Remain ahead & be successful

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

--- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your life is a race, if you stay ahead of others at work, you win. If you perform like a ‘my horse also ran’ type, you do not succeed in the true sense of the word. Staying ahead of others not only implies acquitting yourself well at work, but also directing your gung ho gains.

What should you do to handle your competitive edge over others? You should be serious about your career and conduct periodic appraisal to make certain that everything remains on course. Three things that you should not lose sight of are:

·   You must regard your career as big business:  You may not be the owner of the setup where you work, but you should consider yourself as one. Today, with economic slowdowns looming on the horizon, retrenchments, reorganizations and realignments have become quite common in the corporate world. Under such circumstances, it is you and you alone who should remain in command of your career. Your company can of course help you to a limited extent. Therefore, it is essential that you think that you are managing a single-man run business or regard yourself as a self-employed baron. Your designation is of no consequence; what is important is your contributions at work. Accordingly, you ought to do some serious introspection and ask yourself the following harsh questions to help you steer your career well:

ü  What precisely am I doing?

ü  What is your end-product?

ü  Who is interested in what I do and achieve?

ü  Am I cognizant of my actual merit and value?

·   You must upgrade your qualifications:  How trained are you to take on the challenges of work? Your name may be towing a line of qualifications, but the question is whether they are relevant to your current work or not? To be able to brace up for the contests that plague workplaces, you need to every so often check your folder. You should evaluate your position vis-à-vis others in the context of your qualifications – knowledge and expertise. Such an evaluation therefore, compulsorily entails concluding if you have improved your skills over the years so that you can gear up for the daunting future. In case you find that you need to do something more, put together a plan for the same. You should always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Being content with being better than others is good, but not adequate; you should try to be better than yourself. It is all about becoming a better version of you.

·   You must promote yourself at work:  Your workplace will continue to change and you will have to adapt yourself to altered conditions. While the game per se will not change, the rules will. You will thus be required to be enterprising, remain on the scene and refrain from any sort of rigidity. Those days are gone when you could remain in your chamber attending to routine work. Remember that unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. You will now have to make additional contributions and also focus on what your boss wants or what your colleagues do. You will have to make yourself central to all activities, including decision-making. You will find the results of your endeavours encouraging which, should be used for the projection of your image. Assignments that make you known to all, inter alia include raising a new team and taking it to excellence; superintendence of a project that involves new expertise; and jobs that entail developing external contacts and utilizing them for organizational benefit.

To sum up, you have to learn the rules of the game and having done so, play better than anyone else. Do not impose any restrictions on yourself. There are many people who do that and fail to go further than what their mind thinks. Essentially, you have to remain ahead of others.