Be Different or be dead

December 9, 2019

5 urgent things you need to do for career success

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5 urgent things you need to do for career success.

Over my long career, I have seen so many really talented people fall short of their goal.
Engineers who graduated top of their class; MBA’s knowledgeable on more business theory than is needed and business grads who possess a more than good understanding of how organizations function.

The problem with many of these people is that they are too controlled by the left hemisphere of their brain — logic and reasoning dominates their decision making — which generally means they take too much time making a decision and their career languishes.

Sometimes you have to act with your gut quickly and be willing to take a risk; let uncertainty guide you as opposed to relying on the time consuming illusive precision that a traditional planed approach suggests.

These 5 NOW! actions will help you shed the inertia holding you back from glorious success.

1. Declare an outrageous goal

Declare your goal out loud without knowing how you will achieve it; the more outrageous it is the better.
I’m a firm believer that if you know how to achieve something there’s not much room for innovation; creative juices start to flow when you have to struggle and figure it out.

“I intend to be VP of marketing before I am 40 years old.” was the goal I declared at age 25 in a telecommunications monopoly organization dominated by engineers.

I didn’t have a clue how I was going to achieve it but I’m convinced that it guided me over the years in terms of the career decisions I made. At age 39 I was appointed as the youngest VP marketing the company ever had.

2. Take the job

Take a job rather than evaluate every opportunity in terms of the fit it has with your long term goal.

I have known many people who would not make a decision on a particular position that presented itself because they agonized over whether it was consistent with where they wanted to end up.

They pondered and they analyzed — and did nothing.

Every job has something you can benefit from regardless of your long term goal. Although my targeted destination was a marketing executive role, I took operations jobs to help create an execution context for my marketing ambitions.

After all, marketing exists to create value for the frontline of an organization and having rich experience in the daily operations of a business makes marketing efforts more relevant and effective.

3. Figure out what makes you special

Work on your personal ONLY statement, defining how you are different from your colleagues and others who may be the competition you will face in your career journey.

People who blend in with the crowd don’t make it because they don’t get noticed; they are part of the lowest common denominator seen to be the same as every other fish in the sea.

A unique personal brand helps cut through the clutter of a noisy and complicated environment.
It gets you noticed and it presents YOU with opportunities before others.

You get the first chances and will jettison you ahead of the pack.
”I’m am the ONLY one that…” will clearly distinguish you from the hordes of other people vying for limited opportunities.

Get rid of the copying mentality. Best practises and a boilerplate résumé will only solidify your position in the common herd.

4. Find your person

Someone you trust, have confidence in and will provide the kind of advice you believe in.

This is more than a traditional mentor who you might find at work in a position related to your audacious goal or someone in the business community who many people covet for advice because of their currency and experience.

You need more than a traditional mentor. You need someone who you have known for some time; someone who really knows you, how you think and knows what motivates you.

And someone who has a history of achieving results in a complicated and uncertain environment. They don’t have to be a superstar in a high position; they just need to have been in the trenches with an up close understanding of how to get things done in the real world.

My person was my Dad who had no formal graduate degree but had years of experience as an engineering supervisor in the mining business. He worked underground with miners in wet dingy environments laying track and drilling ore drifts where the unexpected was business as usual.

He knew how to get things done and provided a perspective to me I couldn’t get elsewhere.

5. Train to fail

Get your head around failure NOW. At the start of your journey you need to think about the possibility because it will definitely happen along the way. The chances of you succeeding without setbacks is ZERO.

What separates the successful ones from everyone else is the ability to come back from a body blow and make another move.

The corollary to this is that making mistakes FAST is an essential ingredient to the success formula.

At the end of the day, it’s the number of tries you make that determine your ultimate destiny.

”I’ve missed more than 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.” — Michael Jordan on Success Through Failure

Immediacy is a critical factor for success.

Increasing your odds of success requires that you take action on day one of your journey; waiting is simply not an option.

Serendipity and luck may help you, but don’t count on it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 12.9.19 at 04:50 am by Roy Osing
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November 25, 2019

The 5 deadly sins of being like the next person

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The 5 deadly sins of being like the next person.

If you’re like the next ‘guy’, you have some serious thinking to do. There may be pressure to fit in and conform with others, but the consequences can be deadly; it’s simply not the place to be if you are looking for a successful and rewarding career.

When you are ok with blending in with the person next to you are committing the following deadly sins.

Sin #1 — you become wallpaper

Wallpaper is background; it provides a convenient backdrop for the action going on in the foreground. Do you ever notice wallpaper? You might if you are looking for wallpaper but it’s a temporal thing: after you’ve seen it, it soon fades and gives way to what is going on in front of it.

Think about when you decide to change the wallpaper on your device. You notice the various choices when you are looking, but once you’ve selected one that you like, it soon becomes subordinated to the apps and webpage shortcuts that populate the space in front of it.

Being like the next guy is being like wallpaper; people may notice you for a fleeting moment but then you disappear.
What you need to succeed in the long term is sustainability in terms of being noticed by people who can influence your career.

Sin #2 — you become immune to risk

It’s comfortable being like the next guy; there’s little personal risk and you’re rarely in trouble. Blending in allows you to float around unexposed to all onlookers.

The problem is that being comfy makes you risk averse and you tend to avoid circumstances where you have to step outside your comfort zone.
Being like the other guy robs you of the desire to take a chance because you don’t have to; it’s not necessary when the crowd governs the outcome for you.

A career suffers when an industry is not prepared to take reasons risks; innovation in any organization is impossible without a certain amount of chance.

Sin #3 — you can’t deal with conflict

When you’re like the next guy, you rarely have disagreements with others; you avoid conflict by having similar personas to those around you and no reason to fight for your own ideas.

It provides an artificial (and unhealthy) environment for the lookalike who grows up being extremely uncomfortable with differences in opinions and incapable of dealing with situations like this when they arise.

Being able to handle conflict is necessary in today’s world where the issues are so numerous that a myriad of opinions will always exist and to survive, people have to know how to put up their opinion and fight for it in a respectful way.

Those that can’t navigate through the opinion maze will stay in their herd — comfortable but unsuccessful.

Sin #4 — you think life is about ‘best practices’

When you’re like the next guy, you’ve already decided that the next guy represents your aspiration; the person or set of competencies you believe will make you successful. And you live your life believing that emulation is the way to successfully meander your way through the challenges and roadblocks thrown in your way.

Looking at what others do and copying what you believe to be the “best” becomes your modus operandi and you judge your worth if the image you see in a mirror is someone else.

Being like the next guy forces you build yourself in someone else’s image, to copy what another person has created and follow best of breed. This is not a recipe for success; it’s a path lacking originality and uniqueness and one that leads not to rewards.

Sin #5 — you are constantly in the stall mode

When you’re like the next guy, your life is punctuated by fits and starts; you have no forward momentum because you have no plan that is special in terms of how you intend to meet your personal goals. You are in the hands of others with no control over what you want to achieve or how you intend to achieve it.

As a result you tend to be in a perpetual stall mode waiting for the wind to either olift you up or force you down.

Being in the stalled mode wastes you of the most precious commodity there is — time. While you wait for the next guy’s energy to propel you somewhere, the people around you who choose to standout and be different from the next guy pass you by.

There is absolutely no redeeming value being like the next guy; it’s sinful and will rob you of your future.

Be different. Be unique. Be special. Be you.

It’s the only way you have an exciting life and a chance to win.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.25.19 at 04:29 am by Roy Osing
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November 4, 2019

Why a high salary in the six-figures is absolutely the wrong career goal

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Why a high salary in the six-figures is absolutely the wrong career goal.

When it comes to one’s career plan, money is the way we keep score; the amount of money we earn is the way we judge whether or not we are successful.
And it’s the way we compare ourselves to others; if our annual salary is higher than a colleague’s, we conclude that we are more successful that they are.

And there seems to be a salary threshold that differentiates “good money” from making an average wage. People talk about earning a six-figure salary as the threshold for success; once you’re into six-figures you’ve made it and anything lower gets less attention.

The result is that six figures is the target for most people who want to aspire to greatness in their career and how to achieve it becomes the challenge that occupies people’s focus, time and energy.

But it’s the wrong question.

The question isn’t “How do I achieve six-figures?” but rather “What do I have to do to earn six-figures?”

If you do the right things consistently, the six-figure reward is the natural result.

There’s no fast track to six-figures; at least I’ve never seen one in my 30+ year career. Yes, every once in a while someone gets a lucky break and their salary soars but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Most of us must grind out a six-figure future. We have to consistently deliver value to the people around us — value that is both compelling and relevant, and that addresses what people want and desire.

These are 5 actions I took over four decades that both rewarded me with a fulfilling career, established my personal brand as different from the crowd and provided me with satisfying financial returns.

1. Do whatever is required in the moment

Be that “go-to person” who can be pulled into action when there is a crisis in the organization; when someone must be called upon to fix something that is broken.
Don’t be encumbered by your position description; be prepared to stop what you are currently working on to jump into a project that the organization deems to be a high priority.

I knew many people who resisted responding to an unanticipated project; who viewed what they were currently working on as their primary mandate. They faltered in their career because they didn’t help the greater cause; they couldn’t be enlisted when the organization needed them.

2. Build alliances inside and outside

Successful individuals rarely do it on their own; they need people around them who support their efforts and talk them up to others. Having colleagues “spread your word” is essential to being noticed and rewarded for your efforts.

It takes a community to create a winner, so be prepared to devote time and energy into creating communities of support and follower-ship. Make a point of meeting someone for that after-work libation as a way to maintain relationships and update them on your current activities.

3. Be different

You don’t find successful people in a crowd where they look the same and perform their roles the same as everyone else.
The crowd is a home for those who like the safety and comfort of not taking risks; who follow what others do and who love the consistency of crowd activity which lacks up and down variability — these attributes don’t apply to individuals who have successfully moved upward in any organization.

Take every opportunity presented to you as a gift to be different. I have a trick to keep my be different mantra constantly in front of me. I ask myself “How can I do this differently?” as the context for how I approach a new project, role (or a vacation for that matter) I have been given.

So, for example, when I was elected president of our home owner’s strata corporation, the first thing I considered was how I could do the job in a way that most other people don’t. And this led me to apply more business principles and processes to the decision making process, making it more productive and raising the strata council’s performance.

4. Choose a mentor wisely

Most people are attracted by another professional who has a long list of academic credentials and consider the person with a plethora of abbreviated degrees behind their name to be prime prospects to provide advice and guidance.

Successful people know that it is important to be influenced by people who have strong schooling, but they also realize that it is not sufficient.
Organizations perform in seas of unpredictability and uncertainty and achieving results in this environment is not all about what you know; it’s about what you DO and how you adapt to unexpected events that show up when you least expect it.

Make sure your mentor portfolio includes a healthy number of mentors who have actually done something unique and special in the real world rather than someone who has discovered a formula that explains some empirical phenomenon.

The reality is that it may be interesting to know how to solve a differential equation, but it’s unlikely you will ever find a business problem where that specific mathematical tool will be key to finding a workable solution.

5. Spot missing competencies

Every organization confronts the need to change as market dynamics impose new opportunities and threats. New technologies open up completely new product categories, regulations change to attract more competition in home markets and customers generally have more choices and therefore more power to exert on their service provider.

Each of these forces begs the question “Do we have the necessary skills and competencies to respond and capitalize on them?”.
Successful people are constantly watching for discontinuities in the market that will force their organization to change, and they develop a profile of the employee needed to survive and thrive in the new chaos.

An order of magnitude increase in the number of competitors in your market, for example, might require marketing and sales skills that you don’t currently have; a new technology might need a new specialized knowledge base to convert this technology into high performing product solutions.

If you are perceive to be on the cutting edge of change, with the ability to translate new challenges into the required skills and competencies, six-figures will be within your reach.

A six-figure salary requires a proven five-step performance plan.

Consider these actions to be your priorities if you are serious about reaching your goal.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.4.19 at 04:40 am by Roy Osing
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October 28, 2019

5 secrets I wish I knew before my career started

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5 secrets I wish I knew before my career started.

I’m often asked what lessons I learned over my career that I wish I would have known when I started out.

If I could take what I learned over my formal 33+ year career and was able to apply it when I started my journey there is no question I would have had an easier time.

I would have been able to avoid some common pitfalls I encountered, I would have been more productive and a better leader. I would have been able to add more value to the organization than I did.

In no particular order, I wish I knew these 5 things when I started out.

1. Education matters less than you think

A slight overstatement, perhaps, but I wish I knew then that there is too much fuss made about one’s academic pedigree and the belief that the MBA (or whatever) would guarantee success.

So of course everyone who wanted to aspire to greatness rushed out to take as many courses as they could to get another piece of paper with the mistaken belief that the more you knew, the higher up the ladder you would go.

I learned that it’s hogwash. Yes, you need a good (not great) academic background to even be in the game of advancing your career, but the thirst for more knowledge with the papyrus to prove it is an ineffective use of one’s time and resources.

There are other things that matter more in terms of influencing whether one succeeds or not.

2. Non-compliance breeds success

This is a tough one, because schooling teaches us to comply; to follow the instructions we are given and if we do a real good job at following the rules we just may get rewarded with an “A”.

I wish I knew then that compliance is not the formula for success; it makes you the same as everyone else; you are buried in the herd of people who all look alike and who are all aspiring to be the best copycats there are.

If I had understood that the opposite is actually a better determinant of success — i.e. not conforming with best practices and the standard ways of doing things.

You see the thing is, if you decide to be a conformist, you’ll likely never be noticed. Why would anyone spot you when you look like the person next to you in every way?

It took me a while to figure this out, but once I did I always asked myself the question when confronted with a challenge: “How can I do this differently?”

Not understanding this truism probably cost me at least 5 years if progression in the early part of my career.

3. The perfect anything doesn’t exist

From the first day on the job day we are told that we must produce the perfect plan; that the studies that we are asked to do are complete and accurate — a.k.a. perfect.

Well guess what? I wish I knew then that no plan, strategy or study ever produces the results that are intended (they teach you the opposite at school). At best they produce variations on the theme because the underlying assumptions don’t pan out in the real world.

The problem is that we end up spending a disproportionate amount of time getting the plan or study right rather than getting it just about right and trying it out in the real world of fickle customers and hungry competitors.

I learned that trying an imperfect ANYTHING (and modifying it as you go) gets results. It led me to make more tries than my peers, make more mistakes than their conservative bent and beat them to the top.

4. Reacting is more productive than anticipating

I wish I knew then that with unpredictability and uncertainty the new normal in world affairs, winning in the market was more about what one’s organization did in reaction to unexpected events that shocked them than it was on sticking to their original plan.

That the real objective of trying to maximize the chances of success was to be as good as you can at anticipating future events, but be GREAT at reacting when the future doesn’t unfold as it should.

We wasted time and suffered market position by having to rethink our plan when it suffered a blow due to the unexpected, instead of having a backup contingency waiting in the wings to perform in the moment things went south on us.

5. It’s what you DO not what you know

I wish I knew then to spend more of my time and energy on accomplishing things — actually getting things done — rather than in trying to improve the intellectual quality of my business plans and proposals.

In retrospect, I wasted precious time and energy trying to fancy-up my proposals by more analysis using sophisticated tools to predict specific outcomes rather than on cutting short my up-front analysis and getting to implementation sooner.

I learned that people succeed on the basis of what they produce not on the level of their academic competence.  Theories and principles are fine, but unless they are accompanied by passion, energy and perseverance nothing gets done and no one is rewarded.

There is no reason people have to learn the hard way when others have already absorbed the pain and found out what works.

I hope my 5 secrets will help you avoid common pitfalls that befall everyone in every career path.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.28.19 at 04:34 am by Roy Osing
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