6 Behaviors That Will Ignite Your Career.
No matter how hard you work or how much money you have, there’s one thing you can never get back.
TIME
If you’re young and are reading this, realize that the absolute best advantage you have over anyone in this world is your abundance of time. It’s a gift that never will be replaced.
It’s hard to imagine all the things still ahead of you and what you can achieve when you are young, but be grateful and realize your beginning is extremely powerful.
This is an opportunity like no other because it is the beginning. A beginning is a point of maximum potential and control over future outcomes.
Think about what all this means for a few minutes.
You are essentially at the bottom of a mountain, where you will define your own path to the top as you climb and grow along the way.
You have a blank canvas where you will begin to shape your future, and build a foundation of skills that you will rely on and eventually master later in your career.
Now is the time to act on this advantage and start to map out what your path looks like to the top of your mountain.
How will you summit, and what is actually at the top? How long will it take you?
At the beginning of your career, your potential is limitless. You decide how to climb your mountain.
These are all great questions to contemplate about as you embark on your professional journey.
Also realize it is a journey, and you should enjoy the trip. Everything can be viewed as a learning experience, so welcome all the difficulties, challenges, and rewards that occur along the way.
So, how do you get started? What should you be doing now?
Here are some things that you should be doing to steer yourself in the right direction and ignite your career!
1. Find Your Passion
I recently watched a great clip on YouTube where Steve Jobs emphasizes passion.
“You have to find what you love. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is GREAT work. And the only way to do GREAT work, is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs
Passion is important because it is the inner energy that fuels us and summons the magic of innovation.
When you are passionate about something, you can tap into a goldmine of energy that flows within you.
You’ll find that you have naturally more innovation, nearly endless energy, and things just seem to just…come together for you. It’s like a way of the universe. So why not access this flow?
When you’re doing something you’re passionate about, it doesn’t feel like work. That’s where you need to be.
How to Find Your Passion
What if you don’t know how to find your passion or what you’re good at? Here’s some advice:
- Write down every skill you have, everything you are passionate about or can’t stop talking about to your friends. Also write down everything you’re good at or have knowledge in.
- Evaluate each thing and think about what you can put together right now to create something valuable.
- Think about what you can accomplish three to four months down the road from now.
- You need goals like discussed below, but as Steve Jobs advises in the video, don’t obsess too much on what you could do in four years because you become too long-term focused and never do anything. Instead, focus on what you can do NOW and work on that. Ask yourself, “what is the next milestone, and what is the pathway to get to the next step?” Begin to map those out.
- List all roadblocks, fears, and mental struggles preventing you from acting on your passion and break those down one by one. Use problem solving skills and find a way around them. Be HONEST, and keep moving forward.
2. Take Risks
When you’re young, your abundance of time affords you a lot of leeway to try new things and take risks. So NOW is the BEST time to do it!
If you fail, you still have tons of time to recover and try something else. Plus, perhaps the most valuable result is that you’re going to LEARN something. Sometimes lessons like these wouldn’t be learned otherwise.
We all know that Elon Musk is a man of risks.
He’s NOT afraid to fail and seems to even welcome it. His first three SpaceX rockets blew up, and Tesla nearly went under during the economic crash of 2008, but he kept plowing forward, learning and progressing.
Elon Musk also points out in this video that in our modern economy, it’s really very easy to earn enough money to eat and have a place to live, so that sets us up to spend more time and resources on going after what we are passionate about.
So if you don’t have a family to support or another financial obligation, you don’t have too many excuses to not take risks.
3. Set Goals
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How can we know what to do if we don’t know where we are going? Setting goals, no matter how cheesy, simple, or trivial they may be are absolutely necessary for rapid development.
In mountain biking, for example, I was trained to focus on where you want your front wheel to go in order to be able to steer around rocks and dangers. Some of the best life advice as well.
“Focus on where you want to go and not what you fear” – Tony Robbins
Set Up the Mind For The Long Term and Provide Something to Aim At.
Without some sort of plan we are just wandering around aimlessly, hoping good things will happen. If you’re launching a rocket, where is it headed? Why not have a plan and at least try to define your path?
Having goals will streamline your growth by defining the milestones and tasks needed to get there, reducing time wasted on unnecessary things.
Naturally Track Your Progress and Monitor Your Achievements.
Acknowledgement of advancement is essential in unlocking the dopamine reward circuit in the brain, which will allow you to tap into even greater focus and advancement.
It works because dopamine actually reduces the stress hormones excreted when we are learning something new, allowing us to focus longer and deeper.
I know in the beginning it can be hard to define your goals and yes, they likely will change, but make the effort and adjust along the way.
Develop a Good List of Both Short Term and Long Term Goals.
You may even want to start with what your end goal is and reverse engineer it.
As with a rocket trajectory, you will be constantly adjusting and changing during the journey, but your goals will get you started in the right direction.
4. Find a Mentor
Mentors, like goals, are essential for setting us up to aim toward something. But a mentor is a dynamic thing, and hopefully you will be able to interact with them and learn more. A mentor is someone you aspire to be and develop your character toward.
Success can be about charisma and character as much as it is hard work and training. Mentors help us, especially as engineers, develop that human side of things–the personal touch and magnetism that delivers the full package to execute upon opportunity, combining training, and hard work.
Pick your mentors wisely. You can have more than one, but list out what qualities about them that you admire the most and why.
This will help you define what it is about them that you want to take onboard yourself.
5. Invest in Yourself
Most of us know the benefits of investing in stocks early due to exponential growth and payout of dividends later, right?
Invest in yourself and your abilities and it will pay off like stocks.
You can look at yourself and your skills in the same manner.
Like with stocks, the time you invest in building new skills and expertise will contribute to your success exponentially down the road.
You’ll just get better and better with skills over time and eventually find mastery in them, leading to success.
Success will compound over time and lead to what we are all really after, FREEDOM: financial freedom, location freedom, etc.
Work hard! Use the gift of time and invest in yourself as much as possible to develop your skills and learn new skills.
With the way things are now on the internet, there are endless possibilities for learning and becoming a unique professional consultant or entrepreneur.
Take courses on new skills, consume YouTube videos, buy digital courses online, read blogs, go to seminars. Absorb all of the information you can.
Keep an Open Mind, Treat Everything as a Learning Opportunity.
You never know what you can learn and how it will help you later. I think about my life and all the great people I’ve met and the things I’ve learned unexpectedly from random events.
By having an open mind and a learning mindset, I was able to turn almost any situation into a learning situation. Just constantly ask yourself, what did I learn here, or how can I grow from this?
Stay Productive and Use Your Time Wisely.
As you grow older, aspects of your life could completely change and you may have other responsibilities. Life Happens. Debt, kids, family, or other things can start to take time away from personal development, so use your time wisely when you have it.
6. Don’t Overanalyze, Just Get Started
Elon Musk is also known as someone who doesn’t dwell on the details on how to get there perfectly, he just goes out and takes off.
The big advantage here is he GETS STARTED, gets the ball rolling. This inertia enables real progress.
Yes, Elon strives for perfection in the end product, but he doesn’t sit there and over-analyze things to death before taking action.
He just starts. He takes the risk. He fails. But, as we discussed above, failing is sometimes the most useful thing because we ALWAYS learn from mistakes.
NerdLock /nərd-läk/ – n. — A typical flaw seen frequently in engineers where they become consumed with over analysis to the point where they don’t know where to start. As a result, they refrain from doing anything. (AKA, Analysis Paralysis)
Don’t worry too much about where you are going, just get started somewhere and be mindful of who you are becoming in the process. You’ll learn so much along the way and those experiences will begin to shape and define you.
Conclusion
When we are young and just starting out in our careers, we don’t understand the power of our beginning and the time that we have available to us.
It’s not until later that we begin to understand the payoff of investments in personal development, so I encourage all young people to begin mapping out their goals and life plan as soon as possible.
The absolute best advantage you have from your youth is your abundance of time and your boundless potential since you’re just beginning. At this juncture, you still have the power to shape your career into anything you want it to be.
This article discussed several ways to start taking advantage of this opportunity:
- Find Your Passion
- Take Risks
- Set Goals
- Find a Mentor
- Invest in Yourself
- Don’t Overanalyze, Just Get Started
By following these steps, you can ensure that you’re setting yourself up for the best possible chance to succeed and achieve the independence and freedoms that success allows us.
It’s essential that you start asking yourself “where do I want to go and how to I get to the top of my mountain?”
Now is the time to begin thinking about these life questions and begin to map out your pathway to the top.
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