Take Small Actions

Take small steps forward – the key to personal growth and development.

The idea of designing and building a career that you can feel good about and be proud of can be down right overwhelming.  You might think, “I’ll start putting a plan together this weekend.”  But you never do.  Bob had that thought twenty years ago.  He never did anything about it either.  Instead he just went to work everyday.  And everyday he did what the boss told him to do.  He never advanced his knowledge.  And his skill level never increased.  If Bob were to leave his company today, no one would care…not his boss, not his coworkers and not the customers.

Do you want to end up like Bob?  No?  We don’t want you to either.

The key to avoiding Bob-a-nitis is to take small actions.

We’ll be talking more in depth about designing a career that you can be proud of.  For now however, we just need to take a few small steps to get going.

Double secret probationary undercover big time secret – the fact that you have decided to design a career has put you ahead of ninety percent of the folks in your profession.  Congratulations!

You need to be a specialist on something within your company.  Lets say you decide to be a boiler specialist.  Do you know that you’ve already accomplished two things here?  You’re designing your career and you’ve decided to be a boiler specialist.  The next small step is to identify a couple of resources.  Just write them down.  It could be a teacher, a book or a Web site like Heating Help.  You could then spend six minutes a day on study.  In a week you would have logged thirty minutes.  At this pace, minus two weeks vacation, you would have logged twenty-five hours in one year.  At six minutes a day of study, you would have totaled five hundred hours more of education than Bob, throughout his career.  That’s six minutes a day.  No weekends.  And no studying on vacation.

Take small actions and reap big rewards.