“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin

As a (self-proclaimed) polymath, if my current main source of income goes away, I know I can use my current skill set to either:

• improve another one of my revenue sources;
• capitalize more on my other skills to add new sources of revenues; or
• increase my other sources of revenues.

While you may learn skills that become irrelevant over time, especially with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Biotechnologies, I’d argue that the process of learning is never irrelevant and that the chunks formed in your brain are helping you learn new skills faster anyway.

In the following piece, I defend the importance of continually learning new and different skills:

In a growing world of 7.7 billion people, how do you distinguish who’s qualified for something and who’s not? Unsurprisingly, people trust the opinion of people they know.

Seeking approval from others is so prevalent that everyone and their dog is on Instagram (IG) showing how their life is always so epic. If you’re not sharing your story on IG every day, surely your life is boring, right?

The truth is, it’s not all bad. The more people know and trust you, the more fail-proof you become. Special attention here on the word “trust”. Would you offer a job or buy from someone you don’t trust even if you know them? Certainly not.

In today’s world, the people with real power are those called “influencers”. Influencers are “famous” people online who have so many “followers” that they can get pretty much anything they want, depending on their “level of influence”.

I was astonished recently when a friend reached out to 5-star hotels to ask them for free nights because he was looking for a place to write his first book.

Guess what happened?

They said “yes”!

That same friend reached out to some of Ireland’s top CEOs through cold emailing. 100% of them replied, 81% of them agreed to chat with him.

I bet by now you’re wondering who my friend is and how did he build such influence. Surely he’s got 1M followers on IG or LinkedIn (LI)?

He most certainly doesn’t. For those wondering, my friend is Brian Pennie.

But it’s not all about volume. True influence is when you have a group of people — a network — who trust you so much that they’d do pretty much anything for you. I dug deeper here: