SUCCESS THROUGH SMART SKILLS

According to Sternberg, what intelligence is described as “street smarts,” or the ability to use information to get along in life? We may like to call it as a common sense & it is an important factor for success-story that everyone is interested to know.

In his latest book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell challenges traditionally prevalent notions such as the rags to riches narrative of success by explaining the myth of the self-made man.

He does this by analysing the various factors that come together to create success. These are usually a combination of lucky events, rare opportunities, and other external aspects which are not really controlled by the person attaining success.

If not all, many of you would have felt, at least after the event, that you had choices to pick & when you had no rationale behind the choice and you see it as a right decision, you tend to call it luck. Many a time we don’t recognise these choices/opportunities and the art/science of identifying these choices are a part of practical intelligence or street-smartness. Let us see through the series of blogs on this success-through smart skills the way we need to cultivate this habit of identifying the opportunities

We have heard a stereo type motivational speeches talking about Passion, Talent, hard-work, etc., etc. However, we have seen lots of people with these skills have not shined. We have heard of quotes like Experience make the man perfect”

All these things don’t guarantee success every time. Probability theory of spinning the coin too takes an important criteria that the condition of experiments should be the same.

Does this mean, nothing of these are not required for success & what is required it totally different?

Surely, not. All these things like passion, attitude, hard work, talent and skills are very important, but they can take you up to a certain level only

On your way to Success, you have no other go, but to face few failures, but surely they teach you lots of new ways to success. It builds up resilience, innovative capability and willingness to take more risk

However, more important thing is that it builds your practical intelligence & adaptability to new situations. It fine-tunes all your skills to make them smart-skills to make you street-smart. You get all your basic skills transformed in to a new avtar of SMART-SKILLS like

1. Your Mathematical & logic skills takes the new avatar & you get NUMBER-SMART

2. Your linguistic intelligence gets transformed into WORD-SMART communications skills. Your choice of words becomes powerful to get what you want. (here is the quote from ThiruValluvar, which says that words not rightly chosen is equivalent to plucking & eating an unripe fruit when you have the option to choose & eat ripened sweet fruit)

3. Your kinaesthetic intelligence gets fine tuned into SMART BODY LANGUAGE to express your emotions in the right perspective that paves way for success

4. It makes your inter-personal skills honed to PEOPLE-SMART increasing your ability to leverage your net-work to support you in your journey to success

5. This helps in aligning your intra personal skills into SELF-SMART. You are geared to face any situation & ability to adapt to that situation it gives you the power of understanding on feeling & range of emotional responses.

6. Visual & spatial skills can enhance picture-smart of a person. They will be able to comprehend any problem or new concept. They will have capacity to understand complex concepts easily & will have the ability to convert them into images & present them in a convincing manner. This may give them the power to convince the people and influence their net-work

7. Sound-smart: These are the people who can modulate the voice in expressing themselves & will have the ability to identify patterns in the rhythm which will be of use to recognise the problems and their intensity. They will be very good in expressing their views that will be well received

8. NATURE-SMART: These are the people who are nature lovers, which makes them see & appreciate things in their own natural way. This automatically instils empathy in them to observe both pluses and minuses of any situation which forms the foundation of any situation and give them the ability to adapt to the situation & the scenario, they are in