These are 9-character features and personal skills our gamers arenas experts think to be important in the 21st century. Start developing them right away to remain successful in future.
1. Grit
Here we mean the ability to follow your goals persistently maintaining your interest in it even despite failures, boredom and temporary progress absence. This is the combination of a passionate involvement, durability and self-discipline that helps you move forward while ignoring obstacles and defeats.
According to the psychologist Angela Duckworth, this quality is even more important for success than talents or intelligence. No matter how talented you are, you can’t reach a lot without grit. It helps you dare towards your goal for long.
2. Adaptation Skill
We all live in the world that changes rapidly, and this tendency is likely to remain stable in future. Skills, knowledge and connections you have today can cost nothing tomorrow. That is why the ability to change and adjust to new conditions is critical. Most companies will need exactly such people to remain relevant.
Darwin said the one who survives is not the strongest or the smartest, but the one who adapts to new conditions better than anyone else. This skill of adaptation, improvisation and coming up with a new strategy depending on a problem is the main advantage humans have before computers.
3. Failure Acceptance
It’s a paradox, but a failure is the first step towards success. Nothing is perfect or can be perfect. Try, fail, redo. Concentrate not on results but on lessons you’ve got: people mastering them reach success in future. Each failure makes you come closer to your goal if you learn from it. And the real failure means your refuse to get up after you fall.
So, try to learn a lesson as soon as possible after you suffer a defeat.
4. Learning Flexibility
Futurologist Elwin Toffler once said that in the 21st century, uneducated people will be not those who can’t read or write, but those who can’t learn and relearn. Real education starts along with career. Career needs you to get new knowledge and refuse old methods many times throughout the process.
To reach success in a modern world, you need to be ready to adapt all the time: to forget old rules and to learn new ones. To do that, you need to doubt widespread beliefs, challenge old viewpoints and relearn things important for your job, industry and life at this very moment.
5. Work with Information
The ability to understand, analyze and use information is very important. To make decisions and deal with problems, you need to collect reliable data, evaluate it and choose the most suitable way for a certain situation.
A person able to view the problem from different sides frequently finds an unexpectedly elegant solution showing how poor were opinions of other people.
To be able to do this, you need both critical and creative thinking. According to the philosopher Francis Bacon, critical thinking means a will to search for things and patience to check them. It supposes a person to refuse quick judgments and careful keeping to them along with the hatred towards any kind of deceiving. Creative thinking is based on inventiveness, the ability to find new ways of completing old tasks.
6. Emotional Intelligence
People with higher level of emotional intelligence have their empathy and self-consciousness well developed. And they are able to communicate excellently: this skill helps to build relations with people around, understand their motives and predict reactions.
All fields where emotional intelligence (unavailable for computers) is required will be very popular in future. And if you are not too communicative, you still have enough time to develop appropriate skills and understand people better.
7. Personal Branding
An impression you make is very important. It helps to gain trust of colleagues, clients and chiefs.
In many fields, being successful means standing out from the crowd in something. Think what you are especially good at. Find one or several skills you’ll build your personal brand around.
Additionally, think what your social media profiles tell about you. If you are not active on platforms relevant for your job, it is time to go in for them. Refresh the data about you to make it relevant according to your new image. Start with very basis: delete inappropriate pictures and change your email nickname to a more professional one.
8. Deep Thinking
Usually, nobody teaches people to think. It is supposed they can do that by default. But having the data does not mean understanding it. A deeper thinking leads you towards a deeper life. So, think how deep your thinking is.
Challenge yourself for the rest of the year: promise to go deeper into fields important for you. This will help you understand them better. Compare results, analyze data, disassemble it by parts and use different thinking models.
That is something like reading. You read the book once and have basic understanding of the subject. You read the book several times, make notes and state conclusions, and you understand the topic much better as a result.
9. Ingenuity
First of all, this means the skill of solving problems, though mixed with persistence and psychic durability. A resourceful person can see the old system and find how to improve it. To do that people frequently need good imagination and a lot of optimism.
In most fields, employers look for workers understanding how to make more from less, to solve problems and help the company reach its goals. According to Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, ingenuity is very important for any person with a big dream, because on the way there will obligatory be problems.
Many entrepreneurs know that the point of moving forward means dealing with troubles and failures. You make a step back and do another try. Every time you meet an obstacle or do an attempt, you need to be independent and resourceful. It is required to find the way how to reach beyond usual frames and limits every single time.
