Expanding the Core
The last little while I’ve devoted Sunday Success posts to your core interests, first on protecting your core, then on expanding your core and most recently on taking time and care when expanding your core. Most recently, I got to reminiscing about the changes around here, the development of my interests and writing and how to use that to develop a brand.
Today I want to talk about success and seizing the opportunity, but first a look back on skill stacks.
Skill Stacks
One topic I’ve repeatedly returned to is your skill stack, the set of skills you have that, when added together, create a unique combination you can exploit to further your goals. When I started out to fix my posture a few years ago I followed a path that just grew organically:
- Posture correction
- Back pain relief
- Exercise, fitness and health
- Stress relief and healthy living
- Diet and nutrition
- Ergonomics
I looked at what I’d accomplished just by allowing one thing to lead to another, and decided to add skills I thought might be useful for expanding my reach. This led me to add copywriting to my stack. In my journeys in the world of copywriting, I stumbled upon a very interesting fellow and studying with him led me to add
- Motivation
- Success
- Writing for a mobile app
This set of skills, added to a few I’ve had for a long time (course creation, instruction and public speaking) has motivated me to finally begin building out my first online course. The process of doing this is adding new skills, such as research, using newly minted ones like copywriting, while using the ones I developed over the lifetime of this little site.
Seize the Opportunity
The thing about building out your skill stack is that you don’t know where they are going to take you. I’m building a course centred on the idea of learning healthier, more ergonomic and efficient ways to work from home, while maintaining fitness, posture and pain free movement. I don’t know exactly what the final shape will be, because my market research isn’t yet complete.
Along the way, however, a funny thing happened. Two of the companies I’m working with, Mirasee and Learnistic, have offered Joint Venture opportunities to their clients, including yours truly. So, in addition to learning how to create and launch a course from Mirasee, I will have the opportunity t sell their programs. In addition to learning how to create and launch a mobile app from Learnistic, I will have the opportunity to sell the software.
Will I actually make any sales? I don’t know. I hope so, because, hey, money is money. But even if I don’t make a single sale on either JV, on order to make use of this opportunity, I will have to add more skills to my stack.
What those skills are, I cannot say, because the JV training has not yet begun. What I can say is, no matter what skills I gain from entering into the JV partnership, they will have application somewhere in what I’m doing.
Seize the Opportunity
The opportunities that have opened up to me, in just the last three months, are completely due to me taking the time and expending the effort to expand my skills. I’ve generally added ones that are useful, in one way or another, but even that isn’t necessary. Just taking the time expands your horizons, increases the number of people in your network.
It is this expanding network that provides the opportunities. So expand yours, and when an opportunity comes available, seize it.
