Don’t Fall Behind: How To Become High Value In 2024

Before we dive in; Click here to join 400+ students learning how to achieve Self-Mastery with MasteryOS.

Everyone wants to know the best high-value skills to build to make a tonne of money.

But most people don’t realise that until you become “high value” and get your life in order, you’re not going to make any money no matter what your “high-value skill” is, whether it’s copywriting, lead generation, video editing, sales, or whatever else.

So to stop you from falling behind, here are 5 skills that will build you into someone who can actually make those skills high-value skills work and allow you to become high value in 2024:

Skill 1: Writing

Now this might catch you off guard, but let me explain why writing is such a crucial skill to help you become a high-value person.

Writing is deliberate thinking, it’s you sitting down and working through your thoughts on a certain topic, it allows you to separate yourself from your thoughts and view them a bit more objectively.

The reason this is so damn beneficial is because if you build the habit of writing and over time improve your skill at writing, you’re improving your skill at thinking - because writing and thinking are the same.

And if you get better at thinking, you’ll make better decisions and take better actions, which will improve your entire life and the chances of you being able to make any sort of skill work.

Now I actually used to hate writing because in school I hated writing essays, and I think a lot of people, likely you, are in the same boat. They think they hate writing.

But really you just hated what you had to write about and the way you had to write about it in school.

If you decide to build a writing habit now, you can write in whatever way you want, about anything you want, you just choose something, anything that interests you and grabs you and just put your thoughts down on paper or on a word doc.

You also have the opportunity to build something valuable and meaningful because writing in itself is a high value skill.

So if you write about a certain topic, let’s say it’s self-improvement, you can publish that writing on the internet, whether it’s on Instagram, Twitter, a blog or you use it as a script for a YouTube video, and over time you publish that content, building your personal brand and allowing you to build a business - which is exactly what I’ve done over the past 4 years.

Of course, you don’t have to publish your writing on the internet at all, but I would recommend it.

If you’re going to write, you may as well put that writing to use to build yourself something that will only benefit you with the opportunities that come with it and that has absolutely 0 downsides.

And yes, when you start out writing you’re going to be crap at it.

Writing is a skill, but don’t let that stop you, because when you’re starting out creating content, you have 0 followers - nobody sees your content, so by the time you’ve built up an audience, you’ll have created enough content to be good and earn that audience.

Don’t let being crap at writing stop you from getting good at writing.

By improving your ability to write and therefore think, you will be more articulate, which essentially means, you’re able to get your thoughts and your point across in a more concise and impactful way.

If you’re more articulate, people will take you more seriously and respect you more than if you’re a fumbling idiot, barely able to turn your thoughts into words.

And if you’re more articulate, you’ll be more persuasive. No matter what “high-value skill” you decide to build, being more persuasive is going to help improve your success at that skill and your ability to make money with it.

In terms of building the skill of writing, the most important piece of advice I can give you is to write daily.

Whether you write 10 words or 1000 words, whether you publish it or not, just write daily about anything that interests you.

This is also another benefit of publishing your writing, it gives you a more concrete goal and direction with what to write about as well as providing some accountability to actually write every day.

Regardless of how you decide to build the skill and habit of writing, understand this;

All the most successful people, high value people are amazing thinkers and the best way to improve your ability to think is to write.

Skill 2: Networking 

Admittedly I suck at this skill and it’s something I need to improve on, but networking is incredibly valuable.

We all know the quote “You are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with” and with the nature of networking, you don’t just network with random people, you network with people who are slightly above you or who are at least on the same trajectory as you.

They’re improving and progressing and have big goals that they’re chasing.

When you surround yourself with these sorts of people who are like you, who are trying to do something worth doing and become all they could be, you instantly level up just from being around them, your standards instantly rise.

This is thanks to a sort of friendly competition and innate desire to climb the status hierarchy where you want to do more and do better than them but in the least aggressive way and most favourable way.

They’ll want to do the same, they’ll want to beat you in this friendly competition but also still pull you up with them and so because you’re both always trying to do more but also pulling that other person up with you, you both level up and improve your standards, allowing for exponential progress over time.

This should be a goal that everyone has, you should be aiming to surround yourself with people who make you realise how much higher you should be aiming.

Not only because of how you’ll level up as a person in every area, improving your chances of succeeding in whatever you’re trying to do, but by being around like-minded people who are either above you or on the same trajectory, the amount of serendipity and opportunities that throw themselves in your face goes through the roof.

Let’s say you’re a copywriter and you network with an e-commerce facebook ads agency owner, if any other of their clients need copy, they’ll likely recommend you to them simply because you are in the same network and are friends.

And whether you like it or not, people will judge you based on who you associate yourself with.

If you’re always hanging around losers who party every weekend, smoke every night, have no goals, and can barely get out of bloody bed in the morning, people are going to think the same of you.

But if you network and associate with more “high-value” people, who have goals, who do the work, who want to make something of themselves, and are evidently trying to make it happen, then they will again, think the same of you.

Your network is your networth.

So network with like minded people - this can be online or this can be offline and likely nowadays, online is much easier because you can network with people anywhere in the world at any time.

It’s also another reason to publish your writing online.

If you create content and grow your audience, cool people will reach out and try to network with you, and you also have more leverage, status and social proof with your following, making people who you try to network with much more open to networking.

Pardon The Interruption…

There’s a key aspect to finding success (in any definition of the word, in any area of life) that I didn’t cover in this email.

You see, most people don’t find success in whatever they’re trying to build because they aren’t the sort of person who’s able to make that thing they’re trying to do work.

That’s where the 5 skills I’m going over in this email come into play.

BUT…

There’s an underlying reason why most people, don’t have these skills already and will never be able to build these skills…

They have no level of mastery over themselves.

Their impulses and inner bitch control their every move.

They struggle to do anything consistently, they struggle to focus, they can’t get shit done and they lack discipline.

This used to be me.

But after an inconceivable amount of trial and error, failures and mistakes - I figured out the path to Self-Mastery and I put it together, step by step, in my program MasteryOS.

We’ve had over 400 students join us on the pursuit to building discipline, achieving Self-Mastery and becoming all they could be, if you want to join MasteryOS and become someone capable of achieving anything you set your mind to - click here.

Skill 3: Doing the work

Now this one might seem pretty damn obvious, but yet, it’s the one everyone struggles with the most.

It doesn’t matter what skill you’re trying to build - be it copywriting, sales, video editing, whatever - if you can’t do the damn work that you know you need to do despite how you feel in the moment, you’ll never see progress and improve in that skill so you’ll never get results and never achieve the big goals that you’ve undoubtedly set.

You see, what happens to a lot of people is that they do certain tasks every day, but these tasks aren’t the tasks that they know they need to do, they aren’t what will generate results or progress.

So they use the tasks that they do as a disguise for their inability to face what is waiting for them, they say “Oh I’ll do it tomorrow”, “I’ll do it later”, not realising that tomorrow doesn’t exist.

There’s only now.

So you either do the work right now, schedule a specific time to do it or you put it off.

And when a task or a problem is staring you in the damn face, you need to deal with it. You can’t put it off.

If you do, you ruin your self-respect.

You fill yourself with anxiety and guilt.

All of which makes you even less likely to rise to the challenge that’s in front of you - doing the work or solving the problem.

And then you can’t improve, you can’t get results and you stay where you are because that thing that will make you move forward, is the thing you’re avoiding.

And it’s only natural to want to avoid it.

It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be tough and it will cause some discomfort.

But that is why it creates results and that is why you need to do it.

If you can’t do the work, you can’t do anything.

So stop avoiding it.

Stop avoiding the work that you know you need to do and stop running from the problems that you know you need to solve.

It doesn’t matter how you feel. It doesn’t matter if the world is crumbling around you. It doesn’t matter if it’s cold outside and the rain is lashing down - the thing you’re hiding from won’t just disappear.

So turn and face it.

Do it tired. Do it when nobody else would. Do it cold. Do it when you feel alone and when you don’t.

Because the longer you wait, the farther you run, the bigger the monster gets.

Luckily, this is a skill.

You might be terrible at doing the work right now, but over time you can improve at it and get better at it.

I used to be the worst in the world for facing what I knew I had to face, but now it’s not a problem, when I feel resistance I take it as a sign to run into the fire and enter the arena.

And the first thing I did to help me start improving this skill was building my productivity system.

If you want to see that productivity system and how it works, check out this video

Skill 4: Playing the long game.

Regardless of what you’re doing, the natural human desire is to want everything now, not later.

And it’s completely normal, after all, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, but the problem is that when it comes to anything worth having, you can’t get it right now, it takes time, effort, sacrifice and grit - you have to earn what’s worth having.

For example, let’s say you want to build a web design agency to $20,000 a month.

The amount of time that it will take to first off build the skill of web design and then also your skills at finding and signing clients, fulfilling those clients, potentially handling contractors and everything else you have to do is insane.

It’s not easy, regardless of what any of these make money gurus tell you.

And the amount of time it takes to build those skills to the level that’s necessary to earn 10k or 20k a month, every month is insane, it’s not something you can do in 3 months, 6 months, and likely not 1 year.

Now of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to achieve something like that in 3, 6 or 12 months because some people do it, but they are the exception - for the majority of people building a business like that by the time you build up all the skills that you have to build to the level necessary to achieve what you want to achieve, it will take at least 1 year.

And honestly, 1 year isn’t a lot of time at all in the grand scheme of things, it’s still pretty short-term in terms of building skills and businesses and achieving goals.

But if you’re constantly playing short-term games, you’ll screw yourself over and sabotage any progress you make.

Because when you’re playing short-term games and trying to get everything now, you’re going to try to find and take short cuts and when you can’t find one that works, because none of them do, you’re going to jump to the next skill or business and go from shiny object to shiny object and get nowhere.

I would say this is one of the biggest downfalls of the majority of people who are trying to build something online.

They jump from business to business and yes, there can be some benefits to doing that because if you spend 3 months learning copywriting and then jump to Facebook ads and spend 3 months learning about paid ads and repeat this however many times, you can build a very nice selection of skills that will benefit you when you find the one business model that you’re going to stick to.

However, the problem for most people here is that they jump from business to business for the wrong reasons.

They jump because they aren’t seeing results now and they want everything now.

Playing long-term games is a hard skill to build and honestly, it’s more of a mental reframe and a mindset.

If you’re going to do something, and you don’t plan to be doing it in 10 years time, it’s not worth doing.

You would be much better off putting that time and effort into something you know you will want to still be doing in 10 years, something that you’d be willing to play the long game for - because it will take a long time to get the results that you want to get and if you aim to build something over a decade or more, the thing you can build can be amazing.

And if you start something with this mentality, you’re only going to start things that you’re much more likely to be interested in and it means you will only change business if the thing you’re doing is something you genuinely hate doing and don’t enjoy.

Which is a perfectly fine reason to jump ship.

But if you’re jumping ship because you have a short term mindset and you want results now, then it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re not going to find success in it.

So before you build a high-value skill or start a business or do anything, ask yourself “Do I want to be doing this in 10 years time?”

If not, don’t do it, find something that you would be willing to do for 10 years.

Skill 5: Analysis and implementation

Whether you play the long game or the short game, and regardless of what skill you build, you’re inevitably going to make mistakes, plateau and get stuck.

You’re learning, you’re not sure of what to do next - and here’s a secret, nobody knows what to do next, everyone just makes it up as they go along, but based on their past experiences - and if you’re new to something like building a business or a high value skill, you don’t have that much relevant past experience, so you’re really not going to know what to do next or what the right thing to do is.

So you’ll make a mistake and you’ll plateau - it’s normal.

But where most people mess up is that when they do make a mistake or when they do plateau they stay there.

They don’t try to learn from their mistakes and so they keep repeating them, seeing no progress, and therefore, eventually they’ll quit.

So if you want to improve and see relatively consistent or at least predictable progress, you need to learn how to analyse what you’re doing, what went wrong, and how to implement what you learn.

If you don’t know what you’re doing wrong and how to fix it, you cannot improve.

So if you make a mistake ask yourself, “What caused my mistake, how can I prevent it from happening again and what lessons are there for me to learn?”

Whatever your answer, implement it and do what you can to prevent the mistake from repeating.

If you plateau, ask yourself “Why am I not improving? What am I not doing or trying that would likely push me forward?”

Again, whatever your answer, implement it and try it.

But the problem here might be that you don’t know enough about the skill or business you’re trying to build to recognise your mistakes or what you’re not doing that you need to do.

And here there are only 2 solutions;

1. Fuck around and find out

So you just try something, try anything based on what you do know, and see what happens.

If your results improve, great, that thing you tried is likely the right thing to do.

If they don’t, well then, keep messing around and try to find out.

2. Learn more

Your ability to recognise mistakes and know what you need to do to make the progress you want to make is limited by your knowledge which is largely limited by your experience.

So you need to learn more.

One way to learn more is to fuck around like we just discussed because you’ll gain experience and have more data points to learn from which will improve your knowledge and therefore ability to improve.

Another way is to sit down and learn.

Now you can read books or learn most things for free on Youtube, but the problem here is that when something is holding you back and you don’t know what it is, it can be incredibly hard to know what to look for on the likes of Youtube.

Again, you can mess around and try to figure it out for free because it does work and you will eventually find the solution, it will just a tonne of time, trial and error.

What I would recommend you do is buy a course or a hire coach.

Because courses are put together in order and for a reason, a course is incredibly likely to cover the problem you’re having, especially if you’re a beginner, and give you a solution because that’s what courses do, they solve problems, give roadmaps and tell you how to do a certain thing.

Now hiring a coach is a lot more expensive than buying a course, but they will tell you the exact problem you’re having and exactly what to do in your context with 0 guesswork, so it is by far the most efficient and effective way to solve your problems in your business.

Either way, regardless of how you learn more, whether it’s through messing around, a book, YouTube, courses or coaches, you need to learn more so that you’re able then to identify and analyse your roadblocks, and then implement what you learn so that you can solve your problem.

If you don’t, you will stay stuck where you are when you encounter a problem or make a mistake.

- Ross

And when you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

• Achieve Self-Mastery, unlock your true potential, and smash every goal you set with MasteryOS

• Join the waitlist for cohort 2 of Done In 4

• Learn how to build a multi-6-figure audience and business with Personal BrandBldr