Mark Blasini

Articles

How to learn to be successful

(Note: this post is a follow up from yesterday's post.)

Starts with three important questions. With whatever area you're trying to get successful at, then, ask yourself:

1. What are the basic components to becoming successful here - i.e. the basic sub-skills?
2. Which sub-skills are the absolute most essential?
3. In what order should I learn these specific sub-skills?

Take, for example, personal finance. With personal finance, there are so many sub-skills you can learn, but the basic ones are:

• Maximizing income
• Controlling expenses
• Minimizing taxes
• Tracking income and expenses
• Investing excess income (income after expenses) into tax-efficient accounts

We can then reorder the sequence of sub-skills from easiest to hardest:

1. Tracking income and expenses
2. Controlling expenses
3. Minimizing taxes
4. Investing excess income
5. Maximizing income

Notice here that I haven't mentioned anything about the end-result (e.g. "$1,000,000 in investments," "no credit card debt," etc.).

Sure, these might be good challenges to overcome on the road to successful personal finance, but on their own, they do not teach you how to be successful in that area. It's only through focusing on developing each sub-skill that you will have control over the results.