5 Talents That Help Men In The Modern Age

As winter is about to come to an end, I hope you guys have all been working hard. Much as we may detest the cold, there’s really no better time to get the bulk of your year’s projects done, because warm weather always beckons us with playful distractions. But this brings us to something of a crossroads. It’s very easy to think about what we want to do and the grand finale of our success, but creating a detailed plan of how to get there is another matter entirely.

This is where the concept of a talent stack comes into play. If you look at some of the most successful men in history, you’ll see that they may not necessarily have been the best at any one particular thing, but they were really good in almost everything they did.

You can apply the same concept to yourself, relative to your ambitions. Scott Adams, who coined terminology to describe the concept, explains that goals are for losers. Winners develop systems instead. Systems work better because they can adapt and succeed in a wide variety of circumstances. This, he explains, gives you better odds of success in the long run. Your original idea might not work out, but you’ll have gotten good at something you can take with you in your next attempt. That something you learned from your failure can become part of your system that will be there for you when success is easier to find.

Each of you will have different ambitions than I do, as well as different natural talents. The following, however, is a general set of skills that I think will be beneficial on every man’s journey. They’ll come in handy to taking every protagonist to his own happy ending.

1. Persuasion

No matter what you do, there’s going to be some kind of persuasion involved. Fortunately, Return Of Kings already sent you down this road by incentivizing you to get in the game and get good with women. By doing this, you’re already getting confident, used to leading, suggesting, closing, and so on. The game will give you a better interactive and more enjoyable lesson in persuasion than any course you take or book you read.

Persuasion

Yet, because of the central importance of this skill, it’s always best to learn as much as you can about it, because there always seems to be something new to learn. I recently read one of the best books I’ve ever seen on the subject, Unlimited Selling Power.

Unlimited Selling Power is a book that goes into great detail about hypnotic language patterns and conversational techniques that has already greatly improved my own persuasive technique, and I can’t want to try them out when the day gaming season opens up again in a few weeks. Whether you’re writing or speaking, the techniques work. I recommend you read this book as soon as possible.

2. SEO

Yes, it’s true that the most important part of SEO is creating good content that people want to share. But it’s also true that there’s a lot out there that people tend to miss. Even if your content is good, you won’t get much attention unless you put it through the SEO filters. In this, there’s a lot of little tricks you need to know if you’re going to be selling anything or building a brand online.

SEO is a needed skill, but the problem is it’s somewhat hard to get good advice because the field is littered with “experts” that don’t know anything. Be careful and don’t hire these people. You can get good enough on the cheap, so don’t even consider going to some expensive class or hiring some “expert.”

For instance, one common mistake people make is with image files. Instead of uploading a file with a name relating to the title and content, they upload something like “4qMB37E.jpg.” Safe to say, this isn’t conducive in telling search engines what your image is about, so people will miss it. You may as well have never released your content.

You can get good enough at SEO with a simple book. SEO Step by Step is one I read recently like. It tells you a lot of things you probably overlooked. You can get it for less than $10.

3. Rhetoric

A subset of persuasion, its central importance is that, even in the digital age, you’ll likely still be doing most of your communicating and persuasion through the spoken word. The ancients considered rhetoric to be of central importance to a young man’s education, and if they could afford it, families would send their sons to study under the masters of the art, most famously at Rhodes, where Cicero and Caesar learned. This is but one more thing that modern systems of education are severely lacking in.

Again, getting good with women will go a long way in improving your rhetorical ability, as will learning the conversational techniques in Unlimited Selling Power. Podcasting and video making will as well. I’ll be reading Verbal Judo later this year for a specific book on the subject.

Here’s where I also ask you for help. 2017 is a year where I want to improve my rhetorical skill more than any other. Do you have a resource of your own? I’d love to see it.

Caesar Roman rhetoric

4. Business Writing

This is a skill Scott Adams highly suggests adding to your own talent stack. The idea of business writing is to eliminate anything unnecessary and to get straight to the point. Too many people leave their compositions cluttered with unnecessary points and passive voices, which grow tiring to the reader.

Consider the following sentence:

“The item was purchased by the man.”

Compare it to:

“The man purchased the item.”

The second is far easier for the mind to comprehend. You may think you know that, but it’s actually too easy to wind up getting caught in passive voices or long-winded babble, and it won’t look good in anything you write, especially in your work.

Notice also that the word “may” was unnecessary in the last sentence. “You think you know that” does the exact same job.

These little things add up.

One book on the subject I’m planning to read later this year to improve this skill is Writing Without Bullshit. I’ll let you know how it is.

Business Writing Cartoon

5. Web Design

You should know how to make a website look good and how to install the proper plugins and extensions. Sometimes this may require a rudimentary knowledge of HTML. As always, the idea isn’t necessarily to become a pro, but to just know enough. For instance, at one of my web sites, I installed a chat box that greatly increased engagement and interaction with the site, keeping visitors there longer. I needed to know where to put the code for this in the HTML site template. It didn’t take me long to learn, but the key thing is to familiarize yourself with it. A lot of people tend to think this kind of thing is “over their head,” which means you can lend a helping hand – and win you more allies in the process.

Conclusion

These are only a few skills to add to your talent stack and your overall system. Having an eye for fashion, a system to improve your appearance generally, developing an appetite for risk, and developing knacks to sell a particular product are all important, but brevity requires me to stop here. This talent stack is only the beginning. If you have other vital things to add, skills that have improved your own odds, be sure to let us all know.

Read More: Why Women Are The Unfairer Sex

74 thoughts on “5 Talents That Help Men In The Modern Age”

  1. A few other talents:
    6. Body language
    Can be helpful if you don’t want to be lied to or want an edge in social settings.
    7. Money management.
    A penny saved today is three pennies earned in five years.
    8. Martial arts and self-defense.
    No shit.
    9. Critical thinking
    Helps not to be lied to.

    1. 10. How to use a gun.
      On second thought, I guess that is part of “martial arts and self-defense.”

  2. Well, i should have add: basic fighting, purifying water, finding/building shellter and edible food, but that’s your article.

  3. Unrelated:
    So apparently Red Ice Radio (an independent white nationalist news group) published an interview with Hotep representative Hotep Jesus. Building from the article from a couple of days ago, I would say this discussion was very red-pill and productive.

    1. Did the male presenter at Red Ice get fat ?
      Jesus, cracker needs to hit the gym immediately and fix his hair.

        1. He actually looks more bloated than fat. It could be he has been on some anti-diuretics or something,

  4. As a guy who worked with Web dev, I can tell you for most men, both web design and SEO are very overrated, especially SEO.
    My personal top 5 talents that will help you anywhere :
    1) Game (general social skills, ability to approach and lay or make friends)
    2) Fashion
    3) Fighting
    4) Cooking
    5) Driving

    1. Game is a good field tester for persuasion, certainly.
      This isn’t so much a “personal top 5 talents” as it is “talents to build a brand/platform.”

  5. 1. Giving a girl a good deep-dickin’.
    None listed are any essential talent, in fact #2-5 are very arbitrary and the author basically just applied all of them to writing and building webpages. A little weird. This article title should be closer to: “5 Skills to Master to be a Successful Business Web Page Designer.”

    1. This is more geared toward building your own platform. The title was inspired by some of the things in Scott Adams’ book.

      1. I see. Perhaps as a business owner myself I just look at it differently. In my circumstances it would be a huge waste of time learning to become proficient at web design and SEO, when I can merely hire someone who is talented in that area to do it for me, and spend the time saved on areas more crucial to my business. Opportunity cost is everything.
        I also probably see the word talent in a different way than others do. True talent is a finite resource, the average person is fortunate to have even one area of life that he could truly be called talented in, much less two or three. If you are an individual that is lucky enough to be talented in web design, SEO, and business writing, then by default that field should be your sole business focus and you should be making a lot of money doing this for others.

        1. Scott Adams called it a “talent stack” in the book, so I echoed it here because I find the concept useful.
          True, but what you need to know about SEO can be learned on your own. A lot of these professionals are scammers.

        2. Mike Cernovich often referred to the talent stack as well. (As well as recommending Scott Adams book)

      1. I wish that were true. We’ve moved way past that and little wonder many men are going MGTOW.
        Just being successful and even good looking is no longer a guarantee of anything with American women, as they’re such a mess now.

  6. SEO.
    no expert – and hate some of the nonsense
    also with images — rename from “cannon123.png” to
    “Jessica-Alba-Swimming-with-me.png” and also use the “alt” tag =>
    “Picture of Jessica Alba Swimming with me”
    another is database calls for items such as item =”123″ means nothing to google in the url.
    there are ways to spoof with google friendly urls, so it can be something like:
    item=123-deluxe-tv-set-42-inch”
    And once set up works automatically. also for blog posts -such as:
    “….returnofkings.com/116805/5-talents-every-man-should-have”

    1. There are also some free tools that will replace your local file descriptions and alt-text for each post. You can run the same picture on a post about knitting and basketball (to pick the dumbest example in my head, apparently), and the tool autofills your title and/or tags into the text fields.
      Basically, a few simple (free) tools can take most of the grunt work out of SEO.

  7. Persuasion/Rhetoric – and philosophy.
    IMO most important skills to learn.
    I have realized mostly too late in life. But, will try to help the younger ones…
    However, without powers of persuasion, and rhetoric; less than useless ability against the main-stream media…and Marxist schooling.
    Web Design — unless major reason to do it. Not so important — can use 3rd party tools to get up and running instantly – weebly.com, blogging software, etc…or pay some kid in India.

  8. Disagree with the web design bit. As the boomers die off, the number of people who think that web shit is over their heads will drop dramatically.
    Plus, IT types grow on trees, and things like WordPress make “web design” about as challenging (and thus, as valuable) as being able to click a couple of buttons.
    Agree with the rest, good article.

    1. Young software engineer, here, and from my perspective as a programmer and an independent sitemaster I would have to disagree. I spend an embarrassing amount of time around the college crowd, and they know even less about how the sausage is made than my grandparents. (This is, sadly, true even of many studying IT or computer science. How they got to junior level with such a low level of comprehension I’ll never know.)
      I do a good deal of work with WordPress, and you are right that it’s trivial to get a basic site up and running. However, it costs real money to get just about every neat and useful feature packaged in a way most idiot kids can comprehend, and even then you run into issues. A working knowledge of PHP and CSS increases your ability to design effectively tailored sites by orders of magnitude.
      There are thousands of people out there who can do that first-level design work, but if you can launch even into the second level you cut your competition down to a few hundred.
      And if you run your own site, a little knowledge lets you design the site exactly as you want for next to nothing.

      1. “….it costs real money to get just about every neat and useful feature…”
        Therein lies the trouble. A lot of the features are neat but not useful.
        Still I won’t harp on it too much. I got my start doing web design myself. Before WYSIWYG was a thing. 🙂

  9. SEO is something I’ve been trying to get a good understanding of to help get my site at the top of search results. Not sure if it’s just about identifying trending keywords and tagging the hell out of them in your articles or what.

    1. Its really about keywords and anticipating what someone is going to search. I have a site I’m working on in which I need to figure out my hosting and get the SEO plugins, but I’m interested to see if I can properly anticipate what people will search in order to trend on Google. It is my understanding that once you get a handle on SEO, Google will validate your site and there will be a better chance you’ll trend and be at the top of search engine sites.

    2. a major requirement seems to be back links.
      and there is the google tools to research keywords especially long tail keywords.
      plenty of on-line research/educational tools available via google search. so should be useful if show up on first page of search!

    3. It starts with finding a word you can be competitive in, then using a keyword tool to find the number of average monthly searches, then a title and keyword frequency for the bots to pick up.
      But the biggest thing is to create good content that people want to share. The book I recommended goes into it.

  10. I think he’s blending fundamental skills with functional skills a bit. Which is kind of a mashup. I would separate core skills (internal and evergreen) from functional skills (external, changing all the time).
    The core foundation that will take you anywhere looks like this for me (with rough estimates of their respective value):
    Ability to Think Well (deeply, rationally, independently) – Puts you in the top 5%
    People/Social Skills – Puts you in the top 30%
    Communication Skills (speak, write, publish, etc.) Puts you in the top 20%
    Persuasion / Sales ability – Puts you in the top 20%
    Decision Making/Risk Assessment / Judgment – Puts you in the top 10%
    Self-managment (emotions, stoicism, overcoming weaknesses, etc.) – Top 20%
    In other words, most people either cannot or will not get these core skills handled well.
    Would not these abilities empower me to learn any new functional skill I need? Or to get it from someone else (much more effective, usually)? Think Steve Jobs- not a coder, not a designer, not an MBA… so how did he bring Apple into existence? BTW, he was a 9 or a 10 on at least 3 of those 5 above. Great strenghs balance out great weaknesses in other areas.
    Remember, if you just move one standard deviation to the right, you just raised yourself above a large group of people. (the old joke- “I don’t have to outrun the bear… I just have to outrun you…)

  11. Yesterday I learned how I should properly fit into a T-shirt. Buying a single size to large can easily make you look 10-15lbs heavier. While you think you may need to hide baggier clothing, getting a well fitted tshirt can make you look a ton better no matter your body shape!

  12. Don’t even know what SEO is, and too lazy to look it up.
    Learn Web Design? Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

    1. Nah man, it’s not hard to do, you just film a spider with your iPhone for a while then take notes on what it does. In no time flat you’ll understand how to design good web sites.

      1. i phone? Not gonna happen. Always thought spiders were pretty cool though. And the fact that they scare the crap out of women is a bonus.

    2. In point of fact, I didn’t even know what the hell SEO is. Apparently it’s Search Engine Optimization. Otherwise known as “gaming search engine results”.
      😀

    3. Basic web design is useful and not hard. This site uses WordPress, and I started using it on my sites too. Good stuff.

      1. Everyone can install WP and steal a good template. That’s all the “webdesign” anyone needs.

        1. Not at all – there’s a lot more to it than that, so I’ve learned.
          A website intended to generate income is worthless without good traffic, Google ranking & sandbox, keywords & competition, niche selection, and decent conversion rates.
          A website needs quality content, relatively professional presentation, and to give readers a reason to click.
          Just slapping a website site together doesn’t work anymore like the old days. “templates” (themes) are free but the better ones aren’t, but are still pretty low-cost.
          Also it takes a bit of CSS code & learning to get things tweaked just right. But the good thing is there’s an abundance of information out there for men wanting to pursue those areas & who are willing to learn.

  13. But … but … but … NONE of those are STEM! Rhetoric? What the fuck is that? Grammar? Are we in grade school? The ONLY field worth a red-pilled man’s time is civil engineering.
    /sarcasm

  14. I familiar with SEO and it’s very true that you don’t need to hire other people. It’s all about socially active content. Make content people like and share and you’ll be golden. Make nice content that is easily digestible and put it in front of the right set of eyes and encourage them to share and discuss. You can’t manipulate Google. Also, make sure that your site looks nice. I’ve seen countless pieces of useless content rank very high, the only constant variable is that all top ranking pieces of content are on good looking sites. Great content is often on ugly sites, but people hate ugliness. They’d rather read crap on a good looking site.

  15. Spanking the monkey (considering the state of anglobitches these days) or international travel

  16. Guys, I’m new to RoK and really want to learn more about taking The Red Pill and waking up to what’s really going on. I’ve been looking through loads of articles and reading lots of comments, but there doesn’t seem to be anything that explains:
    – What a cuck is
    – How to identify an SJW or feminist woman before it’s too late
    – The impact Jews have on our society
    Could any of you guys help me out and explain, or at least point me in the right direction?

    1. A cuck is where a woman treats a man like an ATM machine or a carpet rug to be stepped on and where the man accepts his position. A sjw or feminist would be a bit bitchy or act like a fucking slut and think that she can defy her biological role to nurture and act like a man being all tough (i.e. Usage of virtue signalling, the “You go girl!”mentality, “I dont need a man” mindset, “Strong and independent” delusion that they live in, and the mindset that she can be fucking someone else while staying in a relationship (Its woman’s nature to not be loyal)). Im not so certain on the impact of jews on our society as a whole however, as i have heard most of the major bankers like the Rothschild family and Soros himself is most likely a Jew.

      1. Okay thanks for the reply – I’ve been on the Wiki and read up a bit more about cucks and SJW’s etc, but your reply helped me understand it a bit more. I’ll have to have a look into the roles that Jews have on Roosh’s website.

      2. Start with the Bible. Then read out introductionary material here.
        Also: cuck orginated from the word cuckoo bird. As the cuckoo birds would deposit their young in others’ nest for them to raise. sic needed
        Cuck, as the person above me defined is a man who can not maintain his masculine frame in a sexual relationship. He is trampled on by his woman, is ridiculed and denied sex, while she parades herself to other males. Some cuckolds enjoy it to the point they created a pornographic genre around these scenarios, chiefly depicting weak, pasty or fat white males being domineered by said black or otherwise male. The current popular repackaging of the word draws its origin in the fact that men who gladly or blindly parrot sjw/regressive leftist lies/views they are in fact “cucked”. They are not men enough to see the truth and go against the MSM. They also are possibly doing this to gain favor from women who never give them the time of day otherwise. You can draw the similarities there.

      1. Easily one of my favorite and most memorable childhood experiences; seeing this movie and this part in particular.

  17. Looks like someone read How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I did, after recommendation by Mike Cernovich, and it’s good. Scott Adams went through a lot to become the multi-millionaire he is now after the success of Dilbert, and he had a long road before even starting that. A good source of motivation and guidance for men who want more out of life.
    Copywriting is good stuff to learn – A good one is Crypto Copywriting Secrets. Learning to push people’s buttons (emotional, problem-solving, more) in order to persuade them to buy is a great skill. This one is a collection of newsletters but contains good examples of copywriting that works.
    Thanks for the SEO book tip – there’s so much to learn and I’m learning about it now for affiliate sites.

      1. Thanks! I’ll check those out.
        Recommended books for “real” learning are often excellent. That’s how I ended up reading Scott Adam’s book.

  18. I find it fascinating that rhetoricianship is needed no matter what. Look at the examples listed: a philosopher/historian and a warrior/king. There’s no getting around the way of words

  19. “Deception” should be one of them. In a world full of so much bs at work in school etc a man should be able to blend in when needed, take what he wants and vanish kind of like a Stealth Pussy Gabbing hand!

  20. I’d add “carpentry” and other practical skills like as well. Men should understand the basic mechanics and workings of machines and systems around them. This is lifelong process that ends when you die full of knowledge and skills..
    And it’s very rewarding to learn and master them

  21. Hey men.
    Fall in your rock bottom and be forced to eat your own feces. Experience hardship, hunger and thirst. Go work in toilet cleaning job, oil field, automotive industry and feel the physical and mental pain.
    You either thrive or die.
    EXPERIENCE IT YOURSELF AND SEE WHAT YOU ARE MADE OUT OF.
    You either die or live in this society. Which are you?

  22. For some reason as I read your advice herein my mind turned to thoughts of a particular woman. Why do I like her so? She can be a bitch and she can be a real darling. So what? Well, she is honest about it. Not manipulative, wanting, posing, being something someone else told her to be. She is herself and with that I can interact, influence her and be a real friend. I read Unlimited Selling Power many years ago and have read a bakers dozen books of NLP including several by Milton Erickson’s students and biographers. There are few things, if any really, which pay greater dividends than an understanding of the human mind and how it works. I enjoy watching as the Kings return.

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