Beyond dollar signs of career success
You’re well on your way if you are making time every day to learn, writes Shana Lebowitz.
Success isn’t just about money, power, and fame. Personal fulfillment and making an impact count for something, too. So if you’re pursuing your passions, learning, and forging solid relationships, you’re probably on track to do great things.
We collected a series of indicators that you’re going to be more successful than you think. If even a few of these sound familiar to you, you’re making progress.
You look for a better way
Are you stuck in the past – or hurtling towards the future?
On an episode of Business Insider‘s podcast, ‘‘Success! How I Did It,’’ John Sculley, a former Apple chief executive and president of Pepsi, said throughout his career he’s always asked questions such as: ‘‘Why is it done this way?’’
He said success is largely about to the willingness ‘‘to solve a problem in a way that’s never been solved before’’.
The opposite trait – resistance to change – can stall your career. That’s according to Scott Galloway, a clinical professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. In his new book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Galloway writes: ‘‘Trying to resist this tide of change will drown you. Successful people in the digital age are those who go to work every day, not dreading the net change, but asking: ‘What if we did it this way?’’’
You have a vision
Granted, your vision of the kind of life you want may evolve over time. But the point is not to take a job exclusively for the short-term benefits – like compensation.
Even if you only have a vision for the year ahead, career coach and former Googler Jenny Blake recommends asking yourself questions like, ‘‘What does my ideal average day look like?’’ and ‘‘What kinds of people do I want to be connected with or meeting?’’
You play to your strengths
Your signature strengths are simply the skills you’re uniquely good at. As Eric Barker, author of Barking Up the Wrong Tree, previously told Business Insider, research suggests that ‘‘the more often you use those skills, the more you’re happier, you’re respected, you feel good about your job’’.
You’re open to failure
Galloway says the four major tech titans – Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon – are all open to occasional failure, if it means they’re trying something new.
If you want to be successful in your career, you should be the same way. He says: ‘‘If you are not … wiping out and getting beaned in the face every once in a while, you aren’t trying hard enough.’’
You’re willing to take risks
You’d be hard pressed to find a successful person who hasn’t taken some amount of risk in their career. Take Hearst executive Joanna Coles, for example. As a young newspaper reporter, Coles once burst in on a woman in a bathroom stall in an attempt to land a scoop. Later, she left her job as a foreign correspondent for The Times of London and took a job in magazine journalism – even though she was pregnant and didn’t have a visa that would allow her to say in New York.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, has spoken often about how he decides which risks to pursue. In one interview, Bezos explained how he decided to found Amazon: ‘‘I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that.
‘‘But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.’’
You’re nice to people
On another episode of ‘‘Success! How I Did It,’’ Coles described the importance of maintaining good relationships with your friends and colleagues.
She said: ‘‘The thing that I always try and say to young people starting out is your peer group is really the most important influence on your life because you are going to rise and fall together.
‘‘And I have always got jobs through the loose ties of friendships and someone knowing someone who might know a job.’’
You have a ‘beginner’s mind’
That’s a concept from Zen Buddhism, and it describes constantly seeing the world anew, as if you knew nothing about it. It’s a big advantage in business.
The late Steve Jobs was a proponent of the beginner’s mind. As Jeff Yang wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2011, Jobs emphasised the need to develop a beginner’s mind in order to eschew the constraints that cause us to come up with old answers to difficult problems.
You make time to learn
You should be allotting some of your time to reading or research to expand your horizons.
Beth Comstock, former vicechair of General Electric, suggests devoting 10 per cent of every day to these activities. In an interview with LinkedIn, she said: ‘‘Think about how you manage your own time. Can I spend 10 per cent of my time a week reading, going to sites like Singularity, TED, talking to people, going to industry events, asking people: What trends are you seeing? What are you nervous about?’’
You’re self-aware
According to Tasha Eurich, an organisational psychologist, most people don’t know how others see them. Those who have a more accurate picture of how they come off tend to be more successful.
Eurich recommends finding one or two ‘‘loving critics’’, or ‘‘people who will be honest with us while still having our best interests at heart’’. Tap them regularly for insight into how you can perform better at work.
You show gratitude
Gratitude can benefit your health, your relationships and your career. Doug Conant is known for turning around Campbell’s Soup as its chief executive. He’s also known for making gratitude a key leadership strategy: During his career at Campbell’s, he sent more than 30,000 handwritten thankyou notes to staffers and clients.
Other famous and successful people have a daily practice. For example, John Paul DeJoria takes the first five minutes of the day to ‘‘be thankful for life’’.
You’re self-compassionate
Self-compassion doesn’t make you weak or unambitious. Instead, scientists say it can make you more successful. Research on selfcompassion suggests that it has three components: engaging in a positive internal dialogue, understanding that everyone makes mistakes, and being aware of your thoughts and feelings without succumbing to them.
In The Happiness Track, Emma Seppala recommends one strategy for practising self-compassion: Treat yourself as you would treat a friend who has failed. –BusinessInsider.com.au