The most important skill no one can teach you  

Building a world around your work requires a combination of skills, but there is one fundamental ability you won’t learn from anyone else. 

Creating, marketing, selling, writing, communicating—all are prerequisites for building a creative business. 

And from videos to blogs, courses to communities, you can learn these skills from an endless variety of sources. 

Education is not in short supply. 

But application is. 

Because knowledge can break down when things don’t go as planned. 

The song that falls flat. 

The video no one watches. 

The thousands of dollars in wasted ad spend. 

What then? 

What skill can you call on to right the ship when things inevitably go wrong? 

And how do you learn it? 

Here’s the problem 

The foundation of education is conceptual. 

We have to learn how something works before we can ever hope to apply it. 

The good news is that concepts can hold up well when applied with low stakes. 

The bad news is that success is never guaranteed, and the odds of something going wrong in any endeavor are precisely 100%. 

And it is then that you have to apply the most important skill. 

It is the skill. 

Problem solving. 

You see, anyone can claim proficiency when proficiency is conceptual, when there’s no skin in the game. 

But it takes an entirely different mindset to persist when everything is going to hell. 

Ask any successful artist, creator, or entrepreneur, and they will tell you that persistence and success are byproducts of solving increasingly complex problems. 

Because knowing how to do something is not the same thing as doing it. 

How we learn 

Unfortunately, no one can teach you how to solve every problem you might encounter in your creative or business pursuits. 

Because no one can foresee what problems you will inevitably face. 

Sure, you can commit to memory endless heuristics and mental models (I, myself, do love a good mental model) that can guide your problem-solving efforts, but the rules must still be applied with nuance. 

Because nuance is where the fruit of problem solving lies. 

Because problem solving is the practical application of concepts with stakes. 

It involves action. 

And risk. 

There is no other way. 

Because what worked (or didn’t work) for someone else isn’t guaranteed to repeat and scale in the exact same way for you. 

Because every song is different. 

Every video is different. 

Every business is different. 

Every creator is different. 

And the only way to learn how to solve problems is to solve them. 

The solution 

If the greatest skill you can learn, that no one can teach you, is how to solve problems. 

And if the only way to learn how to solve problems is to solve them. 

Then the only way to build a business from your creative work is to build a business from your creative work. 

To create work you’re proud of. 

To release it. 

To promote it. 

To create, sell, communicate, and iterate. 

And then to take stock of the results, seek to understand, and then to show up and try again. 

This is the only way it works. 

It is the only way it has ever worked or will ever work. 

And the good news (bad news for those who are lazy or dependent upon excuses) is that the future belongs to those willing to take action. 

Willing to look foolish. 

Willing to try. 

And fail. 

And try again anyway. 

So if you are a high-agency, creative individual with a superhuman ability to eat glass for an extended period of time, then this letter is for you. 

Congratulations, you’ve already won. 

You just don’t know it yet. 

Because you are already solving problems and learning from the process. 

And just as no one can teach you how to do that, no one can take it away from you either.