The Diary of a CPO - Chapter 3

Master this one skill and you will have a lifetime of career success.

If you had only one skill you could truly master, what would it be to promise you a lifetime of career success?

That’s a pretty loaded question, right?

I used to think it was being really good at your craft, whatever that might be, like being a great coding engineer, or being the best financial analyst with the ability to model numbers in your head.

But that’s not even close.

If you want to master one skill to achieve the greatest successes in your career, let that be first and foremost, the art of articulation - how to express your ideas in a clear, concise and well articulated manner. Articulation is about how we use words to convey a vision, a feeling, an emotion or an abstract idea. You see, in order to communicate an idea or a conviction, you have to be able to captivate an audience, whoever that audience might be, and the best way to do that as a human being is by the words we choose. How you curate those words is literally an art.

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

The reason why I believe that having the ability to articulate yourself is so critical to career success is because it affects every area of your professional (and your personal) life. You require strong articulation to negotiate your terms, your contract, your salary. You have to understand how to use the right vocabulary to match the context of your ideas. With the right tone and just the right words, you have the ability to persuade an entire audience of an idea that may not have crossed their minds before.

To give you an idea of how powerful the art of articulation could be, let me share 3 stories with you.