Motivation Mondays: 12 Qualities I Admire More Than Skills

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” John Wooden

Motivation Mondays: 12 Qualities I Admire More Than Skills

12 Qualities I Admire More Than Skills: Recently, I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed when a post by Gary Vaynerchuk came across my screen and made me pause. It was a picture of a handwritten list of “10 Things I Admire More Than Skills.” His list had the following qualities: Compassion. Sympathy. Empathy. Kindness. Gratitude. Humility. Patience. Self-awareness. Being the bigger person and Sincerity. Something about being the bigger person got me thinking, and soon I had put together my own. I must add that there are many forms of this list going around on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the Internet, and all have merit.

As you read through the list, ask yourself: Which of these qualities am I cultivating?

Skills matter. They help us build, create, solve problems, earn a living, and accomplish extraordinary things. I admire talent, intelligence, education, expertise, discipline, and achievement, but there are qualities I admire even more. Skills tell me ‘what you can do.’  Character tells me ‘who you are. A person can be enormously talented and still lack integrity. They can be Brilliant and unkind. Accomplished and arrogant. Knowledgeable and completely unaware of how they affect others.

Skills can be learned, practiced, sharpened, and displayed. The qualities below require something deeper. They influence how we treat people, how we respond when life doesn’t go our way, and who we choose to be when there is no applause, reward, recognition, or audience. Here are 12 qualities I admire more than skills.

1. Integrity

“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”Anonymous

Definition: The quality of being honest and guided by strong moral principles, even when doing so is difficult or inconvenient.
Why does it matter more than skills? Skill tells me what you are capable of doing. Integrity tells me what you can be trusted to do. Talent without integrity can actually become dangerous because ability gives us power, while integrity governs how we use it. Reputation is what others believe about us; integrity is who we are when nobody is keeping score.

2. Compassion

“Compassion is a necessity, not a luxury.” The Dalai Lama

Definition: The ability to recognize another person’s suffering and feel moved to respond with care.
Why does it matter more than skills? Skills may help us solve someone’s problem; compassion makes us care that the person has a problem in the first place. Compassion takes us beyond noticing suffering and asks what we might do to lessen it. Intelligence can make us capable, but compassion helps make our capabilities humane.

3. Magnanimity

“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom.” Edmund Burke

Definition: Greatness of spirit and the willingness to be generous, gracious, forgiving, and above pettiness, especially when we have the power not to be. Why does it matter more than skills?
Why does it matter more than skills? Magnanimity is character at its most expansive. It is refusing to make ourselves bigger by making someone else smaller. It allows us to congratulate a competitor, forgive an offense, share credit, acknowledge another person’s gifts, and sometimes extend grace when retaliation would be easier. Skills can make a person powerful. Magnanimity reveals what that person does with power.

4. Peace
“Peace begins with a smile.” Mother Teresa

Definition: A state of inner or outward calm, harmony, and freedom from hostility and unnecessary conflict.
Why does it matter more than skills? There is tremendous strength in a person who does not need to create chaos to feel powerful. Peace does not mean passivity, weakness, avoidance, or remaining silent in the presence of injustice. Sometimes protecting peace requires courage, boundaries, difficult conversations, and walking away. Skills help us navigate the world. Peace helps us live within ourselves and with one another.

“A man’s character is the true guarantee of his conduct.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Motivation Mondays: 12 Qualities I Admire More Than Skills

5. Sympathy

“Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature.” William Godwin

Definition: The ability to recognize another person’s pain or difficulty and respond with concern and care.
Why does it matter more than skills? Skill can make someone accomplished; sympathy keeps accomplishment from making us indifferent. We do not have to experience another person’s hardship, or even fully understand it, to acknowledge that it hurts and respond with tenderness. Sympathy reminds us that being human isn’t merely about what we achieve. It is also about whether we remain capable of being moved by one another.

6. Empathy

“I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.” Maya Angelou

Definition: The ability to understand another person’s feelings or perspective by trying to see an experience from their point of view.
Why does it matter more than skills? Skills help us perform; empathy helps us connect. A highly skilled person may be able to solve a problem, but an empathetic person first tries to understand the human being experiencing it. Empathy asks us to step outside ourselves to listen without immediately judging, fixing, comparing, or imposing our own experiences. It makes us better friends, parents, teachers, colleagues, leaders, neighbors, and citizens.

7. Kindness

“I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness.” Mother Teresa

Definition: The choice to treat others with generosity, consideration, warmth, and care.
Why does it matter more than skills? Kindness may be one of the most underestimated forms of strength. Skills can earn recognition; kindness often asks for none. Character is revealed in how we treat people who cannot advance us, what we say when nobody important is listening, and what we do when there is nothing to gain. Talent can open doors. Kindness determines how people feel after we have walked through them.

8. Gratitude

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Cicero

Definition: The conscious recognition and appreciation of the good we receive, experience, and sometimes take for granted. Why does it matter more than skills? Skills naturally draw attention toward what “we” accomplished. Gratitude reminds us that almost nothing meaningful is accomplished entirely alone. Someone taught us. Encouraged us. Forgave us. Opened a door. Gave us an opportunity. Loved us. Prayed for us. Believed in us and/or stayed. Gratitude does not diminish achievement; it gives achievement perspective. Skill says, “Look what I can do,” while Gratitude remembers, “Look at all that helped me become able to do it.”

“Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” Abraham Lincoln

Motivation Mondays: 12 Qualities I Admire More Than Skills

9. Humility

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” Rick Warren

Definition: The ability to recognize your own worth and abilities without believing they make you more important than others.
Why does it matter more than skills? Skills can make us impressive; humility keeps us teachable. Humility doesn’t mean shrinking ourselves, denying our accomplishments, or pretending we don’t know what we know. It means carrying our gifts without needing those gifts to establish our superiority. The skilled person who believes they already know everything eventually stops growing. The humble person remains curious enough to listen, learn, admit mistakes, give others credit, and change course. Talent may put us in the room. Humility determines how we behave once we get there.

10. Patience

“Patience is the support of weakness; impatience is the ruin of strength.” Charles Caleb Colton

Definition: The ability to wait, endure difficulty, or tolerate delay without becoming consumed by frustration or anger.
Why does it matter more than skills? Skills help us accomplish things; patience allows worthwhile things the time required to become possible. Not everything in life can be hurried by intelligence, ambition, talent, money, connections, or effort. Some things, like healing, trust, wisdom, relationships, mastery, and even dreams, develop according to timetables we cannot control. Patience requires an unusual kind of strength: the discipline to persevere when effort has not yet produced visible reward. Skill asks, “What can I make happen?” while Patience understands that some things cannot be forced.

11. Self-Awareness

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” Daniel Goleman

Definition: The ability to recognize and understand your own emotions, motives, strengths, weaknesses, behaviors, and their effect on others.
Why does it matter more than skills? We can possess extraordinary skills and still be oblivious to ourselves. Without self-awareness, intelligence can become arrogance, confidence can become dominance, ambition can become selfishness, and directness can become cruelty, all while we remain convinced that other people are the problem. Self-awareness gives us the courage to examine not only what we do, but why we do it and how it affects those around us. It also allows us to ask one of life’s most difficult and important questions: Could I be wrong?

12. Sincerity

“Simplicity and sincerity generally go hand in hand, as both proceed from a love of truth.” Mary Wollstonecraft

Definition: The quality of being genuine, truthful, and honest in what you say, feel, and intend.
Why does it matter more than skills? Skills can be performed. Sincerity cannot, at least, not for long. We live in a world where people can become remarkably skilled at presentation: saying the right thing, projecting the right image, cultivating the right persona. Sincerity asks something harder: Do your words reflect what you actually believe, and do your actions support your words? A sincere person may not always be polished, eloquent, or impressive. But we know where we stand with them. And that creates something skill alone cannot manufacture: Trust.

What These 12 Qualities Teach Me: Why do they matter more than skills? When I put them all together, I see something larger than a list of admirable qualities: Integrity keeps us honest. Compassion moves us to care. Magnanimity raises us above pettiness. Peace teaches us another kind of strength. Sympathy notices. Empathy understands. Kindness acts. Gratitude remembers. Humility keeps us teachable. Patience keeps us steady. Self-awareness keeps us accountable. Sincerity keeps us true.

None of this means skills are unimportant. We should learn. Study. Practice. Develop our gifts. Become excellent at whatever we have been called or have chosen to do. But we should devote at least as much energy to developing who we are as we do to developing what we can do because skills can get us the position. Character determines what we do with it. Skills may bring achievement. Character determines whether achievement changes us. Skills can make people admire us from a distance. Character determines whether they will respect us up close.

And at the end of the day, I would rather be remembered not merely for what I knew, owned, achieved, earned, created, or accomplished, but for how I made my way through this world and how I treated people along the way. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Character is higher than intellect.” Just five words teaching an enormous lesson. Perhaps that is what these twelve qualities ultimately represent. We don’t arrive in this world possessing perfect character any more than we arrive possessing perfect skills. Both require practice. We stumble. We learn. We examine ourselves. We apologize. We forgive. We grow. So, yes, develop your skills. Learn. Study. Practice. Become excellent at what you do. Use your gifts. Share them. Keep growing. But develop your character even more because what you can do may help you make a living, but who you become helps you make a life.

Positive Motivation Tip: What you can do may help you make a living, but who you become helps you make a life.

PHOTO CREDITS/ATTRIBUTIONS: All Photos from Adobe Free Stock and Pixabay

Until Next Time…
Ask. Believe. Receive. ©
Elizabeth Obih-Frank
Mirth and Motivation
Positive Kismet