How To Earn From Your Skills In 2024

Quality is greater than quantity

Ajulu

Mar 02, 2024

Hello friends, and welcome to Day One.

I will be sharing a lot of profitable resources this year.

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Every time I start learning a new skill.

Or start a skill-powered business.

It usually takes me around 3 - 5 Months to make significant progress.

I made my first Million from writing in 2017 within 4 Months.

I got my first product design gig within five months of learning in 2019.

A business I started in 2023 gave me significant returns within the first 90 days.

I later created a private mini-guide to help others who joined before me in the business group.

I am not saying any of this to brag.

I didn’t do anything special in any of these cases.

I just applied some important principles.

You probably understand what it feels like to learn a skill for months/years but have no income.

You might have even gone on to add more skills to your portfolio.

But didn’t see much changes.

Let me share the keys to solving these problems.

The times that we live in call for more.

With the rising cost of living, it is dangerous to remain stagnant for long.

Getting results is harder when you don’t apply the right strategies.

Suffering the consequences of not taking the right steps affects you for a long time.

Faith in a new endeavor is hard when the last one didn’t go well.

The solution is to fix the mistakes not to fold your hands and say nothing works.

Here are the things that have helped me over and over again

Practice and Sharing

When I started learning product design,

I posted the very first thing I designed and asked for feedback.

It was a simple webpage but I got a lot of things wrong.

However, I cared more about people knowing that I was learning design than what they might think about my output.

Never bow to the fear that comes from putting out your work.

That fear is rooted in comparison.

Comparing yourself with people more advanced than you in your field won’t help.

See where they are as a destination and not something to compare yourself with.

When it comes to practice, what would help you is structure.

I researched design-related challenges and found one.

It was a 100-day design challenge.

It took over 3 months but I completed the challenge.

It helped me to achieve the following:

It helped me speed up my learning process.
I became more consistent with learning.
It helped me connect with people on the same journey as me.
I started getting jobs and recommendations from people who viewed my stories.

Most of this happened on WhatsApp.

Imagine doing it on a more open platform like Twitter or Instagram.

People can’t employ or recommend you if they don’t know what you do.

Your first set of jobs should come from people in your social circle.

Another thing that can prevent you from sharing your work is Ego.

I once talked with a young man who told of someone who knew who got a high-paying job without sharing his work consistently online.

My response to that statement was: “Who do you know ?”

He knew no one who could even recommend him for a job.

Ego will rob you of a lot of things.

There is no shame in sharing your work, you should care more about feedback than what people might think.

No one has time to analyze your life and guess whether you are doing well.

Everyone has their challenges and is focused on themselves.

So don’t allow fear or ego to prevent you from sharing your work.

The graphic below paints a perfect picture.

The Principle of Focus

During my skills conference that I ran earlier this year.

A developer talked about how someone who didn’t have his level of skills earned way more than him.

It is not enough for you to focus on learning one skill.

There is still a need to focus on that same skill.

Content alone has many sub-disciplines

Blogging, Newsletter, Social Media, etc

Not to talk about the different content formats ( video and audio)

So you have to pick a starting point and get good at it before adding more.

As a writer, I made a lot of money from blogging before I started learning other formats.

Focus doesn’t mean that you won’t learn more, it just means that you need to learn in a more structured manner.

There is something called skill layering, where you add more skills to your current skills.

What should drive that is proven demand and not what you think you should add to your portfolio based on the testimonies of others.

Let's say you start learning how to design websites.

Focus on that and share your work until you start getting jobs for that.

And as you go on, focus on getting better and better.

You would start getting ideas on the next thing to learn.

It can be copywriting or website development.

I know a website designer who charges extra because he knows how to mix copywriting with design and create websites that drive more sales for the business that he works with.

But he became a very good designer first before adding the copywriting element.

As someone who gets a lot of good ideas for businesses to implement.

Last year I started using an income-based roadmap.

So as I get ideas on learning or building, I add them to that roadmap.

But at the same time, I use income and systems to determine when to take up the next project.

So as the web designer in my analogy, you can give yourself this target:

Build a design agency that has 12 consistent clients
Make 10 Million Naira from web design
Train/Employ 2 people to run operations work for the agency.

This can also work even if you are working for someone.

Put things in place that ensure you get a certain depth in what you are learning before thinking of something else.

I talked about practice and sharing first because that is where many people get it wrong.

They think the solution to earning is learning more skills.

If you fail to understand this, you will learn 5 skills and have little income to show for it.

Transition to New Sectors

There are always sectors that would pay you more as a skilled person.

In my online writing guide, I teach writers how to accelerate their careers by writing for the blockchain/cryptocurrency sector.

Over the past two years, we have also seen a boom in the Artificial Intelligence sector.

But know this.

If you are moving towards these sectors, you would have to put in more work.

The first thing is learning the culture of that sector and what makes it tick.

Your best bet is just studying its history, which will give you more insights than just reading opinion pieces.

Conclusion

The biggest challenge you would face on your skill acquisition journey is ignoring the fundamentals.

There are no shortcuts to any of the things that I have talked about.

However, applying them diligently would bring you the fast results that you seek.

And as you build, the steps become easier and easier.

My 2023 results came faster because I have built a network for myself over the years.

Something that took others 1 month to achieve can take me just 3 days, not because they are not smart, they just don’t have my level of distribution.

It gets easier as you go.

Always remember that.

Offers From Me

I will be publishing my first book for the year next week.

It's a guide on productivity and the first in a line of books that I will be publishing this year.

Every month I will expand the best-performing article from this newsletter into a book.

The title of the first book is How to Get 40 Hours Daily.

The book would be available for free to subscribers and supporters of this Newsletter.