Fashion Your Own Career
George Chingarande | Monday March 31, 2014 16:47
There are indeed many definitions of the word career. What is evident in each definition is that career occupies a very important space throughout an individual’s life. Careers are so important that almost always when we speak about success we are actually speaking of successful careers. There is no success in life without a successful career. Take a closer look at life, if you wish, and see if you can identify any one man or woman who was successful and his or her success was not linked to some career.
Many things can be said about careers, but perhaps the most important of them all is that there are no small or unimportant careers. All careers are big and important, but not all people pursuing careers are big minded. The problem is never with the career, but with how people perceive it and pursue it. Ronaldo and Messi are very successful career people in their own right. But what is their career? When you reduce it to the lowest, football is all about adult men chasing and kicking an air-filled animal skin. That’s vain, isn’t it? Excuse us for being dramatic, but that’s exactly what football is. And yet it is a multi-billion dollar industry and many people have fashioned successful careers out of it. George Harding was a successful businessman who made fortunes. His fame and success rest on his invention of the portable toilet. The business that takes place in toilets can hardly be described as honourable, but if you ask George Harding he will tell you that toilet making is not an ignoble career. The world is full of examples of people who became very successful by pushing for excellence and innovation in such mundane tasks as coffin making or street sweeping. This surely should teach us that there are no ignoble careers. Small minded people suffer from misperception and treat their careers as unimportant.
It has to be said about careers that they can be and must be managed. Careers are man-made. I make my career and you make your career. No one can fashion a career for you. It is a D.I. Y. (Do It Yourself) affair. You are both responsible and accountable for your own success. As such, it is your responsibility to discover your special gifts, attributes and capabilities that can give you a competitive edge and the greatest probability to have a flourishing career. Writing in the Forbes Magazine Glen Llopis had this to say, “Career management requires quality networking, being in the right place at the right time, earning a voice at the table, knowing your unique value proposition and how to use it, managing your personal brand, being influential – to name a few essentials. But in the end, all of these factors require one important thing: a personal commitment to manage and invest in your career the right way.”
In order to have a successful career, it is important that you must know yourself extremely well. This requires you to understand the factors that positively inspire you to achieve something substantive and relevant – with passion – every day. It is easier to excel when you play to your strengths, and also play in the theatre of your dreams and passion. Where there is no passion careers are reduced to burdensome work and drudgery.
Careers ought to be invested in. And this is your responsibility. If you do not invest in your career, soon you will become a dinosaur and the source of archaic ideas. Many people don’t have career investment plans because they simply do not know the importance of having one or because they rely on the organisation they serve to provide them. It must always be borne in mind that the investments your employer makes in your career are self serving and never enough to give you a phenomenal life – and most of the time these investments align with the company’s goals, not your specific ambition.
Here are a couple of tips on career investment. Invest in your strengths: Use them more frequently.
Become increasingly aware of your natural strengths that allow your skill sets and capabilities to thrive and make the commitment to invest in them. For example, if you are a good negotiator, never assume that your technique doesn’t require fine tuning. Take a negotiations class, enhance your abilities and then put them to work more frequently. Abilities not used and refined are like iron; they rust easily.
Invest in intelligence and know-how
Never stop learning. Learn something new about your career every day. This begins by investing your time to acquire the right intelligence and know-how that will accelerate your career advancement. It is a mistake to assume that you don’t need to get smarter, wiser and more strategic about how to better manage your career. Be proactive. Get to know the goals the industry you are serving desires to achieve and how you can contribute. Build relationships with key thought leaders. In every career there are competitors.