There are two kinds of knowledge:

• Street smarts & practice, where you’ve learned it “in the real world” and know how to apply it. Only learned by doing it.
• Theoretical, abstract knowledge you get from books and school that doesn’t have a tie to your experience and the real world. Harder to apply.

“If you haven’t noticed already, this is a silly system. It’s silly for a very simple reason. For most fields you’d want to enter— aside from, say, research science— beyond basic levels of academic intelligence, developing additional academic intelligence will have virtually no impact on your life prospects and success. Developing your practical intelligence will have far more impact on the quality and success of your life.”

The old school method of job progression is dead for two reasons:

1. Job security is dead, no more staying at the one company forever.
2. The internet and technology has created the means for much more flexible work styles.

The Art of Earning a Living

Instead of “getting a job” you want to design a life where you’re doing what you enjoy and earning a living. There are 4 steps:

1. Get on Your Feet Financially: Get some kind of job to pay your bills and get you started, you need some security in the beginning.
2. Create Room for Experimentation: Once you have financial stability, set aside time for experimenting with different kinds of work, with learning, with entrepreneurial projects, let yourself fail.
3. Run Experiments: Try finding your other thing outside your day job, and keep improving it, keep playing around with new ideas for what it might be. You can always do both: work a boring job and be creative on the side.
4. Strike Out on Your Own: Once an experiment starts to take off, make the switch to making it your full time gig.

Finding Mentors, Teachers, Building a World Class Network

Two powerful questions for making connections and providing value to people:

1. What’s most exciting for you right now in your life/ business?
2. What’s challenging for you in your life/ business right now?

What You Need to Know About Sales

You’re not “above” learning to sell, everyone needs to sell to some degree, and you need to get over your aversion to it.