Help Your Career - 4

Don’t underestimate the value of contributing to others. In his book The Way of Adventure, author Dr.Jeff Salz, an adventurer and teacher, reveals the importance of serving others. He learned this lesson from an unlikely teacher on his travels but the truth of the matter holds no matter when or how you learn it or from whom.

Serve others as a way of improving your own life. That sounds like a bit of a difficult factor but it is true. Only by serving others in addition to yourself will you be truly successful.

Leadership and Entrepreneuership

In his excellent book E-Myth Mastery, author Michael Gerber makes some excellent points about leadership. He makes it very clear that an entrepreneuer must lead his or her company. Leading is much different from managing and I also learned that from Marcus Buckingham in his book First Break All the Rules.

Part of being a leader is simply understanding that you are one. You may not need to say so but you need to lead. Leadership is critical to the success of any organization and good leadership must develop over time.

It is difficult to break away to your own company and become a leader. The natural tendency for a new entrepreneuer is to start a business and take care of all of the details and keep on being a technician. To be successful, a good entrepreneuer must lead.

Help Your Career - 3

After your formal educational preparation, you are set to enter the workforce. At this point, you need to realize that your learning process must continue. What you have learned in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college or vocational school is a foundation but the learning must continue. You must come to the realization that you need to continue to work on your skills. You must choose to work on your professional self.

This is a daily commitment because the easy path is to concede that I am good enough. You can say, I know enough and I don’t feel like working to learn more and do better. It is that will to overcome that feeling that will make you the best that you can be. It is the will to work on all areas of your life that will make you successful. Be careful about the hard work. It must be balanced hard work and you must make a sincere effort to be a great employee, great boss, loving spouse, devoted parent, committed friend and on and on.

Help Your Career - 2

It has been said by self-improvement experts “If you want to have a good job and good career, work on your skills. If you want to make a fortune, work on yourself.” Be careful how you define fortune. If you have adequate funds to live on; savings and investments; adequate provisions for life like food, home, clothing, and automobile; and an abundance of the things listed in the previous paragraph, you will achieve your fortune.

Working on yourself really begins when you know enough to spend your time working toward your own goals. It happens when you realize that you need what your teachers at elementary, middle school, and high school are offering you every day at school. When you take responsibility to learn the things being taught because you know they will help you later in life, then you are on your way. This will lead to an interest in further education whether it is college or vocational school. At this point, the burden of responsibility to learn and grow increases as does the payback from a solid effort at learning and a job well done.

Help Your Career -1

Your career really starts from the day that you are born. Fortunately or unfortunately, you have little or no control over your formative first few years in this life.

At some point early in your career, it is safe to say that the only one standing between you and success is you. When you understand and fully accept that, you are on your way to the path of success if you do the right things.

Now it is up to you to use all of the tools available to improve yourself, your skills, and your career all while striving for a balanced life.

Dealing With This Recession and Recovery

I am reading a great book written by authors David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter of the Boston Consulting Group titled Accelerating Out of the Great Recession. One of the key take-aways so far is that this current economic period, both the recession and the subsequent recovery, is a real game changer.

The authors are careful to point out what a huge role that debt and the accumulation of it by individuals and companies alike played in the run up to the Great Recession. The growth in the years leading up to the big fall was built on credit and debt. The beginning of the downfall started with the crack in the sub-prime loans.

All of this undermined the stability of our banking system and led to near disaster. The authors suggest that the govenment bailouts of the banks actually did help us to dodge a catatrophy and that makes sense to me. Whether we like it or not the bail outs and rescues did help us to avoid another Great Depression.

With all of this said, each and every individual of this country should take a very serious look at their financial strategy in light of this game-changing event called the Great Recession. Will you find success in the stock market? Will investment in real estate on the individual level ever return to the safe bet that it once was? Will our employment opportunities and benefits offered by employers ever be the same as they were in the period before the Great Recession?

It is incumbent on every individual to take a close look at the way they save and spend coming out of this recession. I suggest that anyone interested in learning more about this book click on the title of this post for more information on where to find it.