Stay Awake; Leave Sleeping For Your Career!

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

What does it take to keep your career in overdrive?  Do the rules change?  Not really, not in a year or two - maybe over a generation or two.  But, getting into gear is prettty much the same today as it was a year ago.  

Begin with tossing out any thought that getting up and going to work in some hum-drum role is the same as building and keeping a career.  And, dump the notion that a lousy job with a decent income and comfortable benefits is smart.  It may have been 55 years ago.

Today, though, your obligation to yourself is to love your work, cherish its triumphs, rock on its successes, and crush it every single day.  If all you do is shoot for a target because someone gave you one, you are short-changing your life - you're on someone else's path to satisfaction.  It';s niot a win if you''ve just won someone else's Gold Star.

And, if you get that coveted promotion, but like neither the work nor your colleagues, you lose - big time.  Now that we are all entrepreneurs, we need to actively manage our careers.

That means running yourself as a business, with implications of doing what you want to, with whom you choose, in your own way.  The right job or role gives you immense power an opportunity: contacts and a network that works; resume entries and relevant war stories; wisdom; confidence; dragon-slaying capabilities; and an empowering sense of accomplishment.

Nurturing these allows, permits, and encourages planning for next steps and stages of business and personal life - of defining plans for growth and success, of creating your own life path.

From there, you'll know what pains prospective clients; how much the pains cost until repaired, and what the signs and manifestations of business pain are.

After mastery of clients and self, go for it!  And, good luck managing that new career.