The One Skill That’s Made Me Millions
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 28th, 2023
Let’s talk skills…especially the ones that shape our lives.
Today, I’m diving into the ultimate power skill: communication.
It’s the secret to boosting impact, income, and fulfillment.
I stumbled into communication’s potential while pursuing my passion for writing.
From reluctant wordsmith to successful author, I witnessed how effective communication transforms lives.
Whether speaking, writing, or connecting, it’s the cornerstone of success.
If you’re looking to level up, focus on honing your communication skills.
It’s the catalyst for business growth, personal development, and meaningful impact.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
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And if I have better, higher value skills, then I can become a higher, better value person.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
You all know I’m a real big proponent of skills. I think skills are the only investment that pay dividends regardless of economic conditions. And so you should be, at every turn in your life working to level up your skills. In fact, it’s one of the four spheres of influence that I talk about. You have your, your mindset, you have your health, your wealth and your skills. Those are the four things that are really going to dictate the quality of of your life. And they’re the things that are, for the most part, fully within your control. And when it comes to skill acquisition, I get super excited about it because I look at skills as just being like the operating system by which I can continue to level up my machine.
Anthony Vicino:
And if I have better, higher value skills, then I can become a higher, better value person. And so I just think that’s a really interesting concept that took me a really long time in life to think about in a way that moved me forward rather than held me back. And what I mean by that is that in my story, a lot of it transitioned when I started looking hard in the mirror and realizing that the skills that I had just weren’t really bringing a lot of value to the world. And as a result, because I wasn’t bringing a lot of value to the world, I didn’t have high value skills, I wasn’t making a lot of money. Not only was I not making any money, because money is just one metric by which we might measure success. I don’t even think it’s the most interesting one. But in other areas too, in terms of life satisfaction or feeling fulfilled, in thinking I’m making a meaningful contribution to the world, I’m making it a better place than I found it. I didn’t feel that because I didn’t have skills that really made the world a better place.
Anthony Vicino:
It didn’t improve other people’s experience and didn’t leave anything better than I found it. At that point, I was a rock climber. I was really good at climbing rocks. Cool. That’s not doing anything for the world though. And as a result, I wasn’t making money, but I also wasn’t feeling fulfilled. I was feeling a lot of joy and excitement and traveling the world, but it wasn’t a deep contentment. And so when I decided I wanted to start playing the money game better, the first place I had to look was at my skills.
Anthony Vicino:
And what I realized at that point was, well, I don’t have any. I’m kind of starting from scratch what would be the most important skill to acquire? And I got really lucky, honestly, in hindsight, looking back on it. The skill that I chose to pursue in the beginning and the skill that I’ve pursued probably the most doggedly over the last decade, twelve years or so, is, it turns out, potentially the most valuable, lucrative skill in the world. But I didn’t know that at the time. I just kind of fell into it backwards. And I’ll tell you the story of how I fell into it. But that skill, that most important skill, that the one singular thing that has made me the vast majority of my wealth and not only that, but has led to the most fulfillment in life. And feeling like I’m making a meaningful contribution into improving the lives of other people is the skill of communication.
Anthony Vicino:
That is through the written word, being able to write my thoughts out and to share them in a compelling way or to be able to speak, say on a camera, on a podcast, on a video, whatever. The ability to communicate effectively with people and transmit a message that can help them improve their lives in some way or improve their business, that has been the most lucrative skill I’ve ever had, I’ve ever acquired. I think it is the most important skill if you want to make money. But again, going back to the idea of making an impact on the world, the ability to communicate your ideas in a way that compels people to change or take action, it turns out I think that is the most powerful skill in human existence. And you have to look no further than there’s so many countless examples of powerful speakers and orators and communicators who are able to I mean, look at I’m not saying Hitler is a person that we should look up. To by any means. But you look at what he was able to do. A person who had really no other valuable skills beyond his ability to communicate in a way that compelled people to take horrible actions.
Anthony Vicino:
But he was able to communicate very persuasively to them. But you can also look at the other side of know, Martin Luther King Jr. Or John F. Kennedy. Like these people who are incredible communicators, abraham Lincoln, they were able to affect incredible change with nothing more than their words and their ability to communicate those words in an influential impactful way. And so when it comes to what skills should you be working on, I think communication should be in your top three, if not the number one skill that you should be sitting down every single day with intention trying to hone and improve. And there’s so many ways that you can do this, whether that’s sitting down and journaling every day or blogging or twitting tweeting or having a podcast or doing a video or just making sure to sit down with Loved. Ones or your employees, or your workers, your colleagues, people in the world and having conversations with them and with intention, trying to improve at your ability to tell stories in an effective manner.
Anthony Vicino:
Right? A lot of times we as humans, we are masters at recognizing a good story from a bad story. But we’re not always so good at telling stories and so anything done with intention, I think, can be inevitably a success. But the problem is, most of us don’t try to. We don’t approach the act of communicating or storytelling with enough intention, and so we don’t necessarily improve at it. Now, for me, when I said before that I kind of fell into this one backwards, I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t with intention that I looked at the world and I said, okay, what is the most high value skill that I could acquire to get out of that van and start turning my life around? I fell into communication, specifically writing, because when I was in middle school, my dad, he recognized that I had this innate ability to tell stories and write compellingly. And so he would pay me ten cents per word to write him short stories. And at the time, I wasn’t interested in writing.
Anthony Vicino:
And even to this day, I always say I hate writing, but I love having written, and it’s not something that fills me with deep joy that I’m excited to sit down and write. It’s painful, it’s hard, it’s a laborious process. And it was back then for me as well. But back then, I couldn’t really see any reason to do this thing beyond the fact that my dad was just paying me to do it. So I would write him stories that were long, rambling just so I could pad out the word count and make more money. But they weren’t good. And I never thought that I was going to be good. I just was doing it because my dad was encouraging it.
Anthony Vicino:
And my dad kept cultivating and not pushing me towards this, but just gently providing the resources so that if I ever wanted to make this thing more, that I would have that ability to do so. And so when I was 16, for my birthday, he gave me the book on writing by Stephen King. Again, I didn’t have interest in writing, but he was still just, like, giving me these resources. And when I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But I knew my dad had been encouraging me to writing, so I kind of thought, well, maybe I’ll be a writer at some point in my life. But again, I didn’t enjoy writing all that much, so I didn’t pursue it with vigor. But I went to college, I got a degree in English, religion and psychology. But like the English, I was like, oh, if I want to be a writer, an English degree would probably help hindsight it, doesn’t it? Didn’t at all.
Anthony Vicino:
But I always had it kind of like in the back of my mind, well, maybe I’ll be a writer someday. Well, that time I’ve told you the story before about sitting down with my ex fiance with her parents and asking them if I could marry their daughter, her mom looked at me and said, hey, what are you going to do to provide for our daughter? And at the time, I was just a dirtbag broke rock climber. I had no skills to provide to the world. But I left that conversation with a chip on my shoulder. It’s this idea that I’m going to prove her wrong because she was really judging me. She was judging me as not being worth anything. Because truthfully, at that point, I didn’t have a ton of value to the world, but I took it as a challenge. So the very next day I said, I’m going to be a writer.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s what I’m going to be. I’m going to be a science fiction and fantasy writer. So the very next day, I started a blog called Weekly Short Stories. And it was weekly, as in, we a k. Like, I’m not very strong. Like, these are weak stories. And I would tell a story every week, so it was like a double entendre. And every single day for the next year, I sat down every morning and I would write 3000 words, which is a lot of words.
Anthony Vicino:
And by the end of the year, I had written around a million words. I’d published a bunch of short stories on that blog and I was in the process of writing my first novel, which still has that first novel that I was working on at the time, never saw the light of day. But the reason it didn’t was I was about halfway through it when one of the short stories I had written for that blog started to kind of go viral. And I had written that story, it was kind of a serialized story that had spanned maybe six weeks. So it was a longer short story, it was maybe like a novella length. And so I was like, wow, people really like this. And people were really asking for me to continue building in that world. So I pivoted and took that short story, expanded it.
Anthony Vicino:
And that became the time heist and Mind Breach and Soul State and the firstborn Saga, which became my very first trilogy that I published about a year and a half later. And all that’s to say is that I fell into that skill. I fell into this thing that my dad had kind of been fostering in me since I was a young kid. And in my time of need I just turned to it and I got really lucky, it turns out, because that ability to write effectively and persuasively it then served me very well as I started to transition into nonfiction, and then I started transitioning into more spoken word content. But just what I found was the ability to take my ideas and share them is the most valuable skill that I have. And I think it’s one that we can all improve because we’re all communicating in one way or another, like constantly, whether that’s through our body language, through what we’re wearing, through how we’re saying what we’re saying through what we’re saying. And I think it’s a skill that if you’re starting off right now and you’re not where you want to be in life, I think that’s the first skill to really look at your ability to communicate. Because everything else becomes so much easier in business.
Anthony Vicino:
Whether that’s trying to rally a team around a cause or trying to rally an audience around a product, the ability to effectively communicate has been it’s changed my life. It’s transformed it for the better. So that is the one skill, if I had to pick one, that has made me millions. Hope this brings you a little bit of value. Guys and gals, I appreciate you, as always, being here. I’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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