I know movies make it seem like there’s one person that can get everything done. For example a super hero like Tony Stark. So when your road map is written by fiction it’s hard to see reality, the real skill is about leveraging the skills of many other people. Direct them towards a solving problems. Society teaches it’s people to be good followers because there is a need to leverage other people to build the world. The pyramids were build by Egyptians but on the labor of many people; people that even died.
No Surprise
So there’s no surprise that that leverage does not come natural to people. If you want to be a leader of anything from a small club to a major enterprise you have to learn to use other people’s skills and talents to help build the world you want to see.
A great example of this is Steve Jobs. Steve from the very beginning knew how to use other people to build products, he was the visionary, everyone just followed his instruction. Knew nothing about engineering, he did not know operations but he knew how to leverage the skills of others to achieve his vision. He knew how to make them work hard.
You also have to make sure that the value you are getting from people is more than the value that you putting in. For example if you spend 2 hours coaching someone you should expect that they’ll produce at least 10x the results. If they’re not producing results that means you are not leveraging them to their full potential. If someone signs up to be leveraged they want to feel like they’re being pushed and are growing. Also they want to feel like all that effort is worth something. People will not work hard for you knowing you’re making high returns. They’ll expect to be compensated so they could take care of themselves and family.
Not every skill is created equally
What is the most in demand skills that could be leveraged. That’s a great question to ask.
Skills are tools that produce an end goal. The skill it self is worthless if not thought of from that perspective. What are you trying to get people to create. If there is no direction, that means you will struggle with choosing the right people. This is why a lot of people fail to leverage effectively. They say the feeling they want and not the result they want to achieve.
Think about how many people say they want to a feeling, but never think about the components of that feeling. For example “happiness”, what does that mean to you? Does it finding stable friendships and relationships?
If that is your definition of happiness there are skills required to create such relationships. Both indirect and direct skills.
You will need to develop communication skills, emotional intelligence and fashion to just name a few direct skills, Those skills will determine how people perceive you and stay committed to you.
Indirectly there skills that are going to determine if are going to maintain relationships, for starters having consistent income, so you could afford to hang out with people. Most importantly to be generous with people. Another skill would be being well read, this is something that will give you some substance when you do go out to meet people.
Long story short skills like these are components of a long term goal.
What determines value
What skill is valuable is determined by the end goal. If you want to run a business you need to have a service or a product that is needed. This is what is going to determine what the skills that need to be learned. Define what is needed and you will be able to choose the right people to leverage.
To demonstrate why it’s important to leverage people is to imagine that you worked 24/7/365 days a year. You would only be to produce 8760 hours of work assuming you don’t die. Now compare that to Walmart that has about 2.2 million employees as I write this. In one day assuming we got all of them to come in for an 8 hour shift that would be almost 18 million hours of work. Think about how much you can achieve with that many hours. Super human you would only produce 0.04866666666 % of that work.
Just learn to use other peoples skills okay?!
This article is part of my goal to write everyday for an hour and post it everyday. It may not be edited to my standards but the goal is create value and get content out everyday.
