👀 Overview

Once you know what it is your want and why you want it, you've already won half the battle.

However, this information is useless without proper action behind it.

In this next section, you'll be the expert. This week, you're going to take a super-deep dive into learning and developing skills in your passion.

The objective is not perfection, but rather building the habit of deep immersion in the subject.

During my time when I start scaling I was watching YouTube videos on the subject matters while walking to and from different areas, I was constantly reading books, articles, and watching videos on blogging/content writing best practices, etc.

After you have determined your passion, find the 4-7 most essential skills to develop in the arena, then gather the necessary resources to learn those skills. Don't be afraid to learn in public!

Also, if there's anything that I've learned after purchasing over $10k in online courses, it's that you don't truly need another course, what you need is to gather the best, hard-hitting free or cheap resources. These will more than suffice.

However, you may want to join paid programs for the same reasons that you would want to join college - to gain expert insight and networking. In the beginning stages, it is much more important to start learning from free resources. If you don't learn from free resources, you won't even use your paid resources properly.

The best way to learn these foundation skills and to actually build them up for creating your portfolio design is by following the advice of specific mentors, guiders or experts that you look up to.

For example, if your passion project is going to be about cooking and you want to get more views/traffic as a food blogger and more gigs as a professional chef, you're going to want to start by emulating specific people that you strive to be.

📰 Worksheets

GOALS - Systems/Processes - Habits

5 Step Foundational Steps (What are the 5 most foundational steps for delivering the product or service for your passion project?)

Hyper Focused Learning Tips - From Jim Kwik

Deep Learning Worksheet and Timetable

Resource Gathering Worksheet

✅ Must-Dos/Checklist

At the end of this module you should have:

• [ ] Mapped out all of the skills you want to learn in your passion project
• [ ] Picked the main skill and deliverable that you're going to sharpen
• [ ] Broken down the deliverable into 5 foundational steps
• [ ] Gathered free/paid resources that you can work on to hone this skill quickily
• [ ] Equipped yourself with deep learning tools

💁 Helpful Additional Resources

📽️ Video Script

• Once you've settled on a specific passion topic, it's critical that you break down your field into a sequence of necessary skills. You'll need to narrow down your focus to begin with in order to sharpen your skills and monetize in a short amount of time.

• For example, I want to be a full-stack digital brand consultant. That's my 10-year goal. I want to be competent at all elements of brand design from logos to typography to UX/UI web development and internal branding. In addition to that, I want to be able to do both paid and organic digital marketing at a high level.

  • If I were to list out the skills that are needed to achieve this it would look something like this:

• Data Analytics

• Attribution and measurement systems

• Pay-Per-Click Advertising Platform Management (Google, Amazon, Social Media Channels)

• Display Advertising

• Copywriting

• Content Writing

• Image Design

• Video Creation

• Affiliate Marketing

• Design Thinking methodology (applies to everything)

• Design process (research-mood boarding-applications)

• Email Marketing

• Social Media Marketing

• Branding (including parameters)

• Website Design

• Color Theory and Design Software

• Composition rules (Gestalt)

• Color Theory

• Typography design, including layout and grids

• Art tendency and Modern design

• Design principles and Design Systems

• Usability and user experience applied to design

Learning all of these skills in a year or even 2 years would be absolutely insane and definitely impossible. Instead, I chose to focus on one part of one of these skills - content marketing and blog post writing.

• By filling out the different skills that you need to achieve in your field and learning how to master just 1 in a short amount of time you're essentially condensing the period of time before you achieve your larger milestone.
• Learning skills one step at a time will give you a deep, immersive look into your passion instead of a more shallow step into it.

Now, layout the different skill categories within your Passion. For my marketing goals included Organic Marketing, Paid Marketing, Funnel Design, and Social Media Marketing. Choose one of those overarching categories and break those up into sub-categories as well.

Then from that sub-group, you can focus on one of these that will be your focus for now.

Don't worry too much about pigeonholing yourself up too much at this point, you'll be able to adjust and pivot along the way since you're building your personal brand around you, preferably, and not just around the title of your passion.

After you've chosen a specific sub-skill, make sure that it can be monetized. You can check this out by looking for job boards, postings or businesses that are looking for help with this specific skillset.

Your sub-skill must be, specific, monetizable, and resource driven. Then from that sub-skill, you want to think about the specific result that you can create for your client.

For example: As a blogger I chose to learn how to delivery concise, well-written, 1,000 word blog posts that have SEO value and potentially convert readers.

If you want to learn to become a Nascar Racer and you don't have a driver's license, this clearly is not going to work for you.

However, rapid learning is a very important element of being able to pivot in the modern marketplace. It also keeps like fun :)