Be Different or be dead

April 11, 2016

Why career success depends on being awesome or not

Source: Unsplash

Why career success depends on being awesome or not.

And awesomeness depends on how many people around you are in the same career category as you.

What category are you in? Engineer? Author? Content Marketer? Accountant Executive Recruiter? Advertising Manager? Consultant? Personal Trainer? These are all common ways to describe the box you play around in.

How big is the category you’re in? There are literally hundreds and hundreds of individuals in each of the professional categories above.

Successful careers are determined not only by your performance, but also by the number of other people who share your category.

The larger the population in your category, the more intense competition you face; the more difficult it is to be awesome and the tougher it is to rise to the top.

It’s extremely difficult to get noticed in the crowd and attract the attention you need to progress in your career.

The secret is to redefine your category so that you are the ONLY in it.

Reduce the crowd you’re in to you and only you.

This means getting really granular in terms of what defines you as opposed to anyone else.

So, you’re NOT an accountant! You may carry the accountant tag, but in terms of positioning yourself for personal growth opportunities, you are an accountant with certain attributes that make you unique.

And as such, you cannot be compared with other accountants; you are in an accountant category by yourself.

So how might you go about defining you, the accountant of 1?

Here are 5 questions to ponder.

▪️What added education do you have (that is useful to the organization) that traditional accountants typically don’t have?

▪️What skills and experience have you amassed that would surprise people coming from a “numbers person”?

▪️What unique business ideas do you have that make you MORE than an accountant?

▪️Are you a numbers or finance person who can add strategic value to the organization ?

▪️Do you have a gift for relating to others which might be an unusual trait of someone who fulfils this introspective role?

Consider the standard definition of your job as the foundation on which to build a structure which applies only to you.

Your basic role is but the entry level to a successful career. You need it to play the career game but it guarantees nothing unless you add to it dimensions of uniqueness that others value.

There is no formula for this work, no equation that yields your category of 1.

It requires introspective examination in combination with an accurate assessment of what the marketplace needs.

Get going.

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

• Posted 4.11.16 at 04:03 am by Roy Osing
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