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Eleven Skills That Are a License to Print Money

by | Jun 6, 2022 | Money

Skills don’t all have the same financial value.

Knowing which ones do helps you prioritize what to learn next. Because self-education is the secret to the good life. The best skills I learned happened through trial and error. I wish I’d read something like this 8 years ago.

Learn these skills to print money out of nowhere.

Express thoughts in tiny sentences

Those who get to the point persuade fellow humans faster.

Jano le Roux says tiny sentences took him from earning $2.83 per month to $5,786 as a writer. There’s no magic trick.

We just want people to get to the point, especially with words.

Gone are the days when we would listen to your entire argument in a 20-hour book. That only happens if we like you first, thanks to the tiny sentence you posted online.

Hostage negotiation

Negotiation isn’t about beating the other side.

Negotiation is about finding win-wins. When you build partnerships where both sides get a win, people think you’re superhuman. I used to do it in banking. The corporate leaders thought I had special powers. Not really.

I learned to shut up and drown myself in the other side’s needs. “Is this how the solution would look in an ideal world?”

When you’re unselfish in a negotiation it’s so uncommon. Negotiation is how you get a fairer deal in life. If you can’t negotiate you’ll just take the first offer, which will likely be full of selfishness.

Read books written by hostage negotiators. Former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss has a great one called “Never Split The Difference.”

Web3 skills

Web3 is the next version of the internet built on blockchain. Blockchain is the tech Bitcoin made famous.

The biggest companies in America all want to create Web3 products. The challenge is they have no idea how. Web2 employees — who only understand monopoly mentality and creating high take-rates from users — don’t get it.

“We can own the metaverse, right?”

No you can’t. No company is supposed to own stuff in Web3. The users own Web3. Web3 is a partnership between tech and humans.

People who think like this are rare. If you can learn the new societal structure Web3 is based on, and understand the technologies that go with it, it’s a license to print money for the next few decades.

Learn from Real Vision Finance and The Milk Road newsletter.

Honest sales skills

The skill of selling gets a bad wrap.

There are plenty of sharks out there. They’ll take your money and run to Las Vegas with it. But people who manipulate you with their sales skills aren’t true salespeople. Why?

When you lie you destroy further opportunities in the future. And selling over and over again is the definition of insanity.

Honest sales skills are uncommon. When you’re so upfront with a prospect about what you do and how you can help, they’re taken back. Few people do it. So if you deliver on your promise they’ll tell everybody.

This is the “sell once, get paid for the rest of your life” mentality. It works. But 99% of people don’t get it.

I sell products online. The easiest way I think about it is, “How would I want this to be sold to me?”

  • Countdown timers? Nope.
  • Hyperbole? Nope.
  • Daily sales emails? Nope.

Then I simply sell in the most honest way I know how.

My average customer buys three things. That’s not because I’m great. It’s because I underpromise and overdeliver without all the sales trickery — because that’s how I want people to sell to me.

Reverse psychology works. Use it to sell.

Because every goal in life requires persuasion.

Copywriting

Copywriting is an art form. It’s a style of writing where words get used to persuade a person to buy a product/service online.

The best example is Apple’s website. Each product has 3–4 words as the headline. As you read the subtitles below the headline they pack a punch.

iPad: Light. Bright. Full of night.
Mac display: A sight to be bold.
Apple Air Pods: Pinch-perfect control.

Writing words this good that say so much takes time. There are dozens of online courses and Twitter Threads that’ll teach you how.

If you love words … get paid a lot more to write by learning copywriting.

When I got proper copywriting done for my online business, sales tripled. No point winging it. Print money by learning to write copy or hiring a copywriter.

Ability to be quiet

Making stacks of cash requires solving problems.

To solve a problem you must understand it. To understand you must first know that you don’t know everything. So as the problem is described to you by the people who face it, you need to shut up. Too many people don’t.

They speak too much. They’re afraid of silence. They speak to look smart instead of becoming smarter by hearing the problem.

Try to talk less and listen more. The world will sound different. It’s actually an easier existence to live. The big bucks allow you to give zero f*cks. To earn more dollars, remember…

The money is in the silence.

License to sell real estate

Humans are obsessed with real estate.

It’s the holy grail. It’s our number one expense in life. We’re drunk on real estate. All those home improvement shows make as starry-eyed.

The humans that sell real estate for a living print money. I hate it. You hate it. But it’s the truth and I’m not here to lie to you.

The reason they print money is they sell a high-ticket item and get a percentage of the sale. It’s mathematically unfair given the work involved — yet it’s how the market works.

Get a realtor’s license if you dare.

The Steve Jobs X-Factor

I teach and write online. I meet fellow creators like me all the time who aren’t particularly smart.

What they’re good at is taking all the information online and making it simple. Then they layer in a few stories and some subtle comedy, and they own a money printer.

The world doesn’t want more complexity.

We’re drowning in information because we can do google searches. Yet our lives are too short to ever be able to consume even 1% of the information google offers.

Many people hated Apple founder Steve Jobs. He was a d*ck. He treated people badly. He didn’t know how to take a break or wear non-turtleneck jumpers. But he was a genius at one thing: extreme simplification.

Simple equals money. Because simple saves time.

Webflow

The internet can print endless amounts of money.

Much of it is built using a type of website called WordPress. The trouble with WordPress is you need a web developer. They cost money and can be a nocturnal bunch of crazies at the best of times. The level of customization is endless, so decision fatigue nukes your brain.

The popularity of WordPress is slowing.

Many people are turning to no-code software.

Webflow is a new type of website that doesn’t need a developer. If you can create websites for people in Webflow, you’ll make plenty of cash.

Email marketing

Sending emails isn’t as simple as you think. So many people stuff it up.

Good emails need to:

  • Be interesting
  • Get to the point
  • Get past spam filters
  • Communicate one idea
  • Have enough value to get opened instead of deleted

This might sound easy. It’s not.

Open your email and see how many messages you got in the last week that treated you like a number in a spreadsheet and right hooked you with back-to-back sales offers. What’d you do?

Unsubscribe.

Humans who know how to send emails can make a lot of money.

Email, after all, is where we buy so many products/services from. But we first need a relationship with the email sender. That requires an email marketer who understands psychology. And they’re bloody rare.

Discipline to keep going when it gets tough

To make a lot of money you’ve gotta run a lot of experiments.

This last skill is intangible. In the quest to make money and buy back your time, these experiments will fail a stupid number of times. The default response is to get angry and say “nothing works.”

But if you can develop the discipline to keep going when these experiments fail, you’ll eventually find a way. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’

All you say to yourself is “okay, let’s try one more.”

This is the cheatsheet. This is how people like me found a way to use the internet to print money and quit bad bosses. Why can’t you?

Are You Operating With Maximum Energy?

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