Great News
Here is something that caught our eye this week:
Attitude is a skill
A little over a year ago, we started listening to My First Million, a podcast hosted by entrepreneurs Shaan Puri and Sam Parr. For those unfamiliar, the podcast explores business ventures – successful and not so successful – of all varieties in a candid and understandable demeanor. For example, in recent episodes, the hosts have explored ideas ranging from a successful website dedicated to reviewing soap operas to blockchain-based betting sites.
What we find impressive about the series is that the hosts consistently discuss and debate their own ideas, making it seem like they have some secret never-ending source of interesting business opportunities. Of course, coming up with business ideas is a skill like any other. The podcast, in its own way, is a forcing function that helps the hosts develop an incredibly valuable skill—the ability to identify and have an opinion on a wide range of new opportunities.
Reflecting on this, we were reminded of a Seth Godin post from 2015 titled Attitude is a Skill. From the post:
You can learn math. French. Bowling.
You can learn Javascript, too.
But you can also learn to be more empathetic, passionate, focused, consistent, persistent and twenty-seven other attitudes.
If you can learn to be better at something, it’s a skill.
And if it’s a skill, it’s yours if you want it.
Which is great news, isn’t it?
One of Chenmark’s core values is to Chase Better. This means we have a growth mindset—we believe in our ability to continuously improve in whatever we focus on. This week we were reminded that such improvements need not be limited to hard skills. If we want to, we can learn to have a positive attitude when others only see the negative and we can learn to identify opportunity where others see risk. That said, these are not skills learned overnight. Like the hosts of My First Million have done well, these are skills best honed incrementally and consistently over a long period of time. With that in mind, we have work do to on figuring out forcing functions to hold ourselves accountable to refining these intangible skills. Isn’t that exciting!?!
Have a great week,
Your Chenmark Team
