How to create success in your career

How to be Successful in Business

How to create success in your career

This is my personal perspective on success in business. I worked for 35 years at a succession of innovative start-up software and electronics companies in Boston and in California's Silicon Valley. I had titles including Senior Vice President of Product Development. In 2000, one of my companies was acquired for enough money for me to retire. Along the way, I had a lot of fun in my career - along with a few bad times. And I learned a lot of life lessons the hard way.
Success is very personal. No single formula fits everyone. Please read the following with the idea of looking for one tip that you may be able to apply to your life, rather than expecting to find a ready-made formula for success in your career.
1. Do What You Love and Love What You Do
Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
- Albert Schweitzer
People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.
- Dale Carnegie
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
- Confucius
If you hate your job, you aren't going to please your boss or your customers, so you aren't going to succeed in the long run. In a perfect world, each of us would have a job doing what we most enjoy doing - for example writing or testing video games if that is what you love. At the very least, choose a career that matches your strongest preferences and abilities. If you hate dealing with complaints, don't work in customer service. If you want some room to be innovative, choose a smaller company. If you love being outdoors and working with your hands, don't confine yourself with a desk job. Be flexible, but remember that you won't be successful in a job you hate, and more important, you will have spent your life in unnecessary misery.
2. Don't Expect Overnight Success
It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.
- Eddie Cantor
Success - that is to say recognition and financial reward - may come upon one suddenly, but it is usually the result of years of preparation. I got financial reward "overnight" when my company was acquired - but only after years of work and repeated failures. Susan Boyle, the enthralling singer who was discovered "overnight" on Britain's Got Talent, had worked at perfecting her singing for decades.
3. Be of Real Service to Others, and Success Will Come to You
The man who is successful is the man who is useful.
- Bourke Cockran
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
Truly make the lives of your customers better, and you are almost certain to be well rewarded financially in the long run. Moreover, you will feel good about yourself and your efforts - which is even more important.
4. Balance Persistence with Attentive Observation and Change
I do not think that there is any other quality so essential
to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance.
- John D. Rockefeller
The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence
in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
- Napoleon Hill
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein (attributed)
There is a fine line between perseverance and insanity. At what point have you tried your best, and it's time to do something different? It's a balance - a paradox. If you get in the habit of giving up as soon as something gets difficult, you will never be a success in business, but if you keep tilting at windmills - madly trying the same thing again and again, you will also fail.
Always be watchful for changes in competition, customer expectations, available technology, or other circumstances, that require, or offer the opportunity, for you to approach a problem from a new and better perspective. The best buggy-whip manufacturer could not succeed in an automobile-world. The best mini-computer manufacturer could not succeed in a personal-computer-world.
5. Think for Yourself
Always listen to the experts.
They'll tell you what can't be done and why.
Then do it.
- Robert Heinlein
You can never become successful as a cog in some corporate machine. Even the biggest and most staid companies reward innovation and creativity. But never tell others that they are wrong or stupid. Introduce your new ideas with tact and diplomacy.
6. Never Stop Learning
Success depends upon previous preparation,
and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.
- Confucius
The difference between school and life?
In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test.
In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.
- Tom Bodett
Read, study, learn from others, and learn from the hard lessons of life. Keep refining and practicing what worked well. Change what hasn't worked well.
7. Roll with the Punches
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
- Japanese Proverb
If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up.
Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
- Michael Jordan
Never give up. You will get knocked down many times in your career. It is your job to get up, shake yourself off, learn another lesson, and return to the challenge.
8. Be a Leader - Whether You are in Management or Not
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
- Peter Drucker
When we step on the battlefield, I will be
The First Boots On and the Last Boots Off.
- LtG. Hal Moore
Everyone who is successful is a leader in their own way - whether leading in innovation, in encouraging co-workers, or in management.
9. Treat Customers and Co-workers with Respect
Give Honest and Sincere Appreciation.
- Dale Carnegie
You can't be successful unless you are respected, and you won't be respected unless you show respect for others.
10. Have Faith in Yourself, and in Your Successful Future
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Those who believe they can do something,
and those who believe they can't,
are both right.
- Henry Ford
Visualize your end result as having already been accomplished.
Let the image of your success play on the giant screen
in full color with surround sound - so real you can smell and taste it.
- jlh
Success begins with believing that you are a success. That belief is not sufficient, but it is a necessary beginning to becoming a success in business.