Use These 11 Meta-Skills to Accelerate Your Career

This Twitter Thread is by Zain Kahn @heykahn (source: 08-09-2022). Kahn is a self-proclaimed “marketing and psychology nerd”

Hard skills help you get a job.

But meta-skills help you build a career.

11 meta-skills to accelerate your career:

1. Decision-making:

• Take a step back when faced with a big decision.

• Identify the key emotions and biases affecting the decision.

• Create a list of all the available options.

• Understand the short and long term consequences of each option.

• Decide accordingly.

2. Communication:

• Listen without interrupting.

• Speak with a positive tone.

• Pay attention to your body language.

3. Prioritizing:

• Create a list of everything you have to do.

• Rank things by urgency and importance.

• Do things that are urgent and important.

• Delegate, schedule, or delete everything that isn't urgent and important.

4. Self awareness:

• Be curious about how your mind works.

• Pay attention to your thoughts and feelings.

• Identify which situations or events trigger certain reactions.

5. Time management:

• Learn to prioritize.

• Learn to delegate.

• Learn to say no.

6. Creativity:

• Experiment with new routines.

• Try different solutions to existing problems.

• Try the opposite of what people are currently doing.

• Try as many new ideas as quickly as possible to increase your odds of finding a new insight.

7. Storytelling:

• Identify what problem people are trying to solve.

• Show them how you will help them solve the problem.

• Identify the right emotions that will help your audience go from understanding their problem to accepting you as the solution.

8. Resilience:

• Do more things your are not qualified to do.

• Reframe every failure as a learning opportunity.

• Keep repeating this till you convert failure into success.

9. Emotional intelligence:

• Never act impulsively.

• Take a step back when you're upset.

• Understand what you're feeling.

• Act accordingly.

10. Connecting the dots:

• Go deep into a subject or fields of interest.

• Then explore other fields similar to yours.

• Read widely and talk to people in these new fields.

• Zoom out and identify recurring patterns of success across these fields to connect the dots.

11. Grit:

• Pick a long term goal.

• Practice it everyday.

• Identify ways you can maintain your motivation when the going gets tough and you hit a block.

Thanks for reading! If you found this helpful, follow me at

@heykahn to get more threads like this.

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