- Modern Life Skills
- Posts
- Vol. 10; Modern Life Skills
Vol. 10; Modern Life Skills
A Little Extra, Rejection Olympics, Tesla, MIT, LinkedIn Learning, Amazon AI
Damian Matheson
December 04, 2024
Welcome back to Modern Life Skills.
My goal with this newsletter is to share some of the most interesting and relevant content, from the best internet thinkers I know, within the domain of what I refer to as Modern Life Skills; or the skills I believe young people need to develop to be successful today, and tomorrow.
Modern Life Skills are a collection of:
Mindsets/Mental Models
In-Demand Life Skills
Career Advice
This is Cool (a peek into what’s coming next with emerging technologies and sciences)
You’ll see each of those sections represented in every newsletter. If you’re reading this in the browser, you can use the Table of Contents to skip around.
Table of Contents
MINDSET OF THE WEEK
A Little Extra
My first real job after university and a failed startup was in a sales role at Rogers. The division was called OutRank. It was a collaboration with Google and a company called Yodle that allowed us to put small businesses on the front page of Google for popular searches, i.e. dentist in Hamilton.
It was a wild year that I spent there. ~150 people (mostly male) on a big sales floor in downtown Toronto, cold calling people all day. All day.
Imagine the sales floor at the office in Wolf of Wall Street, without the drugs. That’s the best descriptor I have for it.
A lot of us today refer to it as paid training. Many of the life skills I have today are because of that job. I am a firm believer that sales skills are life skills.
One of the things I really appreciated about that job (in hindsight) was the transparency of everything. It was a meritocracy.
Either you were hitting your numbers and making sales, or you weren’t. And it was visible for everyone to see. By design.
Daily Activity - make 100 calls, earn 3 hours of talk time on the phone, or book 5 demos, and you get a ✅. Fail to do at least one of those and you would see a big ❌ next to your name on the email that went out company wide the following day. Every day.
Commission - the email right after that showed how many sales you had made that month to date, the dollar amount, and what % of commission you would be bringing home.
In every scenario, the names that consistently had ✅ and the most commission always had one thing in common. They put in a little more effort.
While most people were more than happy to head home the minute the clock hit 5pm - after spending a full day of being hung up on and told ‘no’ - the people on top of that leaderboard at the end of the month, and year, always made the extra effort.
5 more calls. 30 more minutes. 3 more no’s. Whatever it was that day, they knew that little extra would be the difference between where they were, and where they wanted to go.
It can be hard to appreciate how much a little extra makes a big difference.
Making five extra calls a day may seem small, but do that for a month, and you’ll have made 100 extra calls. Work an extra hour a day because you don’t go out partying with your friends, and you’ve got 6 weeks of work in a year over your colleagues. That’s six extra weeks of learning.
While those seem obvious, there are more subtle ways this applies as well. The person who goes out drinking the night before is sluggish at work. They might be present, but they’re operating at 75%. If you’re operating at 100%, that’s a big difference.
When you consistently do more, the returns compound dramatically. Like superlinear growth curves, each extra bit of effort builds on previous overperformance. The key is that extra effort compounds – just as doing a bit less daily leads to compounding underperformance.
What looks like a small delta day-to-day becomes massive over months and years.
LIFE SKILLS
Rejection Olympics
At TKS, we would call these discomfort challenges.
Therapists call it exposure therapy.
Eric Janssen calls it the rejection olympics.
I’m a big fan of Eric. Like me, he believes that sales skills are life skills. But he believes in it so much he’s teaching sales and entrepreneurship to undergrad students at Western University.
I wish more of his types of classes existed at every level of education:
Hustle & Grit
Sales Foundations
New Venture Creation
New Venture Project
And he’s not just teaching these skills to university students. Even his 7 year old is getting in on the action.
It’s never to early to learn that you don’t get what you don’t ask for. And sometimes when you ask, you’re going to hear a no.
Some will. Some won’t. So what? Next…
Handling, and bouncing back from rejection is a legitimate life skill. And a teachable one at that.
But like most things in life, you can’t read your way to resilience. You have to get out there, take action, reflect and repeat.
To make activities like this sustainable, and fun, Eric has turned it into a bingo style game, with instructions.
CAREER ADVICE
How bad do you want it?
This is one of those feel-good stories that everyone can rally behind.
It’s also a great example to show young people, that success in life is largely determined between your ears. That life is a game we play in our heads.
Things aren’t going to always go our way. A lot of our day to day is outside of our control. Like competing against people with 20+ years of experience, when you have none.
But how you choose to respond is completely up to you. I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about life.
Mike could have just taken the L and given up on his dream to work at Tesla. Instead, he chose to focus on what he could control - how he would respond.
Six years after that initial rejection, Mike fulfilled his dream. Think of how many dreams you can make come true if you approached life in 6 years sprints like that.
Good job, Mike 👏
THIS IS COOL
MIT is now free for a lot of people
Would love for this to become a trend. Not holding my breath though.
Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold.
Starting in fall 2025, MIT will offer free tuition to undergraduates from families earning less than $200,000, with families earning under $100,000 paying nothing for the full cost of attendance, including tuition, housing, and other expenses. MIT has long had financial aid programs that made attending the university accessible for most of the country’s brightest, young math and science minds. With this announcement, 80% of U.S. families are eligible for free MIT tuition.
This year alone, the university has allocated nearly $170M to need-based financial aid, which means that 87% of students will graduate debt free.
We have a lot of hard, technical problems left to solve and we need the very best and brightest, from every socioeconomic background, to work on solving them. The list of notable MIT alums is too long to print here, but includes Buzz Aldrin, Richard Feynman, Sal Khan, Claude Shannon, Andrew Ng, Robert Noyce, Bob Metcalfe, Lisa Su, Charles Koch, Henry Singleton, Alfred P. Sloan, Jim Simons, Bob Swanson, Murray Gell-Mann, Diane Greene, William Shockley… the list goes on.
If that track record is any indication, expanding the pool of people who are able to attend MIT — and pursue their work free of debt post-college — is going to be a great thing for the world.
Are they able to do this because they’re the only school with a large endowment?
No.
Perplexity
Maybe it’s just a few outliers with big endowments?
No.
Perplexity
And just when you thought it couldn’t get better, it does.
MIT students pay less and earn more. The unicorn of universities.
MIT is better at improving the financial futures of its graduates than any other U.S. college, and the Institute also ranks number one in the world for the employability of its graduates.
In a world that is beginning to demand ROI from post-secondary institutions, these are the types of statistics that should be guiding decision making.
Hopefully moves like this become the standard and others learn to follow suit. But again, not holding my breath.
BONUS
Free (Youth) Access to LinkedIn Learning
Within the first month of the TKS program starting, every student had a LinkedIn account up and running.
It’s much more than a platform to look for jobs, it’s where people build out their professional networks.
And the only social media platform I really spend any time on. You can connect with me here.
It also has a repository of skill based courses that anyone can take through LinkedIn Learning.
LinkedIn Learning is an online educational platform that helps you discover and develop business, technology-related, and creative skills through expert-led course videos.
With more than 5,000 courses and personalized recommendations, you can discover, complete, and track courses related to your field and interests.
With courses on financial literacy, social media, even drawing and music theory, you’ll be able to grow and develop in the areas you care about both at and outside work.
You can also choose to add these courses and related skills to your LinkedIn profile once you've completed them.
They generally do a pretty good job of tapping into working professionals to create and lead the courses. There is an abundance of courses to choose from. If you can dream it, they probably have it.
Here’s a screenshot from my LinkedIn Learning homepage. Everything from a 39m course on how to earn money as a creator, to a 7h 44m (!!!) course on excel.
You can also search, and filter by Beginner level. This is what I got when I searched “game”.
It normally costs around $20/month, but thanks to RBC Future Launch, it’s freeeee if you’re between the ages of 15-29.
It’s on LinkedIn, so I’m assuming it will require students to create a free LinkedIn account. Looks like it also takes 5-10 business days for the account to get approved.
💡 Little bonus tip: when you share this with students, please remind them that taking the course and/or earning the certificate is a great starting point, but it’s not the finish line.
Skill development comes from the application of that content, not consumption alone.
If I’m hiring a game developer, I’m going to hire the person with a few crappy games that they’ve published to their portfolio over the person with an array of certifications, but no projects to speak of.
Actions speak louder than words. Prove it with a portfolio.
HOT OFF THE PRESS
Amazon wants to play
I’m just seeing this the morning this newsletter goes out, so I don’t have a lot of context to add to this, but the tl;dr is Amazon is now a part of the AI conversation. And in a big way.
Some had thought that maybe because of their $8B investments to date with Anthropic, they’d be taking the role of the cheerleader. Turns out they want to be the quarterback too.
See screenshot below for what we know so far.
Foundation models (1) are what most of us lay people interact with. They’re the models that the popular applications like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are built on top of, among other tools. Each big player has their own foundational model(s).
Looks like Amazon is calling theirs Nova.
I like the name, and I like the competition. There are often many second order benefits win when big companies compete like this. It typically drives innovation and lower prices.
And it’s fun to watch. Grab your popcorn folks. We’re still just getting started 🍿
Have an idea for a life skill you think young people should be learning? Hit reply and let me know. I’ll add it to the list.
✌️ Damian