💪 Ai Proof Skills

So relationships are the basis for connecting with others about our beliefs, our values, our struggles, our pains, and our fears. We purchase products that help us achieve our goals, and they help reduce the regular pains that we experience. As you know, relationships are the foundation of many of our big purchase decisions. Think about your first car or your house purchase. I often remember details about the people that I worked with, or the people who helped me with the sale.

How did they answer my questions? How did they think about things from my perspective? I knew nothing at the time about buying a house. How did they inform me? How did they teach me about this? I knew nothing about cars at the time. And so they kind of told us there’s a lot of things you can focus on, but I think, for your needs, these kind of things are what I would focus on. Okay, that’s helpful.

You know we’re doing the same things when we purchase online services. If you work for Upwork, or you work for Fiverr, it’s actually the same thing. In the sales domain, which I work in, we say ”no pain, no sale”.

02:35 - No pain, no sale. Our job is to read between the lines, and relate to the pains that the client is experiencing. Perhaps in the future, or maybe even right now in the present, listening, listening with intent and speaking, with the right confidence, the right pace, the right tonality, will have more impact to our income than many of the skills that we learn. For example writing and reading.

03:24 - Even sales trainers these days, they teach techniques that allow that are specifically focused around active, inquisitive, listening with intent. They allow students to roleplay with each other, using platforms such as Discord which is mainly a voice chat platform where you can speak to others. You can try to sell them on something, right? Like why not. Why not have that as your first selling experience.

Rather than you on the phone with a potential client. You know, you want to get some experience in this. And many of them will go out, like, they don’t just learn this theoretically, they go out and they sell something, they go and buy something, they make money right away. And that gives you so much more practical experience. So it’s a powerful way to learn. And I imagine that in many cases online, this is exactly what we need to be doing.

Because that’s kind of the next level of learning. No not just learn and then maybe use it in the future. No learn and use it now. Because then you’re going to be able to remember it. Jim Kwik talks about the importance of this application, like using it right away. His recommendation is to mostly teach it to somebody. So if you can learn something and you can teach it to another person, you’re gonna have way better retention.

I think teaching it and using the skill is very similar. So if you’re able to use it and then earn money from that skill, that’s another way that you can build up that skill. Now, so why this skill? Why not like other other skills? Why is relate so important? Well, even in a world of Ai, we still deeply crave connection. It’s another reason why live events, like this one are more compelling than a recorded video.

You can just go and watch the video anytime. But if you participate in the recorded event, you’re writing comments down, you’re going to get a lot more out of it, you’re going to remember a lot more.

05:45 - It’s going to be interactive. That’s why I try to provide as many opportunities as possible to interact because this is how we learn. This is how we learn with care. This is how we learn more effectively. Now the second point, is recur. And it seems kind of weird. Okay, let’s bring up that slide again. So the second one is recur. So, one of our biggest challenges in the gig economy is that the amount of work that varies a lot, from month to month.

So during the lockdown, many freelancers saw this huge drop, in the amount of work that they were asked to do, this kind of roller coaster income makes it really challenging to manage, like household cash flow. You know, so many had to take out loans in order to make ends meet, especially for those leaner, leaner months. So the goal of being on an online platform should be to develop the skills that you know, others will pay for, to a level where you can start having regular clients that you can charge a monthly retainer for.

So the goal is not to be on Upwork, or to be on Fiverr forever, like you do it for a short period of time.

07:23 - Because at the end of the day, the most limited resource is is your time. You can only serve so many clients at the same time.

07:37 - So you need to focus your efforts on the ones that are the highest pain, and you need to fire the clients that don’t fit well with what you’re doing.

07:50 - This is this is hard to say especially if you don’t have any clients right now you’re like, man, I would take any, any opportunity and you should, at the beginning. Right, like you should take any opportunity you can. And if that opportunity is like a Fiverr position, why not like if you build your skill, you make money doing it, there’s no, like, this isn’t a lot of harm, but it’s the mentality of, I’m here, doing fiber.

And I’m just going to keep on doing that indefinitely. That’s what I’m talking about here. So in order to charge a higher amount or higher premium, you first have to have skills that aren’t readily available on the online work platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. Your relation skills that I talked about earlier, that number one skill, is definitely going to help you dive deep into the pains of clients.

And so you have a good sense of what people are willing to pay for. Because if you don’t have a good sense of what the clients are looking for, you’re always going to be at a disadvantage. Because people will always say, you know, like, I don’t need that, like that’s not worth it. It’s like because you never really dove well enough into what the specific pain was just that Oh, you just need to make more money, right.

09:13 - So Well, there’s a million ways to make money. Why yours? Why what compared to all the other ones? Like it’s not clear. You haven’t really made the value of what you do clear, and that’s a problem. So what is it? What is that one unique thing that you do that nobody else does.

09:42 - Maybe it’s helping moms who are who have kids that are picky eaters. Maybe it’s helping a business generate more leads through digital marketing tools like advertising on Facebook.

10:01 - The key thing here is make sure that you measure the results so that you can develop this list of social proofs like that your goal with these jobs isn’t just to get paid, it’s to develop a list of social proofs. So that you can show what results that you have produced for your clients. And then when you’ve increased your rate enough, then it starts to make sense for clients to pay you, a monthly retainer, to save money, while still getting the quality work that they require.

So example would be okay, I started charging, maybe $50. And then I started charging $100. And then, you know, $400 $500, and $1,000 per project and at this company where I’m doing like $1,000 project with him every month, so I said, Okay, what we’re going to do is sign up a monthly retainer, and I will charge you $800 per month, but you’ll sign like for an entire year, and so 12 months, is our length of our contract.

And maybe like you need to give me three months minimum notice or something, if you’re going to cancel or maybe six months, I don’t know, like you can decide what the terms are. Or maybe you just say like, there’s no refunds, basically it’s going to, that’s how it’s going to be. But you’ll get a 20% discount, and so it’ll be worth it, because you can get the same quality work, you get it at a much discounted price.

11:29 - So that’s good, that’s good for them. Now, we’re in this world of work, available labor, is available as a service. So make sure that you’re constantly looking for skills that are in demand. And leverage, of course, like, don’t just go and find the thing that’s in demand and just learn that, like make sure it leverages what you are already good at. So it complements your skills. Otherwise, you get into the situation of it’s kind of like the you’ve heard the phrase, jack of all trades, master of none, like that’s basically what would happen is you wouldn’t actually be good at any of these skills and your your ability, and all those skills would would decrease because you’re just too all over the place.

Like what is that particular problem for the client? How can you be good at all the different aspects of that problem for the client, that’s a good way of addressing the problem. Rather than Oh, well, I’m gonna help this client, and then this client and another client, that’s kind of all over the place. We sometimes describe it as like a shiny object syndrome. So you kind of like all over, you’re here, you’re there.

Like, we don’t want that we, that’s not really going to help your wages, because you’re going to have to deal with different clients and each one, you’re going to be starting from scratch. So make sure that it’s about building that relationship, understanding the pain deeper, like what are your interests? What do you love doing? Go in that area? What are people in that domain? What’s their biggest pain point, you probably know it better than most people.

That’s how you’re able to help them better than anyone else. And so the last one, go back to that slide is create. So this is cheating.

13:24 - It’s it doesn’t start with an R but like reading, writing, writing doesn’t start with an r two. So I get to I get to cheat on one, because teachers are cheating on one as well. There is an R in create. So I’m going to go right. So you can get quite far with just the first two that I’ve described. So you have great relations, you’re you’re able to relate with others. And the second is you’re able to get recurring revenue.

13:58 - Awesome. So why why even bother adding on creativity? What’s the point? Well, as I mentioned before, creativity needs an audience. And again, like how do you get an audience This is the relate skill that I had talked about earlier. Your audience could be it could just be your family. It could be your community, or even your society.

14:29 - Now deep creativity challenges the status quo. And what it does, especially in this time is it puts you at the top of the food chain in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. You want to be Uber and not the person whose work is mitigated by Uber.

14:58 - Do you want to be Fiverr and not the person whose work is mitigated by Fiverr. This is a totally different skill set from maybe what you like maybe what we’ve, what we were taught, or we may get taught in school. In the book, the Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg, he showed how some of the most successful school dropouts were world class in certain things that they didn’t teach in school.

Those include relating, he describes it as not relating, but he used the word networking. And then he also used the word sales, so networking and sales, they were just world class networkers, they just knew how to walk into a room and just like collect all of the pertinent information from everyone. And they were really good at connecting the right pieces together in order to make things happen.

This is like the collaboration skill that we talked about in skill school, but it’s like done in a very practical way. And then the other one is kind of being disruptive. And so that has to do with like creative thinking or problem solving, or critical thinking. They just saw things potentially differently than others. And that gave them the advantage because they could see something that other people couldn’t see about what was going to happen.

And that gave them a unique advantage. So those are some of the characteristics of the Millionaire’s that he saw that dropped out of school. Now, in order to do this, like, practically, you shouldn’t be thinking about doing this all on your own, like creativity, like I mentioned in isolation, but you need that audience, you need that community behind you. And so you need a team, we need a team, that is world class, in addressing the pain points of your particular niche.

So you have to be able to address that pain point better, more thoroughly quicker than everything else that is out there. You then also need a team that is great at relating with potential clients and investors, hitting people who are going to help you generate leads generate sales. And that often involves a human contact, he could be a phone call, it could be a zoom meeting, it could it could be a discussion that you have live with that person.

And that’s where things like we talked about tonality, we talk about the just the expression that people have, how they say things like what questions they ask, all of these things are very, very important, they really impact the entire sales process.

17:57 - And so being really good at that type of skill of listening with intent, and then responding by asking the right types of questions that helps them become not this, like pushy salesperson, but more like a trusted adviser, is what you’re really aiming for. And we don’t quite have enough time for me to explain the entire skill. But I think that this is suffice to say like one of the skills that is mentioned in the the millionaire education, that it’s it’s really important, and I think it doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

Now, you also need a team that is also really good at figuring out what work you should focus on and what work you should outsource to others.

18:44 - Now, this is a tricky one. Because as a solopreneur, right, like the tendency is just I do everything. And I will speak from my own experience. Yes, but to have you as well. two year old daughter, I’m learning to parenting skill. You’re a great channel for parenting. Oh, thank you so much, Dr. Tran. Really appreciate you joining us. Um, so as somebody who acts as a solopreneur, there are a lot of things that I could do.

I mean, like with my computer science background, like going out and programming stuff is what I love to do. I love to like, tinker and write code, but I actually have to force myself to say no, those are things that can be done by other people. And while they may help my business they I need to focus on like, what is the value specifically for my clients, specifically for the people that I work with that is going to make the most difference like for them? What pain point Am I going to be able to address for them that I’m really going to be able to solve better than anyone else out there.

And it’s got to leverage the things that I’m really, really good at. So it’s going to leverage the existing skill. So if my background is in computer science, I Don’t go and say like, I wouldn’t dare kind of, say I’m the bio biology expert or something like that, that wouldn’t that wouldn’t help you at all. Because I wouldn’t be further ahead than, say, Dr.

20:12 - Tran. But in this case, the key here is that, yes, like I use these services as well. And I look at Well, what needs to be done? Let’s do some experiments.

20:26 - Let’s see which ones produce the best result. And it’s about that knowing what you should focus on, right, because we all have the same number of hours per day. You have the same numbers as the millionaire or the bil ionaire. Everybody has the sam , what they really focus, I thi k it’s really the focus that mak s the most difference. .