It’s very conventional to say that you’re a contrarian these days.
Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.
When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music.
Remember: If you don’t find risk, risk will find you.
Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity.
Which plan offers the most learning potential?
A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member.
Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help other people first. They don’t keep score. They’re aware that many good deeds get reciprocated, but they’re not calculated about it. And they think about their relationships all the time, not just when they need something.
Until you hear “No,” you haven’t been turned down.
Keeping your options open” is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action.
Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you’re vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B.
In a sentence, as you meet your friends and new people, shift from asking yourself the very natural question of “What’s in it for me?” and ask instead, “What’s in it for us?” All follows from that.
If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.
If you want to find out how resourceful you can be, shrink your budget. Move your deadlines up. See how you cope. This may make you more resilient to actual hardships that inevitably arise.
Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation. They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind. They compare their cash salary to their peers’ instead of comparing lessons learned. They invest in the stock market and neglect investing in themselves. They focus, in short, on hard assets instead of soft assets. This is a mistake.
A lot of smart people are prone to over-analysis and tend to become paralyzed by indecision.
In this sense, the world of tomorrow will be more like the Silicon Valley of today: constant change and chaos.
Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset.3.
Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry.
Figure out how to get into the networks because they are what amplifies your learnings, give you access to opportunity, information and Intelligence to know what to do.
A good career plan accounts for the interplay of the three gears – your assets, your aspirations, and the market realities.