The Most Valuable Skills for 2025

In partnership with

Take on 2025 with $10,000

You’ve got big goals for 2025. And HoneyBook has the tools, resources, and bonus prizes to take you there. Join HoneyBook in January for a chance to win.

Start for free for a chance to win

Hey honeys and hustlers,

The best ways to grow your income are to learn a new skill or increase your competency in the skills you do have. It likely feels natural to lean into our creative and technical skills, as your growth and progress are easily measurable. But what about the intangible skills that are harder to measure? Here are some non-creative skills to consider developing this year:

1. Product development. Producing creative projects people engage with, developing physical and digital products that resonate with your audience and community, or creating educational products that provide transformation. Conducting experiments, iterating on what’s successful, and distilling what you learn from others into actionable steps. Freelancers, in-house creators, and online creators will need to master this to have a sustainable career.

2. Automation-Powered Productivity. Using automation within your workflow to simplify repetitive tasks and enhance the effectiveness of your work. This could mean leveraging tools like Zapier or Make, integrations within the digital tools you already use (i.e. connecting your digital product store to your email list), or button automations within Airtable or Notion.

3. AI Literacy. You don’t have to like it or agree with it, but AI tools are here to stay. Understanding and effectively working with AI tools, knowing their capabilities and limitations, and leveraging them ethically to enhance your work quality and efficiency will be a massive advantage.

4. Digital Communication. Mastering clear and effective communication across various digital platforms for a variety of use cases. Where AI writing will become more common (i.e. LinkedIn prompting you to choose an AI-generated response/comment to a post), being able to write clearly in your own voice will be a sought-after skill for remote collaboration and online writing. I also can’t tell you how few people will follow up, respond to emails within 48 hours, or respond to comments on their posts. The bar is incredibly low.

5. Data Analysis. The ability to interpret data, identify patterns, and make informed decisions based on analytical insights. I think it can be easy to measure when a post gets a lot of impressions, but not as easy to measure what efforts directly contribute to the goals you have and which efforts are falling short. The ability to create a viral post and the ability to create a post that gets a lot of clicks and conversions are two different things.

6. Emotional Intelligence. Navigating interpersonal relationships effectively, especially in digital environments where traditional social cues may be limited is extremely valuable. When you’re a creator, you have to advocate for yourself a lot, which can mean having difficult conversations with customers, clients, or even yourself.

7. Community Building. Nurturing connections and strengthening collaborations, online and offline. A lot of people may know that they need to lean into building community, but very few people are willing to put in the effort to show up for others, especially if it means they may not directly or immediately benefit from doing so. Somebody will get that one on the way home.

8. Focus. Eliminating distractions and staying disciplined on the right things. Time management is going to continue to be relevant. In many ways, we typically know what we need to do, but we often lack the discipline to set aside time to specifically focus on those things.

The goal isn't to master everything at once but to steadily improve in areas that will have the biggest impact on your creative career. Being a creator is a professional choice, but you must improve personally to show up as your best self creatively.

What skills are you working on this year?

In Readworthy News

// In a recent video, MrBeast helped 2,000 people walk again by helping them get prosthetic legs. Check out my previous article on MrBeast’s approach to philanthropy: What Creators Can Learn From Mr. Beast 

// I love making predictions that feel like they’re immediately not going to come true. Meta announced that in addition to rolling back their DEI policies, they’re also getting rid of their third-party fact-checkers in favor of community notes. Let’s see what other predictions I’m right or wrong about: Creator Economy Trend Predictions for 2025 

// From Bo Burnham, “We used to colonize land. That’s where the money was to be made. We colonized the whole earth. There were no other places for business and capitalism to expand into. And then they realized: human attention! They’re now trying to colonize every minute of your life. That is what these people are trying to do. Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone and they could be gathering information to target ads at you.” Read my previous article on The Economy of Attention 

Please Hustle Responsibly,

🤙🏾✨

Say hi on Linkedin or YouTube

If you’d like to engage with this community, here are a few ways you can do that:

Forwarded this article? Your friends have good taste. Sign up here.

Join the Creator Database. The best place to connect with the incredible folks in this community. View and join the database here.

Advertise with us. Get your brand in front of 855 creators, founders, and marketers by sponsoring a YouTube video, podcast episode, or this newsletter. Reach out at [email protected].