The Most Important High-Income Skill To Learn (In The Next 10 Years)

What Is The Greatest Skill Of The 21st Century?

00:00The greatest skill of the 21st century is not email marketing. It is not graphic design. It is not web design. It is not artificial intelligence. It is not personal branding. It is not videography or photography or video editing or photo editing.

00:14It is the base layer of all of these skills that I just mentioned. So the greatest skill of the 21st century is persuasive communication. But that doesn't make sense when I just say persuasive communication and nobody really tells you to learn that specific skill.

00:29Instead, they tell you to learn things like copywriting or marketing or sales. They're all somewhat synonymous. But I want you to understand the framework, the structure of how all of those things work and how they impact human psychology. Because why are we learning skills in the first place?

00:45It's to get value and therefore acquire value. So that exchange between two individuals means that you have to understand the other individual. If value is perception and other people can't perceive what you have to offer as valuable, then you're not going to get the value that you want to receive.

01:04And in most cases that is going to be money. So if you do not know how to persuade or understand the psychology of the person you're trying to exchange value with, whether it's in a relationship or just in business, whether you're approaching someone at a bar or you're approaching someone in the DMS, it's all the same thing.

01:21You have cultivated value to offer. You need to persuade the other person to see that value so that they can give you the value that you want in return. And in the context that we talk about a lot for like online writing or becoming a creator or starting a one person business.

01:36Persuasive communication comes into play in everything. If with your writing, it has to be persuasive if you want it to be shared, If it's not persuasive, it's not going to resonate or be seen as valuable to other people. So that they exchange the value of them, sharing the content.

01:51That's what you want from them when you're posting content, right? And when you're posting, let's say, a landing page or literally anything that you post online, whether it's a DM or even a text to a friend or a tweet that you post or an Instagram post or YouTube video or whatever, it has to follow a general persuasive structure.

02:08And just as a bonus, there is a PDF link to the PDF in the description that goes over my Ten Commandments of engagement. That's commandments and 32 post structures that you can emulate if you want to increase the power of your writing. There's no pitch in there.

02:22There's no nothing. It's just download the PDF, use it, have it open alongside while you write content or literally anything. So let's finally dive in. People don't remember what you say. They remember how you make them feel. This is worth repeating.

02:36Humans are emotional beings. Not logical. 99% of the population have not developed themselves to the point of being free from or in control of their ego. That is the foundation of capturing and holding attention. Poking your readers ego. You can feed it or make them feel good, or you can starve it or make them feel bad.

02:54If you can take people on an emotional journey of love, hate, excitement, deceit, calmness and any other emotion that eventually ends in a benefit for their life. You have mastered the art of content creation. Life is story. Song is story. The universe or universe.

03:12One song. Architecture, music, plant life and everything else. Follow the universal principles of highs and lows, creation and destruction, growth and death, etc.. Humans make sense of the world and stories. Your job is to use the power of word to make people feel something.

03:29Stories mimic the natural highs and lows of emotion. I have an entire chapter dedicated to the universe, which is very big picture understanding of what truth is. In my book, The Art of Focus, and then every other chapter, that's one of the primary chapters that helps you frame business and the new economy, how to acquire skills, how to understand yourself, how to reinvent yourself.

03:53It all mimics universal patterns, and once you understand that, you master yourself and then you can master the world. So if you want to preorder the book, go to the first link in the description. The keepsake box is still live and there are only 2000 copies of that that we are printing before the paperback goes out early next year.

04:11So if you want to be the first to read it, you get instant access to the digital version. When you do preorder the keepsake box. So we understand the importance and kind of how to persuade by mimicking the patterns of the universe, the highs and lows, the emotions that give people meaning and the feeling in this life.

04:27Because if you if you're just happy all the time, this is why happiness is kind of a false metric to pursue is because when you're happy all the time, that's not happiness. You're just kind of stuck there. It's normal equilibrium homeostasis.

04:40Eventually it balances out to what is normal or boring. So if you're at this level of happiness all the time, then your baseline increases to that and you're no longer happy. So you have to pursue more and more and more. That's all to say that human understanding is based on the highs and lows of life, and we need to understand how to bake that into whatever we write, speak, or communicate to another person in life or business.

Dan’s 10 Koemmandments Of Capturing Attention

05:01So as you're scrolling on social media, this is a great way to learn is rather than consuming information, research information. So when you're scrolling, try to understand, okay, what caught my attention? Why am I still reading this? How are they holding my attention?

05:16Try to pay attention to these Ten Commandments on the timeline as you are scrolling so that you can notice them. Pattern recognition helps with learning. You'll feel that increase in dopamine. You'll be like, Oh, that's what Dan was talking about.

05:29Okay, I'm going to remember that and use it in my own content creation or writing or speaking. So there are many ways to capture attention, but I've found these to be the most replicable and practical, with number eight being the most potent commandment.

05:42Number one is number three, My Lord. Number one is specific numbers. Using numbers in your hooks, headlines or tweets will make people stop to see what the numbers relate to. These can be in the form of one statistics, like there are 7 billion people on this earth, $2 amounts like Apple's new $1,175 iPhone has this new feature three metrics like I sent 322 cold emails or after 293 days, blah, blah, blah.

06:09Four lists so seven bad habits that are preventing you from blah blah, blah. The more specific a number is, the more it catches people's attention. And if you can't make a number super specific, like in your headline or in a hook, it's okay, don't stress it.

06:23This is only one tactic of many. You're supposed to use these as tools in your toolbox that you piece together into something that is persuasive, an attention grabbing. So here's one example, and this was actually a thread that led to a lot of people joining my master class digital economics when it launched.

06:40So this is the hook of a thread, how I turned one piece of content per week into a $45,275 a month creative income and 340,000 followers in 2 hours a day in five simple steps. So you can see the specific numbers obviously there. Number two is pattern interrupts.

06:57A pattern interrupt is something that breaks people out of their normal conditioned patterns. If someone is scrolling on social media and is used to a lot of political commentary, a well formatted list tweet will make them stop their scroll.

07:09Most of the things in this list of commandments are pattern interrupts. Number three is the negativity bias. The human brain is wired to notice and pay attention to negativity. Like, this is why you find yourself trapped in the comments or on Reddit just going down this feed of drama.

07:25It's because that's what we're most attracted to. It's why we watch scary movies on Halloween. Today's Halloween. I'm going to watch Scary Movie. There's probably a lot to do with survival baked into this and us paying attention to things that threaten our survival, which is usually negative.

07:38And since humans survive on a conceptual level and survive the identity that we attach to or consider who we are, which we're not an idea, but that's what we do. And so once that idea of who we are is threatened, we feel threatened. I also talk about that in my book.

07:54So if you're trying to say something positive, a lot of people do this in headlines or YouTube video titles, etc., spin it as a negative. So instead of saying you're going to achieve great things, change it to you, will never hit rock bottom again.

08:06The second is a lot more potent because it's more negative, but the message is the same, right? This doesn't mean that you need to change your entire YouTube video to be absolutely negative. It's a way of catching attention so that people see the value you have to offer for something that is overwhelmingly positive.

08:22Number four is a group call out. So this one simple is just call out the specific person that you're talking to. So examples like if you are in your twenties calling all creators, coaches and freelancers and fathers are a gift to humankind.

08:35Even if your audience doesn't fall into the specific group you're calling out, it will allow them to pick a side and compare themselves to what you were saying. So in this post I talked about bodybuilders, and even if they don't consider themselves one, it helps paint a picture of what they can relate to.

08:49So the tweet was a bodybuilder is happier than the average person when eating bland chicken and rice every day because he is progressing towards a meaningful goal. Things that are often boring and monotonous become enjoyable when you have a reason to pursue fulfillment over pleasure.

09:04If someone talks about being a father, I can still relate to because maybe I'll be one one day, but it's still going to attract more fathers. It's just a better way to capture attention rather than talking to everyone. But you're not really alienating anyone, right?

09:18When you niche down smart, you're not necessarily alienating people from your niche. Instead, you're just making what you say more potent and relatable. So all of these can be used when you're actually promoting something like if you're promoting a product or service or something.

09:34This is one of those things that is very potent, is just calling out who your product is for. Number five is the problem. Call out. So if you're if you're in digital economics or like in any of my courses or just have listened to anything I talk about relating to marketing and sales, I'm so big on pains and benefits.

09:54People always come back to me and they're like, Man, I really need to remind myself to just remember pains and fucking benefits where problems and benefits, whatever it is, because pains and problems that people are experiencing when you talk about them, it makes the people aware of them, right?

10:08A lot of people aren't walking around with their problems, just top of mind. They're distracted, they're scrolling on their phone. But if they're not getting anywhere in life and that's kind of just lower in their subconscious mind and you bring it to their conscious mind, then you understand the levels of awareness in marketing where your job in order to sell a product or service or make any kind of money or even catch attention, you have to hit on a problem, make people aware of it, make people aware of a solution, make people aware of how that solution benefits their lives

10:35over the course of either a landing page or a year's worth of content or a YouTube video or whatever it may be, until they're ready to buy your product. You create customers by educating them on the problems, how to solve it, and you providing a better solution or a more streamlined, efficient and aggregated solution.

10:53And so here's just an example. By the way, all of these tweets that I listed are very high engaging, like these are tweets that I curated because they did so well. So this is me calling out the pain point of helping them feel better. You feel terrible because your subconscious just knows that you could be doing better.

11:08I actually ended up turning this into a thread the other day and it got like 20,000 likes on Twitter, which is pretty dang good for Twitter. So that just goes to show that it does catch attention and it does work. Number six is potential benefit.

11:21So this is the opposite. Where problem is is more potent because of the negativity bias that we talked about. But potential benefit, you have to create the transformation. When you're selling a transformation, you talk about where they are now and where they're going to be, and then the curiosity gap between those two makes them want to learn more from you on how to achieve that transformation.

11:42So potential benefit, like in a YouTube video thumbnail, when you have like a before picture of a fitness transformation and an after picture of a fitness transformation, those are very attention grabbing and make people want to click and watch because they're like, okay, how did he achieve that?

11:56I relate to that. I want that potential benefit. I'm going to watch this video because it's going to show me how he did it. Now, number seven, seventh Commandment of engagement or attention capture is social proof. So again, social proof is authoritative and implies an information gap or a curiosity gap.

12:12When you flex your results or credentials, people automatically assume that you know more than them. They will take your content more seriously and read to find the information they are missing. This works 100 times better when it's not viewed as a flex.

12:24I'm sure we all have that negative connotation or negative feeling when we see something on like YouTube where it's like, I made $1,000,000,000 in a day, Here's how I did it. Well, that's actually not that bad. But there's ones that are more like cocky, right?

12:38You can feel it. You know what I'm talking about here. So, Justin, Wealth, in my eyes is the current king of this, of like the humble flex. So here's a post from him. Sometimes you need to ask people to buy your product. If you don't, you're missing out on 12 X days.

12:51Simple as that. And then he just has a screenshot of his revenue with a thing at the top. So you use social proof to illustrate a point that you're trying to make. Number eight by far the most important one is confidence and conviction. You can create highly impactful posts with confidence alone.

13:07It allows other aspects of attention grabbing to fall into place. You're right about everything at this very point in time in relation to your goals, visions, beliefs, values, and everything else that forms your perspective of reality. This is what you're doing when you're writing or creating content.

13:21You're painting a picture of your perspective and what you believe right now. And if you're so wishy washy and all these beliefs and goals and values of yours, then one, it's safe to say that you're not really making any progress. You don't trust yourself and you aren't taking action in alignment with your goals.

13:35But aside from that, your job is to have confidence and convictions in your beliefs and a credible or clear argument to back them up. If you have to back them up. This is the thing is, if you have a certain perspective and it's not educated, you haven't learned and created your own philosophy or worldview just through education of studying smart people outside of the school, through self-education online and following leaders, and then filtering their ideas and seeing what is true to you or not.

14:03Then that's step one. You have to do that, like just for general quality of life or to not be a clone of someone else or of society. Everyone is on social media to be told what to do in a confident way. Nobody is secure in their actions, choices and beliefs.

14:17They're looking for someone to confirm them with confidence and give them the clarity to act. So this is a life hack all around. Is that one? You're uncertain in a lot of things. So are other people. Like it's okay to be confident. And if you're presented with feedback or an argument that challenges your worldview and you agree with it, then be okay with that change.

14:37It's like, boom, change. You're right there. Okay, I'll do better next time. What is there to do? But by like restricting yourself from saying what you believe, you're restricting yourself from progress because you're just not certain in the actions that you're going to take and you're never going to, like, fail forward.

14:53You're never going to be confident enough to just go in and make the mistake and learn. Right. So if you aren't confident right now in the beliefs that you have, it's going to be very difficult to become more confident in the future and actually be able to learn more.

15:06So here are some tools you can use to sound more confident. One is eliminate words that imply uncertainty to speak in absolutes when possible. Three Exaggerate your point to add energy. Of course, do not abuse these for the sake of engagement.

15:19So rather than saying it may be wise if someone develop their skill set, say it is crucial that everyone on planet earth develops their skillset just by being confident. My words flow clearer and the writing is more impactful. And the thing here is, is like, Oh, what if you're putting out false information?

15:35Well, at least it's confident to the point of allowing giving someone else certainty to act like if I'm just wishy washy all day, my content isn't doing anything. If I'm angry and I'm exaggerating a point and I'm being very direct with what I'm saying, then I give people the confidence in their own lives to go and make mistakes and learn from them.

15:54If they blame me for them making a mistake in life, then I don't know. That's just like that's just a bad like outlook on life in general is blaming other people for the mistakes you made rather than seeing that you made a mistake. And that's one of the best things you can do in life.

16:09So here's an example of me being confident in what I'm saying. The greatest skill one can develop is decreasing the time between idea and execution. So this tweet surprisingly got a lot of controversy because people were just like, That's not the greatest skill.

16:21This is the greatest skill. And so I think it's funny that I'm including the title of this as the greatest skill of the 21st century, because it gets the point across. Like I could rant all day about metaphorical versus literal interpretation of life and how it will change your life in many ways.

16:36And one because people read literally and they're like it just like makes their brain explode for some reason. But if you interpret metaphorically and understand the essence of what I'm trying to say and understand that I'm adding impact by saying it that way, you don't take it literally.

16:50You're not like, Oh, this is the greatest skill. So this is the only skill that I'm going to learn. And how do you even learn that skill? Decreasing the gap between idea and execution. You get the point. That's the exact thing is getting the point.

17:01Getting the point will change your life. Like words point to something they aren't the words themselves. So here's another example which is a bit more extreme, but this one has just worked time and time again for me because it's relatable and the people that get it, they get it.

17:15How to get ahead of 99% of people go quiet for three months. Laser in on one big goal self educate like mad, apply everything you learn, deal as much as possible every month. Take a break and have some fucking fun. Bursts of intensity are how you blow past everyone else.

17:30So this brings me a lot of followers on all platforms. When I like integrate this occasionally. I actually had like that's my most popular video on YouTube. And then right after everyone just swiped the title and used it to get millions of views.

17:40So whatever. If you want to use the title, just do the same thing. How to get ahead of 99% of people and be unoriginal. I'm just kidding. It doesn't really matter that much. It's kind of the name of the game. So number nine is active voice.

17:55Active voice implies that there is a story. It uses people into what you were saying. Passive voice is often boring and gives away the mini story too early. There is no anticipation that makes people want to figure out what happened next. When you were practicing writing posts, look up an article on active voice and use it to edit until you get the hang of it.

18:11This also helps with being perceived as confident. Number ten is warnings and cautionary advice. So what should people be looking out for when they're trying to achieve something, preferably within your brand or worldview? Because your brand has goals, you're obviously like if you're selling product or you have a service, then there's a goal behind that that you're leading people towards or else you wouldn't attract followers if you weren't a leader.

18:31So can you warn them about something that they're going to encounter as they're trying to reach where you are now? So this is best illustrated with a tweet that I wrote that also got a lot of engagement, but I hit on a high engaging topic like dopamine and warned them of another hot topic.

18:46So this sparked a lot of controversy, assuming you can guess why. But let's just read the tweet. Be careful telling people about your goals. It releases dopamine similar to achieving them. Skip the instant gratification, go quiet and build.

18:59So if I were to come back and just like listen to my own advice of when I'm given feedback from being confident and refining my worldview, what I would say or what I would go back to rewrite this tweet as or at least add nuance to, it would be, Don't tell people about your goals.

19:16Tell people about what you're doing. It's like, What if you don't tell people about your goals and then no one can help you? Well, what I'm saying here is, one, you're missing the point. What I'm saying here is that most people tell people about their goals and then they do nothing about it.

19:27They aren't doing anything. So if you tell people about what you're doing, then you can still work with people, people can still help you, etc., etc.. See through the literal interpretation of words here, get the point. So those are the Ten Commandments.

19:41And now we need to understand what holds attention because we captured attention. Now we need to hold it.

What Holds Attention?

19:46Once the curiosity loop is open, the mind feels committed to figuring out the rest of the story. That is what holds attention. Crafting a compelling story. Stories are layers of metaphors, concepts, perspectives and experiences that take people on a journey.

19:59People want to understand the entire story. They want to know what came before, during and after. Any given argument from capturing attention. But I also want to say here that a story is also metaphorical. A story is not. I woke up this morning and then I went to make coffee and then I got on like, it's not just a string of things.

20:18What I'm talking about here is structure, structure versus content in all of this structure of a story is highs and lows. You're walking people through a problem. Like think of it like the story where it's setting problem, rising action, climax, falling action resolution, and you can paint a picture of that.

20:37That's what a landing page is. A landing page is a story, even if it's just like education on like, oh, how to started copywriting business. It's all guiding people through a story with problems, benefits, solutions, purpose, path, priority.

20:50Another chapter in my book that's a universal principle, or you can think of it as a goal, what people want to achieve and things associated with that, the benefits problem where people are now and how it's ruining their lives and then path in between or system or plan, how are they going to reach the next step?

21:09That's a story. So there's two things you need to understand about this. One is this structure. We aren't in high school anymore. Long professional paragraphs don't matter and reduce readability, especially on X or social media. People log on to that platform to escape the professional world.

21:24So how do you improve the structure of all of your content? First is bullet lists. So use numbers, lists and other tactics that help you break apart what you were saying. These lists create a story in themselves. Second is line breaks. So use line breaks whenever possible, but don't just add line breaks for the sake of it.

21:39Be creative use line breaks to emphasize specific sentences and help your writing flow. Three is starting short and concise so you shorter sentences or paragraphs at the start of your content. Capture attention with short and punchy statements.

21:52Then let loose and get creative with how your sentences flow. Four is just break apart sentences, so use parentheses and dashes over commas. This sentences too long, open parentheses until I make people want to know what are in these parentheses close parentheses.

22:08I use this all of the time in my content and in my YouTube titles. I use parentheses a lot because it's it's okay, what's next? I broke it down, so it's more readable. So here's an example of all of the above. In a hook. Most people suck at DMS.

22:22Hi, how are you? Please follow back will probably get you blocked more than it gets. Responses. Let me make DMS easy for you in seven steps. Okay. I didn't include parentheses there, but I could have put in seven steps in parentheses. Number two is novel perspectives.

22:38This novel perspectives requires you to get the bulk of your ideas from long form newsletters, articles, podcasts, books, etc. or talks short form. It's more difficult to actually create a novel perspective because it's so short. You're not getting the entire perspective.

22:55Novelty increases dopamine levels in the brain, and it brings more clarity to an idea that has been talked about over and over. If you're getting all of your content from Twitter while trying to grow on Twitter, you'll probably end up with the same perspective as everyone else metaphors, personal experiences, and creating new concepts is how you achieve this.

23:13So I was reading an article and I learned about how a glass of water creates an acre of fog. And I'm like, That's a unique perspective. How can I take this into what I'm doing? Because it had nothing to do with like mindfulness or business or human potential, the things that I talk about.

23:28But I wrote this tweet, the amount of water needed to create an acre fog is one drinking glass. Remember this the next time your mind is fogged with worry. But in reality the problem is as insignificant as a glass of water. Content consumption or research is as important as creation.

23:45You need a you need a research of 100 to create a content of one. So that's how you hold attention. But what creates engagement?

What Creates Engagement?

23:54Remember, people don't remember what you say. They remember how you make them feel. Alan Watts may have been an alcoholic in his later years and died because of it. Although in order to focus community, someone brought up that that may be a psyop or he thinks it's a science.

24:07I could very well see that. So who knows if Allan Moss was actually an alcoholic. But regardless of if he is or not, his work has changed my life for good. I'm not going to eliminate or restrict myself from listening to his message just because he may be a person with values that don't align with mine when the message can truly change the way I see the world.

24:29This is another thing. I mean, I'm similar in a lot of ways. There's like people that I don't really like and I don't consume their content. But this is a good reminder for all of us that even the people like that, we don't like their click baity titles or thumbnails or whatever, we're missing out like by not watching them.

24:45We're missing out on so much information that could radically change our lives If the one idea that would change our lives was in those videos and we watched it. So Food for thought that Talon wants is that I may remember some quotes of his, but the reason I remember them is because of the clarity they gave me.

25:03The feeling of having zero worries in the world. When I want to experience that again, I throw on an Allen What's lecture you are but a humble messenger of a life changing message. So the first thing that creates engagement is the feelings that come from education or learning, Learning something new or gaining clarity on some aspect of your life raises dopamine levels in the brain.

25:24You create clarity through novel perspectives, metaphors, stories, personal experiences, and other parts of your life that will help others understand what you're saying. Speaking of those things, those are actually elements in our core note system.

25:37For Cortex, the app is not out yet. The software is not done. But we're going to revolutionize writing and creating for the entire creator economy by making this so seamless, this entire process. Your job is to make sense to a specific group of people.

25:51You do this by sharing how certain topics make sense to you. That's it. You read something. Oh, okay. I get that. I like that idea. How does it make sense to me? I'm going to share that with other people. Simple as that. The second thing that creates engagement is the feeling that comes from inspiration.

26:07Inspiration is different from motivation. You're helping people connect the dots on their own, giving them the clarity to make their own decisions and change their behavior. People feel good when they think they came up with the answer themselves, but will still attribute that feeling to you.

26:20The third thing that creates engagement is the feeling that comes with entertainment. Can you throw in a joke meme or interesting point of view when you watch a movie, you are entertained through humor, drama, emotional parts of the story, and battles that spark excitement in you.

26:33Entertainment, education and inspiration are the main goals of your content. That's what you are as a content creator is a mixture of an entertainer, an educator and an inspiring person. So that's it for this one. I hope you enjoyed it. This one was very practical, but you have to actually practice the theory.

26:50So remember the PDF is available to download in the description. Also the Art of Focus Keepsake box or just the Art of Focus book in general are both available link in the description. If you want to learn how to write online and build your social media or just a personal brand or one person business however you want to frame it, they're all the same thing.

27:09Everyone writes. Everyone needs to communicate value. Everyone wants to do their own thing. So if you want to do that, regardless of whether it's like labeled as a social media influencer or not, just write online. If you want to do that to a writer, the course link in the description.

27:21Other cool stuff. Check it out. Thanks for watching. Peace.