The 6 Most Important Skills to Have Nowadays, to Live A Meaningful Life
There are many important skills, but these are the six most central ones.
But firstly and importantly:
All of these life skills are built on proactivity — the notion that you should try to control only that which you can control, and that you are responsible for your own actions and choices in creating your most ideal life within the boundaries of your circumstances. Without this ideal, you have no agency, and without agency, you will fail to move toward a better future. Therefore, you must take accountability and act with intention — and know that you can choose to change your life by practicing and mastering these skills.
Prioritization.
Today’s society operates on urgency — on staying busy and updated on things that are fairly unimportant to the individual person.
Counterintuitively, being successful in this day and age means slowing down. It means valuing what important to you over what is urgent — and pursuing the goals, skills, and habits that lead to consistent improvement and accomplishments. The way to this heightened focus is prioritization.
The ability to prioritize certain tasks creates:
- Focus: You may overcome the distractions that disturb your growth
- Important living (vs. urgent living): You may pursue your own life mission (your deepest values and goals) to achieve your dream life
- Effective use of time: You may spend time on the things that truly matter
Prioritization is essentially the ability to say “No” to things that are superficial and unimportant to your ideal way of living. Therefore, it is the distinction between improvement and regret — and between growth and decline. Indeed, prioritization allows you to choose who you want (and do not want) to be.
In a world where people split their attention on anything that is distracting or addicting to them, you can be the one to prioritize the things that make a difference.
Self-awareness.
Most people are unaware of their own flaws and strengths.
They are aware of every social trend and news update, but they do not know where in this chaos they fit in and where they should jump off. Doing this requires courage, to recognize your worst flaws and acknowledge those deeply-lodged dreams you have long neglected. But self-awareness is a necessary skill to have if you want to move forward.
Self-awareness allows for these things:
- Growth: You may identify your shortcomings and work to become a better person in terms of your lifestyle, career, relationships, and health
- Talent: You may focus on harnessing your individual strengths in order to work on your own unique abilities to become a master in your field
- Self-understanding: You may become more attuned to your feelings and values, increasing your understanding of your own needs and desires
With self-awareness, you can acknowledge your current state and dream for more. You can build on the things you already have. You can dismantle the habits that hurt you and create a better life for your future self.
After all, the first step to any journey is knowing where you are — and knowing where you want to be.
Honesty.
We live in a world of lies.
Photoshopping, facetuning, and taking credit for works generated through AI, are only some examples of increasingly popular trends. Transparency is sparse, and so are other facets of reality and human vulnerability. The only way to move past all this deception is honesty.
Honesty provides:
- Authenticity: You may be your true self, unashamedly and gleefully
- Trust: You may garner trust and admiration from others, even yourself
- Self-assuredness: You may stop people-pleasing and take your life back
Honesty is the ingredient in constructive communication between friends, colleagues, partners, and health workers. Without honest information and feedback, you cannot move forward. No progress can be made on a shaky foundation.
With honesty, though, you can cut through the deceptive fog and reach your potential.
Empathy.
These days, perspective is everything.
Differences in political, ideological, and social perspectives create polarization, conflict, and hate. All of this stems from a lack of mutual understanding, with individuals becoming too self-centered and narrow-minded. To achieve the social harmony us humans depend on for peace and mutual aid, we need empathy.
Being an empathetic person is rewarding for several reasons:
- Listening skills: You may listen to understand, without interrupting and pushing forth your own perspectives, and receive due trust from others
- Selflessness: Instead of resorting to aggressive or selfish acts, you may become more altruistic, compassionate, openminded, and peaceful
- Cooperativeness: You may work with others despite differences, integrating various cultures and knowledge systems to create solutions
The ability to understand and help others is imperative. Cambridge researcher Simon Baron-Cohen is quoted in the book Sensitive as saying that “any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble”. If every conflict and challenge is built on the (perceived) incompatibility between different perspectives, empathy really can solve anything.
As Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) writes, a central habit is to understand others before you try to be understood yourself.
Creativity.
Today’s media is abundant — but very lacking in quality and creativity.
As creativity expert Austin Kleon would say, it is art at its most unoriginal. This can be seen in how repetitive social media content is, with memes and filters in visual and auditory format playing again and again with little variation of actual content. What stands out in this landscape of copied trends is creativity — which at its core, is the integration of two or more separate things to create something largely new or unexplored.
Creativity has many beneficial outcomes:
- Originality: You may be credited with never-before-seen art or solutions
- Autonomy: You may be an active creator instead of a passive consumer
- Stimulation: You may become more artistically or sensorily stimulated, in ways that the mind-numbing qualities of social media cannot provide
As a writer, I obviously think very highly of creativity. It is the source of my passions and the main outlet of my energy and focus. Being creative every day — whilst studying, writing, working out, cooking meals, and talking to friends — really has made me more confident in handling life’s challenges, and choosing hobbies, clothes, and actions that are more authentically me.
To be able to create something new is immensely valuable in a world where everyone else is simply copying or repeating.
Learning.
Despite the great amounts of information we are exposed to every day, most of these tidbits are filtered out or are otherwise unimportant filler.
This has made many of us passive passengers in our educational journey, and fairly uninterested in developing our understanding of other things. But to grow and move forward, we need to be active — to look deeper into the things that interest us and broaden our horizons. A thirst for learning is exactly what inspires this development of body and mind.
The practice of learning has these outcomes:
- Curiosity: You may find interest or happiness in anything new
- Intelligence: You may become more knowledgeable or skilled
- Mastery: You may develop your strengths and fill in the missing gaps
Learning is how we have made it this far in life — by adapting to our environment and sharpening our individual skillsets. It is also the reason that people expand their perspectives and change for the better. Not only that, but spending much of your time gathering knowledge and experience, you can teach yourself new skills or unlock hidden talents and passions.
Without learning, there is no growth.
It is learning that allows you to read this article — and it is learning that facilitates the abilities to prioritize tasks, become more self-aware, be an honest person, empathize with others, create meaningful work, and learn to live a more meaningful life.
