Here’s a compilation of tips from some of the world’s leading business minds to help you best prepare for career opportunities and competition:
1. Work harder on yourself than your job. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, manager, supervisor or intern, you are getting paid for bringing value to both your market and colleagues. Study yourself more than anything else and ensure that what you do challenges you in terms of knowledge growth and work practice. Entrepreneur and author, Jim Rohn once stood in front of a vast audience and said, “The most important thing is the value you become, what you become pays more than what you bring.”
2. Practice more than one skill and even better, learn more than one language. It’s not too late for anyone to lay the foundation for their future fortune. Save yourself economic distress and learn more than one skill to maximise your opportunities and become more valuable in any and every job you do.
3. Be led by your inexperience and the things you don’t know. We often become fearful of stepping out of our comfort zone and handling something within our work commitments because we feel we may not do things correctly. But Sara Blakely, co-founder of Spanx ensures us that we should not allow the things we do not know to intimidate us. Instead, what we don’t know can become our greatest strength in doing things differently and providing innovation.
4. Get comfortable with the word 'no'. It takes a few plan B’s to get to your fortune, so don’t feel despair when your plan A gets shut down. After her struggle with acceptance, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote that if plan A is not available, be ready to kick the sh*t out of plan B.
5. You become the average of the five people you choose to surround yourself with. Take a look at those you surround yourself with. Where are they leading you? Surround yourself with people you feel are more accomplished, experienced and knowledgeable than you are.
6. Be prepared for opportunity. Opportunity comes unprecedentedly and for the most part of our lives we are preparing, whether it’s preparing for a good day, a job interview, or attending a workshop. You’ve got to be well-equipped by language, by your instinct, temperament, personality and influence. Life overall, you’ve got to prepare yourself for success because life gives you exactly what you deserve.
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