BetterLearningBetterEarning™ | Get Better Work & Income - Teach Yourself Higher Paying Skills

Successful people seem to have unique mixes of ingredients that form their achievements. Social media permitted me to catch up with an old friend recently, and I was absolutely impressed to see what he’s accomplished in his life. He’s worked his way into several executive positions and now leads a “CFO-for-hire” consulting firm, among many other things. Since we went to the same elementary school and had the same teachers up through 3rd grade, this post is an effort to find out where our trajectories diverged. Ken answers a few questions about what role learning played in his success.

Revisit: I've re-released this podcast here in response to some heated discussions about the "To College or Not to College" dilemma. Click the link below to leave a comment or share using social media.

In this podcast, I discuss some of the illusions about what a college degree will or will not do for you.

Click this link to download/play the audio file: Artificial_Intelligence.mp3

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You probably realize that to get a better job and income, you’ve got to learn new skills. But you can’t afford to quit your job to devote time to education, can you? How can you maintain your full time employment and still learn things to advance your career? You can do both at the same time!

Receiving a degree doesn’t mean you’ve received an education. While a degree’s essential for some professions, the paper means little or nothing for other careers. How can you succeed and make good money without a degree? Well, you still have to get an education; just get it somewhere else.

When I finished college and moved to Denver, I thought I’d have a great job within a few weeks. I had solid work experience accrued throughout my college years and a respectable, non-technical degree in my pocket. But those two weeks turned into four full months before I landed my first job in the training industry.

Those four months without work took a terrible toll. I didn’t sleep soundly for more than a few hours each night. Stress and worry tear down immunity quickly. I got so sick with the flu I think I might have died. The few thousand dollars we had saved quickly evaporated and my wife was pregnant with our first child – no health insurance!

Do you get inspired to see other people who’ve found their “thing” and developed true expertise? Rachel Clare is a family friend who we’ve watched refine her photography skills from good to great over the last few years. Now she’s making bank and a name for herself. She took the time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions about how she learned these moneymaking skills.

How do you feel when someone’s copied your ideas? And not given you credit? I’ve become a little suspicious – even paranoid – that some of my articles here have been the inspiration for some recent A-list bloggers’ posts. So what if they have. A smart little man has helped me to realize that the Internet and especially the blogging world are community oriented. Do you have a great, unique idea that may make you rich? Well, don’t blog about it.

When I was unemployed a few years ago, a job digging ditches for $2 an hour would have qualified as a good job. I was lucky and got what I thought was a good job. It had a salary, some health insurance benefits, and a few days of paid vacation each year. Within a year or two, the good job somehow turned into a crappy job. So I looked elsewhere for a better job and got it. Would I consider my position now to be a good job? I plead the fifth. (By the way, how ya doin’ boss?)

Learning more depends on expanding your vocabulary. Words serve as building blocks to:

• Express yourself better
• Understand others better
• Create new concepts and ideas
• Help you win Scrabble
  

Several years ago, a mentor of mine recommended a habit that has helped increase my vocabulary immensely. Want to learn the secret?

How foolish I was to think I could go by a bestselling author’s book signing event at a local Barnes & Noble and ask him a few questions about how he learned his writing skills! When I got there, I saw over 200 people in line for his autograph, +/- about 75 kids. Luckily, I whined to his agent about not having access to him and she forwarded my questions to him the next day via email. I wanted to know specifics about how he learned to write well enough to become a bestselling author.

Family get-togethers turn strange when relatives ask, “So, what is it you do for a living again?” I reply, “I’m an Instructional Designer!” Without fail, the next crack is something like, “Don’t they make some type of pill that will cure that?” My Grandpa-in-Law is still convinced I make comic books for a living – a far cry from the interactive computer-based training I develop. Learning the basic principles of instructional design can help you teach yourself more effectively and master higher paying job skills.

The three topic options for a term paper in my freshman philosophy class didn’t interest me at all. I looked over the requirements for our term papers – we wrote four over the course of the semester – and thought that it doesn’t explicitly say I had to write on the assigned topics to get an A grade. Knowing that the paper with the lowest grade got dropped from the calculation for our final course grade, I took a risk. I wrote a paper in flawless logic proving that, “Students in Philosophy 110 don’t have to write on the assigned topics in order to get an A on their term papers.”

What knowledge, skill or ability will be your next cash cow? Answering that question goes hand-in-hand with predicting the next big trend. It’s like speculating about high earning stocks but focusing on your own personal development instead. What will the next cutting-edge, high paying skill be?

Does your resume fail to get you phone calls and interviews? Why do people ignore your emails and blog posts? Copywriting is the art of persuading people through written words. Even if you’re not trying to make money online, developing this ability will improve many facets of your professional life. How do you learn copywriting skills to get better work and income?

I work at a large company’s headquarters in the HR department and sit right next to our corporate (and executive) recruiters. What I’ve learned about how jobs are actually awarded conflicts with what many job coaches advise people to do. Of course, this is how it happens at one big company, but I’ve also gleaned some myth-debunking information from working for an even larger company before this one.

When was the last time you were “forced” to learn something? Did you have to attend a training session for your job? Have to complete an online course for school? Required to complete job hunting workshops to maintain unemployment benefits? The fact is we don’t learn very well when we feel the “education” is against our wills. Pink Floyd phrased the sentiment well when they sang, “We don’t need no education…we don’t need no mind control!” The more liberated you feel, the better you’ll learn.

Has the fad of blogging died out yet? I – like Darren Rowse of Problogger.net – hate the term itself. Sounds like some bodily indiscretion: “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go blog.” However, publishing through the Internet offers great opportunities to improve several important abilities. You’ll sharpen your marketable skills, make some new friends, and possibly bring in some extra money as you start sharing your ideas through blogging.

As of now I've got about 52 followers on Twitter. Oh wait...53! I haven't employed any tricks to get thousands of people to auto-follow my profile so that number's relatively low. I hope my "tweets" provide some value to followers. I use the application primarily as an Internet bookmarking method. However, that's not why I continue to post. Twitter has much more value to me as a learning tool.

If you’ve survived layoffs at your company then you’re one of the lucky ones who’ve inherited the workloads of two or three people. If you’re unemployed and received a job offer, then you’re also trying to forget that the salary’s only a fraction of what you used to make. If you’ve recently started a business then you now seriously doubt the mantra, “If you build it, they will come!” Just remember that as you consume a steady diet of these circumstances, the food is entirely organic and high in protein.

Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com

You’re reading this post because you want to experience some of that financial success yourself. That’s how I found Pat Flynn’s blog on how to use the Internet as an income stream. Pat’s different than many Internet marketers because he’s succeeded primarily by promoting a solid, non-Internet marketing product: an architectural exam study course. What’s more, Pat is very open about where his earnings come from, and even discloses his web site traffic statistics to help instruct his readers.

Seven hours yesterday on Facebook? SEVEN WHOLE HOURS?!? I’m all for signing in for a few minutes every other day to see what people are doing and give an update myself, but seven hours? What is it that you do for that much time? Mafia Wars? What the heck is that? What’s Fishville, some sort of job search service? No? Another Game? You know what I could do if I had an extra seven hours to burn?

How would you feel if many people thought you were the smartest person in history? How might your life be different if you actually were that intelligent? Although we often think of Albert Einstein as one of the smartest people ever, we don’t investigate what it was that made him so. People who speak highly of him often attribute his genius to some mysterious gift. They don’t believe his smarts came from a certain attitude about learning. I believe you can recreate some of his habits to get smarter and find more rewarding work.

Do you refuse to "waste time" reading fiction as a form of personal development? Many great, successful people have referred to works of fiction as having a profound effect on their own development and inspiration. This podcast discusses fiction as a great learning tool.

Diagnosed cases of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) continue to rise hand-in-hand with TV, Internet, computer game, and portable media use. Marketers compete viciously to get your attention. It takes louder noises, brighter lights, and extreme headlines to pierce the wall of media’s onslaught. All these tricks leave your mind numb and unable to focus on your work, creativity, or studies. As you fight back and recognize the battle going on for control of your mind, you can increase your attention span and improve concentration.

If you want to get new skills for a better job, to make more money, improve your business, or all of the above, your 2010 goals must include some type of learning. But what should you learn? The marketable skills today may be worthless tomorrow, so focus on abilities that will offer value for at least a few years. I’ve put together this list of 10 things that I personally feel will do you and/or your business a lot of good in the coming year.