So here’s a life lesson for you: Everyone wants to get with the prettiest girl in school or a notorious bachelor, except sometimes when they do, they find out why that guy or gal is single— it could be countless reasons, but we’re not going to go down that road.
I’m not saying don’t get a corporate job, quite the opposite, but when you do land that first good, name-brand job, watch out for how they micromanage people and watch out for your coworkers, and adjust your behavior accordingly.
The hard part is getting the job, something you can put on your resume. But once you get the job and keep it for a while, you can use that resume to even get another job for a competitor, especially because they’ll like that you worked in the same industry.
Succeeding at work: a few tips
Once you start work in a large company, you’ll need to follow a few tips to keep your job and get ahead.
You have to sacrifice to get where you want to go
To make it to the next level in your life or career, you have to give up a level of control. In fact, that’s where most small businesses fail because they won’t give up control or ownership, and yet they expect their workers to work as hard for them but with no equity or say in how things happen.
Gary Vaynerchuk in the early years of his career has said that his employees were making a higher income than him, this showed that he was willing to pay his employees what they are worth. has said that when he discovered that his employees were making more than him, he realized that it showed that he was willing to pay his employees what they were worth. So if you have a choice, and you almost always do, work somewhere where they have an incentive plan and where they reward their employees for their worth.
Of course, you don’t want to land your dream job in your 20s, because it’s too soon, and if you do, you’ll already be settling down and not being open to new opportunities.
To really get to know your strengths and weaknesses, you’ll have to dig deep, or you’ll have to fail forward to learn who you aren’t. I for one think the former is preferable to the latter. So, even if you don’t have a skill others have, you always have a skill that someone doesn’t or doesn’t have as well as you, so get to know yourself and learn what it is you offer.
Working your process
If you someday dream of climbing the corporate ladder and having an upper management job as your ticket to wealth and security, then you will need to follow the advice I’ve just given and keep grinding it out. Who knows, if you stick it out and don’t ruffle any feathers of those in charge as you work your tail off, you might even move up and will do so faster than those who have already been working there longer than you.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that someone above you will notice you and reward you with great promotions, but if that’s your goal, you’ll need to stick around, play by their rules, and do what they expect if you want to have a chance. In the end, nobody is going to manage your career but you.
And when you’re engaged in a long term process—and that’s how you’ll have to view climbing the corporate ladder—you’ll need to figure out every facet of that process and work it. In cases like these, the goal becomes the process, and once the process becomes the goal, and when you keep working the process, good things will start to happen.
Here’s a quick analogy: if you want to lose 20 pounds, how much to lose each week, and by the end of the year I’ll be at my goal weight. Having small tasks and milestones along the way can make a large task easier to accomplish. Recently, I set a goal to shoot 60 quick videos messages each week to share with people I want as clients. I’ve figured out that I need to shoot 12 messages each workday (Monday through Friday) to accomplish this goal. Sixty videos are a lot of videos, but when you break it up, it becomes much easier to do.
Your Guide,
Joshua Krafchick, “Unconventional Money Guy”
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