I will give away the greatest secret of all.

I hope to inspire everyone to do what I am doing. To connect with the world. To interact with it. To learn from it.

So I will share with you the greatest secret of all.

The ability to communicate is nothing but an acquired skill. The ability to relate, communicate, listen and share are all just acquired skills.

So how do you acquire a skill? How do you refine a skill and get better at it?

YOU PRACTICE.

You practice as much as you fucking can.

Like every skill there is, you will make countless mistakes as you practice. You’ll mess up conversations sometimes. You’ll get scared and give up sometimes. You’ll get rejected sometimes. People won’t understand you sometimes.

All of that is perfectly fine. How many startups are out there that the founders didn’t fail miserably for a LONG time before they found success? How many startups are successful today ONLY because they persisted in the face of mistakes. And more than that, they learned from those mistakes and sharpened their skills, moving forward more concisely and clearly while doing so.

Now, here’s an even better part about this practice. You’re not practicing how to be a presentation. You’re not learning a script or how to ‘sell’ to people or anything like that. It’s strange but, you actually have to practice being yourself in conversation a lot. Speaking from a genuine nature that is crucial towards gaining trust in relationships. You have to learn how to be fearless in expressing truthfully and, the first times you do this, it might not go so well. This is the part where many people might not understand you. You might feel you said too much. Asked too much. All of that. But, in time, with lots of practice, you continue figuring out how to just be yourself as much as possible. To be present in those conversations and genuinely listen and learn from them.

If you have your phone in your face, ignoring the world around you, you are not practicing. You are actually regressing because there are people around you practicing and they are continuing to move forward. And the world is always moving forward, with or without you. There is no standing still. You’re either moving forward or falling backwards.

There is no stasis.

To learn how to communicate, in person, these days is one of the SINGLE MOST POWERFUL TOOLS you can possibly have. You can be yourself so you can share your heart with others. You can ask for help when you need it and you can give it when it’s asked of you. You can negotiate and not give up something that makes you bitter or resentful. You can be way smarter, way more intuitive and way more aware of what’s actually happening in the world around you.

SO PRACTICE.

Practice every single day. A great way to practice is to go to restaurants or sit at a bar with a beer. Leave your phone at home and strike up genuine conversations with the waiter. The bartender. The person next to you. You have absolutely NOTHING to lose in these situations and learning how to create a genuine conversation takes real world experience many times and here, you’ll have no limit to how much you can practice.

If you can communicate, the world bends in your favor and everything falls into place. But most importantly of all, you get to surround yourself with relationships that genuinely know who you are and what you need, because you were able to communicate it. And they will be vulnerable with you and do the same also.

Go practice.