Five Key Building Blocks for Constructing Your Career on Solid Ground (Success drivers)
June 14, 2023
- Finding Your Talent
In every person there is a seed of greatness. Understanding your uniqueness, your values, your
natural strengths, and your authenticity is vital to finding your success. When you find your
talent, you’ve found your sweet spot. To find your talent, one of the best questions to ask
yourself is, “What am I naturally good at, with little or no effort?” Another good question is,
“What do I do so well that other people would be happy to pay me to do it for them?”
Your talents will be found in your natural strengths, motivators, behaviors, and skills, so the
sooner you know and understand them, the better. It is much easier to improve a natural strength
than to try to improve a weakness.
- Making Good Decisions
Becoming a good decision-maker is highly underrated as a requirement for success. Ultimately,
having good judgment and making good decisions is far more important than just being smart.
All of our decisions involve the future, which is uncertain. With uncertainty comes risk, so we
need to be prepared to mitigate or manage these risks.
The best way to do this involves taking a step-by-step approach to decision making. This process
should involve clarifying your goals, doing your research, considering alternatives, and then
making your decision. And whenever possible – sleep on it to make sure you’re really
committed before acting.
- Taking Smart Risks
Risk and rewards go together. In order to get the rewards, you have to take the risks. If we try to
play it too safe, we can be sure that our rewards will be small. But if we can grow comfortable
taking smart risks, and learn how to manage and mitigate them, the rewards will surely follow.
Think of risk-taking as “the art of managing uncertainty to achieve a goal.” We live in a world
that is full of uncertainty, and as much as we want to feel like we are in control of everything, we
need to understand the difference between certainty and uncertainty, and use it to our advantage.
- Keeping Your Drive Alive
After you commit to your own success, you will find many obstacles on the road to achievement.
It takes a lot of energy, persistence, resiliency, ambition, and determination to overcome these
obstacles.
To stay motivated, identify your “why.” What is important to you? Why do you get up in the
morning? Why do you want to succeed? Knowing your “why” will go a long way to providing
you with the motivation to stick with it when times are tough.
- Managing Your Career
A lot of people under-optimize their career potential because they let others make their job
decisions, are too slow in changing positions, and don’t align their strengths and motivating
values with their career paths. Managing your career success requires that you excel at your
current job, prioritize learning and personal growth, and use solid judgment when it’s time for a
change.
- Jobs and careers are two different things. A job can be doing anything for any length of time and
may or may not lead anywhere. But a career is a series of individual jobs that progressively build
on each other, creating more knowledge, more experience, and more value in the individual.
With a 20-year career you can get 20 years of experience. But with a 20-year series of
disconnected jobs, you can get one year of experience 20 times, which is not very valuable for
anyone.
As you consider your next move, the key is to sit back and take a hard look at where you are in
your career, what you’ve learned so far, and what experiences or responsibilities you need to get
to the next level. Then set some clear goals for what you want from your next job and take the
personal initiative to find it