3 basic rules of freelancing. Know who you are: If your messaging is not clear, you will not work. Know what you offer: You should never be trying to do it all. Know who your ideal client is: You cannot be everything to everyone.  Basics, right? We've all heard these rules before but they are more important now than ever before. In a market that is experiencing growth unlike anything we've ever seen, it's a do-or-die situation. If you cannot clearly define who you are, what you are offering, and who you want to offer it to, there are plenty of others who can and are just waiting to jump right in.

concluding that noncognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.

They assumed it would be technical expertise. Instead, it was people who made time for one-on-one meetings, helped employees work through problems and took an interest in their lives.

The extent to which jobs required social skills grew 24 percent between 1980 and 2012, he found, while jobs requiring repetitive tasks, like garbage collecting, and analytical tasks that don’t necessarily involve teamwork, like engineering, declined.