10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade

Learn the rare skills of admirable people

Neil Kakkar
6 min readJan 27, 2021
Photo by Sead Dedić on Unsplash

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed certain skills in people I admire, from Paul Graham, Vitalik Buterin, to Ender Wiggin.

These are rare skills, responsible for making them who they are. Most normal people, including me, don’t realise it. This makes the skills powerful — not everyone can see them, and very few people have mastered them.

However, I aim to change that. What follows below are 10 skills sourced from admirable people that I want to develop.

Learn to take compounding seriously

It’s not just your wealth that compounds, but life experience and knowledge, too.

So, learn the most basic, most useful skills first. The longer you wait to learn skills like these, the less time there is for compounding magic. That’s what this entire list is about: powerful skills to learn and use for the rest of your life.

And even though you’ve heard about compounding, this item is first on the list, because taking ideas seriously is hard.

A good way to figure out what compounds is to figure out what’s a platform.

Learn to develop taste

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Neil Kakkar

I write about Code and Life philosophies. Sometimes both. | https://neilkakkar.com | Engineer @PostHog | Write (Code). Create. Recurse.