough times!

As consumers and business leaders, we simply need to become more discriminating in our spending, making sure we get value for our dollar and that we only cut back on the high risk areas in business and unnecessary items as consumers.

The world is not about to stop, but these are times for great lessons and clear thinking.

More here:
What is your debt appetite?