These are six things every high performer needs to know how to do. And I mean, you have to really do them. Not just read about them or watch videos, practice doing them. We don't learn about these in school or at work because no one teaches them. I've lived through enough lives to know which ones move the needle. You know, I started as a monk in training and somehow ended up becoming the CEO, board member, investor in tech and AI companies. And these skills have helped me find success time and time again. In this video, I'll break them down one by one. And you know, in the age of AI, these skills can bring you immense wealth and a sense of worth. And they make you genuinely self-reliant, no matter what the world throws at you. High performance is not just one skill. It's three relationships happening all at once. With yourself, with other people, and with reality. Neglect one and the other two can't save you. So, we'll cover six essential skills. Two for each. And one skill at the end that rules them all. So, let's get going. We always admire confident people. So, we chase confidence. But that's the wrong move. Serena Williams had won 23 Grand Slam titles and spent two decades at the very top of her game. And still, she has been open about this. She has struggles with self-doubt. Same with Paul McCartney. He is one of the most famous musicians on the planet. But on a recent TV interview, he just shrugged and said, "Yeah, just like everyone else, you have to have insecurities." So, we think confidence is waiting on the other side of our success. But that's not where the real confidence comes from. In the late 1960s, a Stanford psychologist named Albert Bandura worked with people who were terrified of snakes. And not just afraid, but deep real phobia. And first, they watched someone else hold a snake from a safe distance. Then they took one step closer. They touched the snake with gloved hands. And then one step closer without the gloves. And within a few hours, the same people with serious snake phobias were playing with the snake in their lap. That's interesting enough, right? But what happened later was even more fascinating. Their sense of confidence did not stay in that room alone. Once those people had faced and overcome one fear, they started acting confidently in many other parts of their lives. They became more willing to speak up. They stopped feeling nervous about hard conversations. They took actions they had been avoiding for a while. Confidence built in one little corner of your life can start spreading into other parts of your life. When you do a hard thing and survive it, your brain files it as a proof. And that's how confidence starts getting built over time. And by the way, I came across this snake story while I was researching for my newsletter. If you like ideas like this in your inbox, my newsletter goes deeper with one insight, one tool, one practice every Tuesday. Please subscribe. Link is below. And it's free. But what gets developed here is not just your confidence. Something deeper starts happening. What gets built is your self-trust. Because confidence is the feeling about the outcome. I'll do well. That feeling can rise. Feeling can fall depending on what results you get. Self-trust says, "Listen, I may not know the answers, but I trust myself to figure it out." That is much stronger and it lasts longer. So, here's our first framework. I call it the proof pyramid. You need three kinds of proofs to build that confidence, that self-trust. The base of the pyramid is proof of action. Do one small hard thing that you've been avoiding. The middle of the pyramid is proof of integrity. Make one small promise to yourself and keep it every day. And finally, the top of the pyramid is the proof of recovery. When you come back after failure or rejection or embarrassment, your brain gets rewired because self-trust only becomes real after we fail and recover.

That's where we go next, the important skill of failing without becoming a failure. I have been fired three times in my career and none of that was gentle. One of them was so bizarre that I still remember it vividly. So, I was serving as a chief revenue officer at this tech company in New York City and our new product was not doing well. It was delayed dramatically, our customers were very angry, they were leaving, revenue was tanking and there was a board meeting and after the board meeting, the CEO called me into the board room and he said, "You know, we've decided to let you go. I have to ask you to give me the access keys and don't go back to your office. We'll send you your things in boxes later." Literally, he walked me out to the elevator and waited there until I left and that was it. And on the train ride home, I just kept thinking about how I was going to tell my wife. What would she think of me? What would I think of me? I was unemployed for almost 10 months. I called recruiters, I had coffee with friends and former colleagues. I would ask everybody if they knew of any role, if any opening, any consulting gig. Nothing for 10 months, nothing. You know, the half-life of failure is very long, and it makes you feel small. It makes you feel alone, but eventually I got hired again in a new role as a chief strategy officer at an awesome company. And I got to work with a phenomenal CEO who became a great friend and a mentor. And it became one of those stepping stones to my CEO role years later. So, it works out in the end, but none of that was obvious to me when I was hunting for a job for almost a year. And that is the problem with failure. It's a great teacher, but first it likes to punch you in the face. Now, our brain loves to explain failure in three ways. I am borrowing this from the works of a psychologist named Martin Seligman. You know, we see failure as either personal or permanent or pervasive, sometimes all three. First, we say, "My failure is personal. This clearly means that something is wrong with me." Second, "My failure is permanent. This will never change. I am doomed." And third is pervasive. I failed here, so I'll fail everywhere else. But once you see those patterns, you also realize that none of it is true. It's just that voice in your head playing tricks on you. So, finally, let me share three cheat codes that helped me manage that mental model after failure. First, it's actually good to make useful mistakes. Just feel comfortable about it. Not reckless mistakes, but useful ones. If your rejection rate is too low, you're swinging your bat enough times. Ed Sheeran is a great example. You know, he was rejected by every music label he approached. They thought he was too awkward, too acoustic, and too different looking to have that pop star persona. He played live and he would get booed. So what? He would go to the next town and he'd play again. Those were useful failures because he was gathering that feedback and refining his act. Now, he sells out stadiums as a one-man show and sings duets with Beyoncé. The second cheat code is about portfolio thinking. So, all these venture capitalists know most of their bets might fail and that's why they invest in so many of these companies so as to diversify their risk. You should think about risk and failure the same way. Take risks, but size them, limit them, diversify them so you can survive being wrong. And the third cheat code is the one none of us can cheat, death. Now, this may sound a bit too dramatic, but I got this advice from a mentor of mine. All of this ends the same way for all of us. That's the reality and it comforts me because it reminds me to focus on the things that truly matter beyond our superficial definition of success and failure. So, you can implement any of these three cheat codes or all of them and that can change your relationship with failure. And you can fail often without feeling like you're a failure. Those are the two things you should learn to work on yourself.

Now, let's go to the second level, working with others. And one of the most important skills there is selling. Life is about selling. Your first job interview, you have to sell. You're going on a date, you have to sell. Raising money for your company, you have to sell. Negotiating with your teenage daughter to get her off Instagram, you have to sell. Maybe that's the hardest one because Instagram has sold her something that is way more powerful. And that's because selling is about influence. The biggest misconception about selling is that it's about tactics. It's not. It's about credibility. The best salespeople I know spend years becoming believable. And then they simply say what they believe in. And that's what closes the deal. That's what influences people. You know, humans are hardwired to resist being sold to. The moment you sense a trick, you'll realize your defenses go up because people don't want to buy products. They want to buy better versions of themselves. That's the transformation. That's the influence. And that's why Nike ads would rarely mention the shoe. Same for Apple, same for Harley-Davidson, same for Patagonia. They don't sell products. They sell feelings. So that's what selling is about. And the simplest way of thinking about four skills that you're going to need to become a very good seller is a framework that I call care. C A R E, care. Because that's literally what it takes to sell, to influence. C is curiosity. Focus on what others want. When someone wants a promotion, for example, they don't just want promotion. They want recognition. They want financial safety. And you won't get to that truth unless you're genuinely curious. A is alignment. Now, alignment is about connecting the dots between what you have and what the other person wants. That matching requires a lot of empathy. R is reliability. Just tell the truth. You don't have to sell. Tell them what you believe in. Tell them why you believe in it. Tell them what your product cannot do or else they won't believe what it can do. So, trust takes years to build and seconds to destroy. And finally, E for emotion. Make them feel the future version of themselves. Masters like Steve Jobs understood this reality when they said, "A thousand songs in your pocket." He didn't talk about the storage limits or gigabytes or any of that technology stuff because he knew that facts will make you nod, but feelings will make you move. And moving people is what selling is about. And that takes us to the second skill you need, how to build others. The most valuable person in the history of Silicon Valley had no formal power. Bill Campbell was a football coach who got fired at the age of 39. But then he went on to become a mentor to founders and companies that have defined our entire digital lives in more ways than one. Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, Intuit. His impact on Silicon Valley was like no other. The interesting part about Bill was that he didn't know how to build software, but he knew how to build people. A long time ago, I knew a CEO who was one of these genius types. You know, he had a great team and he was building a company that was absolutely killing in the market. He was unquestionably the smartest person in the room and he knew how to build a company, but he was not very good at building people. He was able to deliver revenue numbers that were huge, but he also made his people feel small. Eventually, the company's stock plummeted, the executives around him started leaving one by one. You know, you can have a great mission, a great balance sheet, but if your people don't feel valued, you'll lose all three of them. Google ran an experiment on 180 internal teams to find out what do the best teams have in common. And the answer was surprising. The best teams were not the ones with the highest IQs. They were the ones where people could speak their mind. It's called psychological safety. Teams that felt safe delivered way more than teams with much higher raw IQ. That's what otherness is about. It has nothing to do with being nice. It is one of the most important career moves in your life. So, how do you create psychological safety? How do you focus on others? By giving three things away. First, give attention. The rarest resource anyone has nowadays is attention. So, when you focus on someone fully, even for a minute, you can make magic happen. Make the other person feel fully seen. Second, give credit. When things go well, find the person who is responsible and just thank them. And you can be specific about exactly what it was that you appreciate about their effort, about their talents, about their judgment, whatever it is. Name that specific thing that they did well. When you remind people about how good they are, they will remember how great you were. And finally, give ownership. This one grows with you. If you're in a team, this is about letting your teammate present the work that you guys have done together. If you're a manager, it's about letting the team own their outcomes. Make them feel like they're owners, not helpers. These three can change the entire trajectory of people you work with. And when they grow, you grow faster.

So far, we have talked about your relationship with yourself and with others. Now, let's get to the third part, dealing with reality. Let's start by dealing with money. Warren Buffett is 94 years old, and there's a number nobody talks about. 98% of Warren Buffett's wealth came after his 65th birthday. At 65, he was worth 3 billion. Today, it's 160 billion. And he says it himself, "My life has been a product of compound interest." The greatest investor alive made almost all his money after the age where most of us retire. That's what our brains just don't understand. We're incapable of understanding the idea of compounding. And that's why it's one of those things that most of us don't understand about money. Financial literacy is a skill that helps you deal with that kind of reality. But it's not as widespread a skill as you would think. In 2021, two economists wrote three simple questions to measure whether a person understands how money works. One, if you have $100 at 2% interest, do you have more or less than $102 after 5 years? Two, if your savings earn 1% and inflation is at 2%, can you buy more or less a year from now? And three, is a single stock safer than a mutual fund? That's it. Those were the three basic questions. That was the whole exam. But still, in the US, more than 85% of adults under the age of 35 got at least one of them wrong. And finance is one of the strongest forces that will shape the rest of their lives. This is the most expensive ignorance they can't afford to have. And underneath those questions, the researchers wanted all of us to understand three realities about money. First, money compounds over the long term. So, be patient. Second, inflation will always eat into your money unless you invest in a way that keeps you ahead of the inflation rate. And third, diversification is always always better than concentration. So, that's how you deal with the reality of money. And now, let's go to the sixth skill about how to deal with reality, judgment. We build our entire careers, status, and dreams upon one thing, and AI made that into a commodity. Think about all that we've coveted in our lives. We try to get into the best universities that we can, we find jobs at the most prestigious companies that we can, we try to spend time learning and teaching and growing. And now comes AI and it commoditizes the one thing that we relied upon the most, intelligence. So, what can you do in an era where machines can outthink you? Well, you have to outjudge the machines. If you're trying to write an essay, for example, AI will generate millions of lines in just a few minutes. The real question is, which lines are you going to pick? Your judgment and your taste are the skills that make all the difference in this era. And here the main three challenges using AI without judgment. First, AI can fake deep fluency. It sounds right when it's wrong. Second, AI is going to drive you to the average. It gives you the most average of what everyone thinks. There's no way to differentiate yourself. And third, AI seeks confirmation. It wants to please you so desperately all the time at any cost, so it always agrees with you all the time. And the only way to protect yourself from all those three challenges, your judgment. I have a separate video that I made that goes deep into the idea of judgment and critical thinking, how to develop it, how to protect it, how to nurture it, because I think this will be one of the most important skills to develop in the age of AI. Now, when you try to make a decision, when should you trust your gut feeling? The answer is surprisingly simple. Trust it when you can get fast, honest feedback on your decisions. A firefighter is able to build real judgment because fire gives feedback to him in real time. The more reps you have with clear and quick feedback, the better your judgment gets over time.

So, those are the six skills. Now, every single skill in this video has one thing in common. They're all like restless chickens running around in your barn. You have to constantly keep chasing them. Otherwise, they'll run away from you. So, the most important meta-skill is learning how to learn these skills. The world that is coming our way will require us to pivot so many times because the hills you want to climb will change their shapes right under your feet. While you're busy studying the map, you cannot afford to get rusty on any of these skills that we've covered. And I see this as a great gift. I think there's a certain amount of joy in being a student again. Empty cup once again, so a fresh brew can fill it. You know, I always remember a lesson my teacher taught me a long time ago. Some things cannot be taught. They must be remembered. The most important things in your life, your judgment, your empathy, your genuine character, cannot be handed to you by a teacher or a book or a guide. You have to quiet the noise so they can rise to the surface. Nobody can give you what's already yours. I'll see you next week. Thank you. And I love you.