Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

What do you think is the number one skill or asset that everyone should have that will always further them in life?

Good communicator in the written word. I don't think it's hard to improve that. I think that a regular practice of writing, it could be journaling in the morning for five to ten minutes with something like morning pages. Having a regular writing practice, and it could be just an assignment that you give yourself once a week, and you're going to write three to five pages, and then you're going to pay someone to edit it or to review it and that could be a teacher at a local college who does say creative

writing classes or it could be a friend as a lawyer or a lawyer lawyers are very good at spotting

sloppy language or sloppy thinking words that are unnecessary words that are easily confused

just that practice of

tightening up your writing will tighten up your thinking. So if you want to improve your thinking,

the most concrete, tangible way to do that that is easy to manage is having a regular writing

practice of some type. And the goal isn't to become a better writer. The goal is to become a clearer thinker. No matter what you are doing in life, you are going to have to, especially in a digital world where email is going to remain king for the foreseeable future. And if not email, it's going to be text. There will be a text component. Then you need to be a compelling communicator. And then I would suggest very closely related to that is getting good at negotiating. So communicating and negotiating, there are two pieces. So written and then verbal. Written and verbal. There's a program called Secrets of Power Negotiating. The audio version is exceptional to listen to because you are able to pick up the nuance of the intonation

and the delivery. And then you role play that. You have to practice. You can't expect to read a book on

negotiating, walk into a huge negotiation that you're nervous about and knock it out of the party.

You have to roll play it. You have to practice. The one asset would be honing your

clarity of thought by some type of regular writing practice.

What do you think are some good ways to increase confidence for anyone? Or what are some ways

that you did to increase confidence along the way? And what are some things other people can do?

I think positive thinking is necessary but not sufficient. What I've noticed, and this is very common, for instance, in the meditation world, they're

outside of the action, right?

So they're at a monastery.

They're somewhere with minimal inputs, and they're the picture of patience and calm and so on.

But I've seen some of those people.

Exactly.

When you throw them onto the front lines, they lose their shit. I think that you need to make yourself uncomfortable. And that's why in the four-hour workweek, these comfort challenges are so important. And they seem silly, but there's a very transcendent, important benefit that you get from, say, going into a Starbucks and laying down on the floor for 20 seconds and not saying anything to someone and they're just getting back up. And that's a comfort

...