Create a flexible plan and continue to develop new skills for success.
The first key to business and career success is a flexible plan built around continued innovation and skills development.
The needs and interest of consumers will always change. Successful businesses and people change with the needs and interest of consumers. At one time, nearly every strip mall in my neighborhood had a movie rental store. Changing technology made these businesses obsolete. Redbox, Netflix, Amazon, on-demand television movies channels, and other companies offer better ways to get the same movie products. Creating these businesses required the flexibility to develop skills that the people in video rental stores did not have.
Build on your strengths.
The second key to business and career success is to build on your strengths. Know you natural talent. Recognize that there are things that you can do more easily than other people can. Those are your strengths. They are also probably the things that you enjoy doing.
For example, learning languages is something I enjoy. For me, building language skills is fun and easy. Computer languages are similar to the languages people speak. You can write spoken languages, and you can write computer languages. The part of the brain that processes spoken and written languages also processes computer languages.
If you have excellent language skills, you might find that learning computer languages comes naturally for you. Much of computer language has to do with punctuation, vocabulary, syntax, and proofreading. The functions are part of all languages, including science languages.
On the other hand, I am curious about math and science. There are elements of computer programming for managing data. These skills are harder for me to develop. If you have strong math skills as well as strong electrical engineering, you might want to develop these skills for computer application development or other emerging businesses.
For example, environmental companies have needs for people with science, cartography, and engineering skills. To move into the environmental industry, you may simply need to develop or expand your skills for environmentally specific tasks.
Think of ways to help others.
Another key to business and career success is to think of others. Whenever I get to thinking too much of myself, I feel stress. Self-absorption takes my mind off solving problems to seeing nothing but problems. Taking time to check my ego and help other people relieves me of self-absorption. Doing volunteer work helps me become more effective at work.
Giving a bit of myself away helps me regain focus in my job. I see it as a key to business and career success. I use this key to overcome feeling discouraged. It is hard for me to feel discouraged when I am thinking of ways to help other people.
It is a key to business and career success that reminds me that success is not all about me. It is about helping other people get what they want.
Practice persistence for business and career success.
Persistence is a key to business and career success. If every sales representative quit after the first person said “No” to a proposal, no one would ever sell anything.
Turn frustration into solutions and inventions.
Everyone has frustrations. We can learn from them. We can use them to create solutions and inventions. These are keys to business and career success.
“I’ve missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan
I heard Ed Land say that as an inventor, he “imagined things before they happened.”
Instead of sitting around angry and frustrated, look at the situation and ask yourself, “How can I solve this problem?” Starting with this question is how successful people build business and career success.