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Gone are the days when people could survive the competition with multiple skills. They mastered the skills as they gained practical experience by working for brands in the industry. However, after the great pandemic took its toll, everything changed over time.
Both consumers and producers got an ample amount of time to evolve personally and professionally. Companies went uphill in revenue, while some others went downhill. Similarly, some people grew by investing their time in perfecting a skill, while others invested in learning multiple skills, yet to perfect them.

The massive difference before and after a couple of years is that the competition is not what it was before. Today is when a person with one skill with exact skill proficiency is far better than people with multiple skills without being impressive in at least one of them. However, skill stacking is still an essential part.
So, the question arises, “How to be the best in the world at something?” Well, there are a few distinct winning design principles and disciplines which you need to follow to be the best in the world at something.
What Is a Skill?
According to the dictionary, “the ability to do something well is a skill.” Everybody works and does chores daily, referred to as hobbies. If you do something every day for another week or a month, performing that particular task becomes your hobby, depending on how heavy the responsibility is.
But the thing here is, the more you perform your hobby, the better you become at it. As time goes by, the more countless practices you take, it teaches you to become professional, which is called a skill.

For instance, children love basketball. Since infancy, most of them have practiced their skills on the basketball court. But very few people reach the milestone of playing for the country. Playing basketball is not an easy task.
It requires you to shed ounces of sweat, sacrifice fun, sleep, take deliberate practice, and many more. And that sets winners apart from people leading a mediocre life. Winners plan accordingly and have winning strategies planned, while others excuse their practice time with excuses.
You can learn multiple skills, referred to as skill stacking. But, developing a skill one after one is necessary to gain industry knowledge. Having your own skill stack system helps you track and test your abilities.
Inborn and Learned Skills:
A skill is not hard to learn, yet it takes hundreds of hours, interest, and concentration to master it. However, most people define skills in two ways.
- Inborn Skill: Inborn skills are the greater genetic gifts. These skills are inherited as you are born from either of your parents. You develop these skills naturally without much practice as you grow. Examples are school subjects – mathematics and others.
- Learned Skills: These skills are the skills learned from professionals. It requires time, countless practices, working on assignments, and laboring for peanuts as a fresher to gain practical experience to survive the competition. Examples are – SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Writing, Programming, and more.
One can improve both inborn and learned skills as one grows. However, there are a couple of skills that everybody should look into, and these skills are the pillars of every learned and inborn skill. No educational institution teaches these skills to attendees, yet crucial to implement them.
What Skills Should You Develop?
The skills you should develop are very much essential to formulate them. If not, do it on the side as you work or study your stream of education or work.
1. Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills are the pillars of everything you do in the competitive world. These skills help you stand out from the crowd of a million people from the moment you graduate until you succeed in your dreams and beyond. Interpersonal skills are “the potential to communicate or interact well with others.” They penetrate all areas of life and are equally significant in personal and professional commerce. Some Interpersonal skills are:
1.1. Public Speaking:
No matter what stage you are in, public speaking is always a must-have skill for everybody. If there is a way you can express your thoughts and ideas and convince people, it is through public speaking. Speaking in a group of people requires courage, a clear mind, an idea of what you will talk about, and a good vocabulary. The most masterful public speaker understands the importance of following distinct rules while talking.
- Make eye contact with everybody
- Use powerful words
- Follow gestures
- Asking the audience to participate is the primary tip in a successful strategy.
Although it is hard to master, it is a huge professional advantage once learned. According to a study conducted among 540 engineering students, only a tiny fraction were good at speaking in a crowd. So exceptionally, an engineering student with tech knowledge must plan to look into these skills.
You can seek inspiration from Michelle and Barack Obama, and Steve Jobs, and almost every Harvard commencement speech can do it to make you speak in a crowd.
1.2. Writing Skills:
Writing skills and public speaking go hand-in-hand, referred to as verbal and nonverbal communication. The language used for speaking varies from the language used for writing and follows a set of procedures to sound professional. Any profession you take still requires you to write something, and the first step to getting into any job is writing a resume. Suggestions from the world’s greatest writer are:
- Keep your sentences short and crisp.
- Use simple language
- Do not use more than 20 words in a sentence and more than five lines in a paragraph.
- Write for your targeted audience.
Most successful politicians and world leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Steve Jobs back then, Obama, and Gary Vaynerchuk in the modern world are not just good public speakers but also good writers. Being just a good writer requires drafting the content in the most convincing way possible, and it should drive people to take action as they go through your written words.
1.3. Emotional Intelligence:
Another skill in the job’s skill stack is emotional intelligence. It boasts about dealing with emotions and is one of the useful skills that demonstrate you as a mature and responsible person. The primary focus of the skill is controlling emotions at the right time rather than losing your temper. It requires high intelligence to understand your emotions and opponents’ feelings to act on the situation.
You may encounter unpleasant circumstances daily, but how you deal with the dilemma represents your emotional intelligence. The best steps to control emotions are:
- Take a long breath
- Put one of your hands in your pocket and take five counts slowly. On count five, get it out.
These three are the primary skills essential for every moment you take in your life. You understand others’ emotions and try to act accordingly. Similarly, speaking in public needs high emotional intelligence because you talk and write to convince others.
2. Entrepreneurial Skills

Although you may or may not relate to entrepreneurship, it is still a crucial part of your job strategy. Nowadays, almost every company is looking for people with high creativity and entrepreneurship-minded people because they follow a particular path and understand where they are going. They will be capable of unraveling problems effortlessly. Or, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, here are the top entrepreneurial skills you should develop:
2.1. Craft a Vision:
Every great leader will have a conception before they start doing anything. A vision guides you when you are stuck in your journey, when you take a wrong path, or when you need inspiration because you will reflect on your intuition at the end of the day. Intuition is the final goal that shows you and leads you through the successful path. Some advisories from the most influential people are:
- Create SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Something like “I want to be a certified SEO specialist in the next three months.”
Here the goal is SMART. You can measure and achieve within a specific time. The top self-help gurus like Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie are the best examples when talking about vision. Their books on manifesting goals and dreams are just unbelievable.
2.2. Leadership Qualities:
Leadership is not always about assigning and checking on tasks regularly, but it is beyond the imagination. It is about the life of the brand you are working for, it is about the community of people, it is about work ethics, it is about motivating and inspiring people, and it is beyond everything. And this is something every HR looks for in every resume they get because they need somebody who can move the company forward, not someone who would hardly work and go.
Listening to others in your team highly influences your leadership qualities more than any others because, as a leader, it is your responsibility to digest all the factors and to come up with the wisest decisions that help you, your team, and the company. A few tips to formulate leadership skills are:
- Listen to others carefully.
- With a keen understanding and deep insight, draft a solution.
- Motivate your team members.
- Build a healthy and friendly workspace.
These are the entrepreneur’s two skills that help you lead a competition-free life personally and professionally. However, as an entrepreneur, there are multiple other skills you should learn, and your learning path is continuous till you retire. You should be able to study the current market and its trends to not deal with the crowds.
3. Personal Branding

Personal branding is marking an identity for yourself as an individual or a business online or offline, following various strategies. Primarily, you should understand what you should be known for and why people should trust you. It might seem fascinating, but getting started off the ground can be daunting.
With advanced technology, it has become more valuable to brand online rather than offline as people move towards the internet. Building a robust social media presence can help you land a job effortlessly, and there are many other benefits as well once you start building an audience. To get more visibility online, at first, you should:
- Understand whom you want to help
- Figure out how you will help your targeted audience
- Understand where your audience is.
- Choose the best social media platform.
- Post content regularly
- Track insights
- Optimize the profile
- Enjoy the benefits
However, focusing on all the social channels only leads to destruction. Instead, start with one platform, and when it blows up, move to the other. Also, creating the same content on different channels does not give positive insights. Preferably you should generate trending content in a particular industry or social platform.
4. Technical and Design Skills

There is a high demand for technical and design graduates as the world adapts to technology. And before releasing any product or service, brands design them first to understand the customer’s pain points and to ensure that everything is in its place.
Above this, technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, machine learning(ML), and others are booming, with hundreds and thousands of job posts in the tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and other prominent brands. Some popular tech and design skills are:
4.1. Artificial Intelligence:
It is a technical skill and a specialization. AI is about making machines behave more like a human. So tech companies are trying to make human lives more comfortable than ever before and hence, need these specialists and are willing to pay more. So, this can be your chance to hit the jackpot.
4.2. UX Design:
UX is the user experience that focuses on the customer and aims to increase the usability of a particular thing. The app icons you click on every day, the chat box on your WhatsApp and the user-friendly websites you come across are all the works of a UX designer. So, before releasing a new or making changes to an existing product or service, any company should look up to UX designers.
4.3. Cloud Computing:
As customers are worried about storage to store data, every mobile application plans to provide a cloud storage system to their customers so that they can stock their personal information, which in turn hopes to acquire customers. Every mobile application is turning towards providing this feature. Hence, it can be a great chance.
Mastering all these four skills can help you survive the competition. Remember, it is better to have three okay tools than a single one. However, acquiring individual skills at a time is far better than breaking a bundle of sticks in one go.
How to Be the Best in The World at Something?

Numerous strategies are available for learning any skill, but the same scenario does not work for all. Nevertheless, here are the basic steps you can start with, and figure out what works and what does not as you progress, as it will help you create your own path to learning something.
1. Goal Setting:
The primary thing of all is setting your goals. Goals keep changing from moment to moment as your tastes and interests change. But motives do not have to relate to your curiosities unless you are an aspiring freelancer. Yet if you are into technology, not only looking into tech but also the skills from the management side can help you out. And with which moving to the next step.
2. Study the Market:
To be the best in the world at something, you should also pick the best. So before taking the yield of any job or skill, check the current job industry in your locality because the businesses vary from location to location, depending on the people’s mindset. Currently, there are 12,000 careers with millions of employees and another few million posts to be filled by experts. So, finding the best job or skill can be a little tough, but doing it will surely pay you off. For a winning hand, follow these steps:
- Understand what you want to do
- Check for insights into the current job trends. Ensure to look back a couple of years and a few years forward.
- If the market is favorable in your niche, go with it. If not, choose another one.
3. Quarterly Plan:
Industry experts would have done this once in their lifetime or might be doing it now. To frame a quarterly blueprint, you must divide 12 months into four batches, with three months in each cluster. Now, choose four skills you think are significant for you and put one in each quarter. This way, not only do you learn one individual skill at a time, but also you can measure your progress in skill stacking. And remember, you only got three months to learn a skill. But if it is a technical skill like AI and others, you can have a half-yearly plan.
4. Mode of Learning:
Where you learn plays an essential part in skill mastery. Sometimes, courses online might seem much cheaper but do not provide value. And lessons offline may be expensive but give a ton of industry knowledge – vice versa. It does not matter where and what you learn, but your determination is fundamental. Many opt for online courses as they are cheap and give the comfort of taking classes from any part of the world, and deep inside, they know that they are more likely to get a deviation when they look at electronic devices. Yet people prefer them, only to end up as a victim. So, choosing the promising mode for you is your responsibility.
5. Cheat Sheets and Workbooks:
The essential part is working on workbooks, assignments, and cheat sheets. Any course-taking platform will have homework to work on, cheat sheets to look at, and workbooks to refer to. They are designed to help you digest what you have looked at in class. And it is essential to work on them to memorize everything you have learned. So, taking a course is not crucial, but working on the given task is, and it is what will put you above the crowd.
Which Are the Best Online Platforms to Take Courses From?

There are hundreds of mobile and desktop applications offering online courses. While some are paid, others are free. Choosing the best platform is as crucial as picking the right skill.
Difference Between Free and Paid Courses:
Free Course:
You can find free courses everywhere, on YouTube, Instagram, and other course-giving platforms like Coursera, Skillshare, and others. You will only get the video content for free, while the workbooks, assignments, and every other course material will be premium. You will have no external support from the team, and it is like you have to learn everything by yourself.
Paid Course:
When taking a paid course, the platform plays a significant role. It can be by the quantity and quality of the demo session, platform popularity, the guide’s LinkedIn profile, and the number of students taking the course. Here you get everything you need to master the particular skill. Cheat sheets, workbooks, assignments, videos, and community to share your thoughts are free under one membership.
Which Is Better?
Although it is up to your convenience unless you cannot learn everything by yourself – surfing the internet for the course material, clarifying doubts by yourself, and gaining industry knowledge, in such circumstances, choose paid courses. If not, you can move with free lessons if you do not get distracted by the elements like the internet, mobile phone, and friends.
Course platforms:
- Coursera – best for technical courses
- Hubspot – best for freelancing skills
- Udemy – best for all kinds of courses
- Alison – best for diploma courses, and you get them for free
- Simplilearn – best for all classes (all are free)
Final Thoughts:
How to be the best in the world at something? Being the best in the world at something is not an easy task. It requires hard work, dedication, determination, and many sacrifices. Moving forward by breaking obstacles and framing a winning strategy is a must. Similarly, with a keen understanding and deep insights, choosing the right skill is mandatory. Learning multiple skills can help you stand out, but mastering them one at a time can make you a master at it rather than making you look like a jester with half-knowledge.
Last Updated on by Himani Rawat