5 Skills to Learn before you're 25

There are 5 useful skills that everyone should develop while at their job or with their own projects

1. Programming
2. Marketing
3. Design
4. Sales
5. Writing

How do you develop these skills?

Nat Eliason outlines a Sandbox Method. The project you take on should be:

Low cost or free: so you don’t delay in starting

Low-stakes: so you’re not afraid to fail or show your work

Public: so that you have to put your work out there in some manner

For each one we have some examples:

Programming: Accounts on Github, Heroku, and StackExchange for building projects and asking for help.

Writing: A personal blog hosted on WordPress, Medium, or SquareSpace.

Design: Sketch, and a Dribble account to show your work on.

Marketing: A blog or information site hosted on WordPress that you can try to grow.

I'll add to Sales

Make your own product, newsletter, subscription service, or sell your own consulting/experience as a product

So what's my plan on how to develop these skills?

Getting into the weeds of each skill, there are specific projects I can do in order to

1. create a portfolio of work
2. provide value to someone or another company

Programming is where I have my weakest ideas for projects. My current list is as follows

FounderHacker Course

Web Scraping Course

No Code Tools and App Ideas

Marketing is also a tough one, but I've found a good niche in job searching and career development that pairs well with a Wiki Strategy that Nat recommends as well

Other Niche Topics I can market

• Fitness and Training
• Fashion and Lifestyle
• Skill Development and Acquisition

This can involve creating an account and trying to grow it, which can be a lot of work in addition to the rest of the projects I plan on completing. There's also not as much upside to building a following for the sake of followers.

I've dabbled in Design projects with the Visualize Value Design Fundamentals Course, but quickly lost traction because I didn't have much of a backlog of inspiration and ideas to "visualize"

In order to make this something that I can come to at any point and start creating, I need to keep a list of ideas accessible with some brief explanations of what I would do to visualize it.

In addition, there's nothing better than summarizing and curating information from people I already follow. As a weekly thing it would be great to put a quote or tweet in a designed image and present that to Instagram/LinkedIn/Twitter and ask for feedback.

LinkedIn is somewhere where publishing your work is undervalued. Publishing consistently and providing actionable content is something that it values. I'll keep publishing on it in order to gain more eyes on my profile as well as build a portfolio or work and connections.