10 Skills Critical to Your Future

These are ten skills critical to your repertoire. They have indelible impact as part of a resume, a personal brand, and as a skill set. They compound in value each minute in the marketplace. Though it can be done, these 10 skills are difficult to cultivate inside the proverbial box. Yet they are critical to your future, if you want to be an idea creator and not an idea consumer. These are

The 10 Most Critical Skills for the 21st Century

Deep independent thinking and problem-solving — The ability to understand a problem or opportunity from the inside out, vertically, laterally, at the detail level, and the aerial view.
Mental flexibility — The ability to tinker with ideas and viewpoints to stretch them, bend them, reconstruct them into solutions that fit and work perfectly in specific situations.
Fluency with ideas — The ability to describe many versions of one answer and many solutions to one problem set and to explain the impact or outcome of each both orally and in writing in ways that others can understand.
Proficiency with processes and process models — The ability to discuss a problem in obsessive detail and to define a process, linear or nonlinear, that will solve the problem effectively within a given group culture.
Originality of contributions — The ability to offer a value-added difference that would not be there were another person in the same role.
A habit of finding hidden assumptions and niches — The ability to see the parts of what is being considered, including the stated and unstated needs, desires, and wishes of all parties involved.
A bias toward opportunity and action — The ability to estimate and verbalize the loss to be taken by standing still and missed opportunities that occur by choosing one avenue over another.
Uses all available tools, including the five senses and intuitive perceptions, in data collection — The ability to weigh and value empirical data, sensory data, and one’s own and others’ perceptions appropriately.
Energy, enthusiasm, and positivity about decision making — The ability to bring the appropriate mindset to the decision-making process in order to lead oneself or a team to a positive decision-making experience.
Self-sustaining productivity — The ability to use the confidence gained from the first 9 skills to establish relationships with people at all levels–from the warehouse to the boardroom–knowing that ideas are not the pride and privy of only a gifted few.

Innovative, imaginative, inventive, mind-expanding, playful-wondering, what-if, how-come, dramatic-difference, find-the-wow, visionary, killer-app, I-want-one, no-more-stupid-stuff, nothing-in-moderation, bet-the-farm, incredibly-sexy, please-please-can-I, that’s-so-cool, couldn’t-knock-it-off-if-they-tried-to, able-to-see-better-than-the-best, no-more-move-here-today-move-it-back-tomorrow, stupid kind of thinking happens outside of the box.

The skills that you develop from outside of the box thinking stay with you for a lifetime and are transferable from one job to another. You don’t need them to write every shopping list, but they are there whenever there is a problem to solve or an opportunity to take advantage of.

It doesn’t take a genius to become a fluent, flexible, original, and creative source of ideas. It takes a person who can develop habits of thinking in new ways. What actually happens is that you find out how you really think, rather than how you were taught to.

You become uniquely you–BRAND YOU–the only one–priceless.

Who wouldn’t want to work with a person like that? –ME, Blake Fanley.