How deep is your skill stack?

Skill stack, or talent stack, is the combination of different skills that you have that will directly or indirectly affect your income, and as a result, your general life quality. 

Currently, I argue that the most important skill is communication. Listening well, talking well and asking well are key components of good communication. In the beginning era of artificial intelligence, communication is getting more important than ever.

Good communication leads to good persuasion and negotiation skills, which are crucial for the future income of an individual. They are also packed with necessary skills of speaking in front of a public and writing in an interesting way that will keep people reading at least a couple of minutes in a period that the common attention span is only a couple of seconds maximum per content.

Those skills build the necessary talent of selling. Life is, like it or not, a form of selling. You sell yourself as a valuable person to your partner. You sell yourself as a valuable employee to your boss. You sell yourself as a valuable business to your customers. It is all about selling, and without selling skills, you can build or possess the best product in the world, you will have a hard time to get it out of the ground.

The second main group of skills is building. Building also captures the skill of writing, which is necessary for creating high quality content. If you are building a product, “building” can mean coding. It can mean designing, editing, polishing and publishing. If you cannot build, then you are left out with your passion and hustle to arrive somewhere, but you will always be dependent on people who can build. 

If you can build and communicate, you have a killer combo, because you can understand the gaps in life, you have the capability and vision to analyze them, and then you are able to take action to fill those gaps with your ideas and products, and eventually you have the capability to market and sell your product as well as yourself.

Build a killer combo and you are set financially in the long run. People who are obsessed with specialization are not able to build a killer combo skill set understanding and engaging in various skill areas.

So, get your skill stack deep and wide. Make your stack bigger, put blocks on top of each other. Learn to think like an engineer, or be an engineer. Learn to speak and write. Learn to create more than you consume. Creating more than consuming combined with compounding interest is the way of building value and financial freedom.