Career Mistakes Too Many People Make
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Here I speak about a few of the mistakes people make in how they view their career.
10 Career Mistakes Boomers Made That Gen X Should Avoid
I’m not sure that these are specifically career mistakes; I think some of them could go into business category as well. I’m going to try to cover both and start off with the big one.
- You made a mistake. You are going to make more mistakes.. The real question is how you will respond to the mistake. Do you beat yourself up? Do you punish yourself? You spent hours or days or weeks fixating on the mistake or do try to learn your lessons and move on?
I wrestle with this 1 myself. I’m a guy who spent a lot of time searching for perfection and not spending in time, accepting excellence. Maybe you are the same way, too. I think there’s a chance to learn and be kinder to oneself because there’s a chance that you are going to make mistakes and more mistakes! It happens.
What can you learn from the experience? What can you do to learn and move forward from it?
- If you are interested in being happy in your work, it is probably going to take time. Especially when someone is junior, what tends to happen is you get what is called, “grunt work.” It tends to be the foundation for how people learn the fundamentals of the craft.
For example, in IT, someone starts off by being a coder. Although the technology will change over the course of time, they will use it as the baseline for how they learn and grow to manage people, how to lead organizations and such. Certainly being a kind coder doesn’t guarantee that you will be a good manager, but understanding the fundamentals of your craft and not taking shortcuts will help a lot.
That’s the important thing – – learning the fundamentals of your craft and not taking shortcuts. What are the fundamentals? You ask for help and advice? I’m not talking about asking your manager, but from other people? That is what’s going to help guide you and help you progress.
- Another thing is about being patient with yourself. It takes time to be successful. As I said before, the secret to success without hard work is still a secret. What can you do to lay the foundation? If you think you can figure it out by yourself, you are going to make it a lot harder than what you need to do.
- Always be networking and always be asking other people for advice. Save the information. Collate it. Start creating spreadsheets or data categories that kind of fit with one another so that you can learn what’s being told to you constantly and see whether it meets with your experience. Adapt and change.
- The last thing going to talk with you about is the fact that so many people separate the work from the personal life. It’s hard of these days, but I remember an old story from the original owner of the New York Jets. He was trying to figure out whether or not to promote someone into particular role and one person over another. The reason he made the particular choice he made as he tell the loser in the situation, that for the loser this was a job with all the template of being a job. This contrasted with the other person who loved what he did.
Your goal is to find work that you love. I don’t presume to know what it is and there are a million ways to find it and figure it out. Think of your career as being a longer race than just today, even if you are in your 60s, and start laying the foundation, working at it and finding work that you really love.
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ career easier. Those things can involve job search, hiring more effectively, managing and leading better, career transition, as well as advice about resolving workplace issues.
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He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2500 episodes.
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