25 Years to Overnight Success

It has been about a year and a half since my company reorganized and some people are beginning to post for other positions within the company, sometimes even outside. So, I too have been thinking and posting lately myself. Aside from that, for my own development, I have been reading about ambition and I wanted to share a couple of quotes that I have found interesting. 

The first is this, “How we live when ambitions are delayed significantly shape who we become.” The other relates to the outworking of ambition. From a CEO of a large construction firm, “It took me twenty-five years to become an overnight success.”

So let me briefly write about the first quote and how I think about it. I have a certain ambition to change roles or to get a promotion and I try to post out or up and it doesn’t happen. What do I do with that? What do I do with the unrequited ambition?

This is where I have gone to…

·         What is it about my current role that I still could learn or need to learn before I move to my next assignment?

·         How can I rethink what I currently do to prepare myself for that next role?

·         If I am the best, in my mind, at my current role, how can I get even better?

·         What does my response say about me and how I need to change to meet conditions as they are?

Let me share why I have gone there. I am thinking long term career development. I am thinking 10-20 years. I am thinking about finding my career best in each new job. If I am unable to change roles there has to be something that I can learn where I currently am that will help me years down the road. A very wise man one time suggested, when I was complaining about my situation, to blossom where I was planted. I think that advice is appropriate here too.

So what about the other quote? I heard this quote from a man that had worked very diligently on a vision that he had of being the head of a large construction company. By the time that he was selected to do a very visible project, he had been at honing his craft for over 25 years. Many people came up to him and asked him questions as if he had come from out of nowhere. His response was the quote. If you know anything about Jeremy Lin, he is another example of this phenomenon. Cinderella stories have a history.

So how does this all fit into Career Development? This is where I see it headed. I have my development goals and what I see as a successful career. My day to day experience is going to shape me and refine me until my goal is reached or until my career aspirations change. So if my ambitions are delayed so that I can learn something more, all the better for my long-term growth.

 If I am looking at my career goals from the long term I need to be in the upper loop of the victim-accountability loop and learn something and have it shape me and how I see things. When I have learned all that I need to learn and my role is visible to a broad audience or gets noticed in some way I will have walked through many hours of diligence and hard work to arrive at my career goal.

1 of 10: What a Successful Career Looks Like

1. To answer the question about what a successful career would look like, ask yourself, “What would I be doing on a weekly, monthly or daily basis if I was doing what I wanted in 10 years?”

It is August/September in 2021, what will you be doing for your career on this side of eternity?
Some of you may be saying to yourself, "Matt, I have no idea what I will be doing in 10 years, how could I ever plan for that far out?"

I agree we can't be certain and exact but just for the thought exercise, if you could be doing what you have always wanted to be doing in 10 years, what would it be? If you are 10 years older, what type of things would you be working on? Is it retirement, or is it the pinnacle of your career? Is it spending time with your wife each weekend on house projects? Or is it still working on weekends finishing a PowerPoint presentation? The choice to pursue the destination starts today.

Some additional challenging and insightful questions that may help answer this question of what a successful career would look like are:Who or what type of people would you be interacting with?

• Who would you intentionally surround yourself with?
• Who are your Customers? Vendors? Suppliers?
• What would you struggle with, positively or negatively, personally or professionally?
• What influence would you have on this world? Or the next generation?
• Who or what are you looking to define success?Once you answer some of these questions and you can look at them in front of you, ask yourself this last question, "What do you need to start or begin or continue that will make these possibilities come to fruition?

The problem with 10 years out is that it seems so far away and so we put off thinking about it or planning for it. Much like businesses that only plan for the next year or the current year, they spend very little time planning for what could be and spend their days reacting or responding to the crisis of the moment.

Until next week...