Life skills are some of the most important skills you can have. One thing which separates life skills from the skills that we learn in school is that life skills tend to be things which are hard to teach in a classroom, skills that will most often be learned through experience alone.
Handling Work
One such skill is learning how to handle work. In real life scenario, anytime that you think that you have got to a point in a project where you think it is fully completed, there will always be more work that can be done, extra effort that can be put in-order to take it a class above the rest. Contrary to this, in college, students are given projects that must be definitively completed at a specific time.
While project deadlines also exist in the real world, the work is never quite finished. There will always be more that you can complete, and you should think of life in terms of ever increasing experiences which allow you to learn more about the world you live in.
Handling People
An important life skill is learning how to handle people. When it comes to handling people you must always keep in mind is that people are non-altruistic, and will do things primarily for their own self interest.
One thing that is found to be interesting is that many people, particularly those who are unsuccessful, go throughout life making decisions based on emotions, as opposed to logic. Many people look out for their own self interest, not yours.
While emotions are inevitable, they also make humans weak. A computer or machine does not factor in emotion into its decision making process; its decision on whether or not to carry out a function is based on cold hard logic.
You must keep in mind when doing business in this world is that people are looking out for themselves; if they need to rip you off in order to get something they want, many of them have no problem doing so. Therefore, you must always protect yourself and try to make critical decisions based on logic and never emotion.
Never think that people care about you because you are a nice person, or because they just like associating with you. While it is true that you attract more people when you are sociable, people in most cases will only deal with you if there is something they can get out of it. If they cannot get anything out of it, then they may not deal with you.
When dealing with people, never deal with them in terms of emotion. The people you deal with should be useful to you; if they are not, then you have no business dealing with them.
Friendship
Friendships should be handled with caution; friends tend to become jealous and patronizing, and because they know you as a person, they can sometimes be more dangerous than your enemies.
Always watch friends carefully, and be prepared to discard of them if they become problematic. Never continue dealing with a friend simply because of any emotional attachment you have to them, think logically.
Good Grades
Having good grades will not make you successful, but it will get you a job
In college, many students are obsessed with having a high GPA. They thought that by maintaining a high grade point average, they would have more job opportunities. They are right, they will have more job opportunities, to work as an employee for someone else.
Having a college degree will not guarantee that you will become the CEO of a company; the fact of the matter is that most of these students end up becoming employees who work under a person who never even graduated from college.
Having good grades only shows that you are good at following directions, at memorizing facts and concepts.
The problem with getting good grades is that it does not teach you how to take risks, or how to become a leader. This is something that can only be learned out in the real world, you can only learn how to lead or deal with risk by having experience, it is something that you acquire as you progress.
Because high GPA students seldom learn how to lead or face risks, they are often the least likely to establish their own companies, since it is easier and less risky to simply go work for someone else.
