It has never been about what you know.

The old quote "It is who you know not what you know" can be understood as a conclusion in investing in soft skills over hard skills. You'll know people who can fix gaps and you can call upon these people through utilising soft skills to build relationships.

Soft skills can be sorted into creativity, innovation, teamwork, leadership, communication, initiative or just simply being human. Hard skills are essentially just knowing things in relation to the job such as driving a forklift.

There is a large misconception in every walk of life that it depends on what you know. That has never been the case in any walk of life. It has always been on who you know.

The Facts

A Study of Engineering Education authored by Charles Riborg Mann in 1918 stated that 85% of job success comes from having well developed people skills. The other 15% comes from the hard skills.

If you ever thought about it, the most successful people in most industries are the ones who are more personable and approachable. It is the one that generally people turn to when things need to get done. The people that simply just know it all are often rarely successful.

The person may not know everything but they know the people who can help them. It often leads to potentially beneficial outcomes where people are more motivated to help the person with stronger soft skills than the one with stronger hard skills.

Imagine if you're an absolute prick to deal with and the only reason why people talk to you is because you're the only one that knows how to make a boiler. These people would be slowly invested into creating their own boiler rather than dealing with you.

However, if you were more collaborative and potentially merged your businesses together. They'd instead invest into you rather than against you.

So how do I build my soft skills?

Nobody is perfect in this sort of area as there are miscommunications and emotions involved. Managing those is a key component in driving soft skills growth to ensure that everybody is on your side.

I mean there is an entire self-help book dedicated to this called "How to make friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie.

If you want to drive a relationship or drive a project especially in disagreements, you need to understand what sort of approach that another person is having. This is where the soft skills come into it. You want to dive into their needs, what they want and a plan to get what they want.

The main key component on building soft skills is get involved with what the person is talking to you about. You can ask questions such as what do they most enjoy about X?, what is stopping them from getting Y? and what would their end goal look like? You want to avoid making judgements or trying to fix the issue. Sometimes people want to be heard rather than for someone to fix it.

These sort of inquisitive skills helps you get into their world and they'll open up more about themselves. You'll also need to have the self-reflective skills to be aware how you could be or appear for someone else which sometimes is incredibly difficult.

The other critical soft skill is being able to tell person that they're wrong and lead them to a different direction without it turning into a personal attack.

Self-Reflection

Self-reflection is incredibly important skill to master. You need to have an idea on how you would appear to somebody before engaging with someone. The most common one is that generally older people think they know better than younger people therefore older people may view you as an inexperienced kid.

From my self-reflection, I've been pretty terrible at managing my emotions in particular when something that I feel is unfair is involved. I've been incredibly combative in certain scenarios and have definitely hurt my esports career considerably.

Once you've assessed what you are to the other person, you can build from whether you wish to stray away from that quality or further refine that quality.

Trust

Trust is literally 95% of my job as a financial adviser. I have to convince people that they can trust my skills and abilities as an adviser. They need to trust me on both a personal and technical level. This is a hard trait to maintain but an easy trait to throw away.

In my job, I am incredibly skilled in this area as when my company that I worked for was taken over. We managed to keep 95% of the client base with the new company and you know what most of them said? "Because Josh is there."

It was mainly it was because I had built all those trust relationships up with them for the last 10 years. Being a financial adviser is all about getting into their lives and opening up about themselves.

Trust is quite simple such as doing what you said you were going to do. Lining up both your words and your actions. This is an incredibly important soft skill to utilise in the industry. If you are unable to be trusted, nobody will ever recommend you.

Trust requires you to be consistent and act with integrity which can be quite difficult especially with conflicting ideals involved.

If you are unable to act with integrity especially with people involved in the decision on who gets hired. It'll be a long road for you.

One clear example of conflicting ideals is accepting a role at the Esports World Cup. You can't claim to be fighting the good fight with the pride movement then accepting money from an institution which is against that. It is a choice between short-term gain or a long-term gain.

Creativity

Creativity and Innovation generally fit together as a soft skill. It involves the ability to tailor a solution to a unique problem. Creativity and Innovations generally separates the leaders and the followers.

One example is the Esports Awards where a lot of known figures in the Esports Scene have now created their own award show. This is due to the current Esports Awards were purchased by the Saudi Arabia government.

This allows for the Esports Scene to still have their award show and maintain their trust and integrity. You can see the unique problem with the unique solution that has been provided.

With Esports, the main attributes of creativity and innovation comes from doing something different from the norm. It doesn't involve just simply throwing money at it. It involves being more than what you are.

As an Esports Organisation, you want to be more than just an Esports Team, you want to be able to sell merchandise, provide content and have collaborations which complement your primary objective. The primary objective with an esports team is generally have a successful team but even that objective can be changed.

Teams like Team Endpoint and the former Copenhagen Flames focused on developing players, building high quality bootcamp facilities, hosting tournaments and strengthening other income streams rather than building a competitive team.

Team Endpoint has become a team where the Esports Team is the marketing arm for their high level Esports Facilities for various international teams to utilise.

Creativity and Innovation is essential to ensure that your income streams are diversified and not reliant on venture capital or whether your team wins a tournament.

Last Words

From what I've experienced in the Esports Industry, these three soft skills is what most of the top tier talent have. They are able to become much more than just a host, just a caster, just a tournament organiser or just an Esports Organisation.

This is what you should strive to be. You'll want to be more than just a caster. You can be a caster that organises tournaments. You can be a caster that writes articles. You can be a caster that writes a podcast.

The worst thing you can do is be one dimensional and wait for opportunities to come to you. You want to be taking charge without needing any incentive to be placed infront of you.

Thank you for reading!