"Most people overestimate what they can do in a year,
and they underestimate what they can do in a decade."
- Tony Robbins
"Most people overestimate what they can do in a year,
and they underestimate what they can do in a decade."
- Tony Robbins
Start Your GrowthIf you only take the last 15 years of my career it looks like I had it all figured out, but that's not how it started. I was an average student who dropped out of college twice. I didn't discover my life's work until I was 30, and 15 years later ... we sold Android to Google. A few of us know exactly what we were meant to do, but the rest of us must figure it out over time. It takes over 10 years to build a career, and it’s frustrating. Working at a job you don't like may be tolerable for a while, but over 20 years it's a prison sentence. Don't settle! You can learn how to grow yourself into a satisfying career. I wrote the 7 Career Drivers to help MBA my students grow faster. It has everything I wish I knew when I started my career, including 17 Growth Exercises. All 50,000 words are yours with a Free Membership. - Nick |
1. Master of Business (Preview)
1. Master of Business Become a great employee and your career will follow One of the most important steps in your career is learning how to become a great employee. You can’t be a great teammate, manager, or leader unless you become a great employee first. The first part of becoming a great employee is learning how to do your specific job. The second part of becoming a great employee is learning about business. 90% of employees have never studied business even though they work for one. Only 20% of college students study business. You don’t need a business degree to become a Master of Business, but if you want to have a successful business career, then you need to understand how it works. This chapter will help you understand five powerful forces that drive business: Competition, Owners, Customers, Employees and Technology. When you understand what drives business, when you can see your work through the eyes of owners, customers, and employees, you will be able to create win-win-win solutions for all three groups. Great employees become more than masters of their jobs, they become masters of business. Open the full chapter here. |
2. Perseverance (Preview)
2. Perseverance “If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” – Martin Luther King Jr. The sign on my college math teacher’s door read, “Success is getting up one more time then you’ve been knocked down.” A brilliant but simple formula to measure success. Sooner or later, life is going to knock you down, or wear you down, or you’re going to fall down all by yourself. Why do some people get up and move forward when others quit? Why do some people become victims while others grow stronger? Perseverance is the ability to continue doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success, to keep moving forward by ignoring the things you can’t control and focusing on the one thing you can control - yourself. When I’m overwhelmed with stress, complexity, or failure, I narrow my focus to the next thing that will move me forward and I block out everything else. I can survive anything for a short period of time by narrowing my focus in Survival Mode. Long-term success is much harder to achieve because it requires years of sustained effort in Marathon Mode. Perseverance is your gateway to long-term success and you can increase it by maximizing your Confidence, Motivation, Work Environment and Self-Control. Members can access the full chapter here. Get your Free Membership now. |
3. Intelligence (Preview)
3. Intelligence “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” – Albert Einstein Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Your level of intelligence is not fixed; it increases when you learn and change. Based on intelligence tests, about 9% of the population has superior intelligence and 9% has a deficiency. The rest of us mortals fall into the normal range and how smart we become depends on how well we learn. You can raise your intelligence to the upper end of the normal range or beyond. It’s a function of where you are right now, how fast you learn and the amount of time you spend learning. You may recall this simple math formula: Distance = Speed x Time. Everyone knows how to increase Distance: travel faster and/or longer. If Intelligence = Learning x Time, you can increase intelligence by learning faster and/or longer. Intelligence is a function of Learning and Time (i.e. Experience). In this chapter, we’ll examine two types of intelligence: Cognitive Intelligence (IQ) is your ability to learn, and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is your ability to work well with others. We’ll also discuss the value of Self-taught Intelligence and lifelong learning. It doesn’t matter where you start, it matters how far you go. I started with average intelligence, but I learned how to increase it over time and it became an advantage. You can do the same. Members can access the full chapter here. Get your Free Membership now. |
4. Experience (Preview)
4. Experience “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.” – Immanuel Kant Experience is the skill or knowledge you get by doing something. Experience provides your brain with the feedback necessary to achieve high levels of IQ and EQ. Experience is your stairway to building confidence and your gateway to becoming a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Most students believe their career starts when they graduate from college, but if you’re a professional athlete, your career started very early in life. All the time you spent as a youth practicing your skills, competing in games - it's all experience. The success of a professional athlete is not possible without the experience gained in youth sports. Most athletes are so well developed by the time they graduate from high school, it’s almost impossible to catch up if you are starting from scratch. By the time an athlete graduates from college, they have 10-14 years of work experience. Compare that to the college graduate who ends up working in the business world. If you worked every Summer during High School and College you would accumulate two years of work experience by the time you graduate from college. By the time I graduated from college I had 7 years of work experience. During those 7 years, I learned a lot about becoming a great employee and it turned into a competitive advantage that I used to match or outperform my peers – even if they had degrees from the best colleges in the country. Work experience will eventually have a bigger impact on your career than school. When I joined Google in 2005, they only hired the top 5% of students from the top schools in the country. They valued IQ over experience. Then Google grew so fast they ran into a problem, there weren’t enough top students to hire. They were forced to include people who didn’t have as high of grades and they started hiring people with more work experience. When they analyzed performance data, they discovered GPA was only a predictor of work performance during the first two years, after that, it had no impact on performance. Experience is the greatest teacher, and here is the good news. Just like a professional athlete, all your work experience counts. It might not count to your boss when you start, but it will count toward your performance and that’s how you’ll be measured. It doesn’t matter what type of work you do or if you are the lowest level of employee. It only matters how you treat the work. That you take your work seriously, you strive to do a great job and you learn as much as you can from the experience. Don't wait until you graduate from school or become a "professional" to start your career. You can start your career with any job, because your career starts when you treat your work as a career. Members can access the full chapter here. Get your Free Membership now. |
5. Improve Your Team (Preview)
5. Improve Your Team “Magic Johnson is the best leader and most unselfish player I ever coached.” – Pat Riley When I was a Brand Manager, my team was responsible for planning a yearly sales retreat at the beautiful Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. In order for the retreat to qualify as a business expense, we hired a high profile speaker to motivate our sales people. I wanted to hire Magic Johnson, but the big boss wasn’t convinced he’d be the right speaker to talk about sales. I was allowed to hire him primarily because he fit into our schedule. I met Magic ten minutes before his speech to walk him over to our event, and I used the opportunity to ask him basketball questions. Every answer was preceded by a huge smile as if I had asked the best question in the history of sports journalism. I was having so much fun that I didn't bother to remind him to include some sales advice in his speech. When we arrived at the hall, Magic was introduced and he spent a few minutes describing the highlights of his career: NCAA Champion, 5 time NBA Champion, and Olympic Gold Medalist. Then he said, “That’s the end of my prepared remarks, but you don’t want me to stand up here and talk, you’d rather ask questions.” Holy crap, I thought to myself, Magic didn’t prepare a speech and I’m going down in a huge ball of flames! But then I noticed half of the sales people had raised their hand to ask a question. Magic answered each question with a big smile, followed by a great story that contained a lesson for success. We paid Magic for an hour but he stayed for 90 minutes because everybody fell in love with him and wanted more. My favorite story was about a lesson he learned in grade school. Magic was so tall he could easily score enough points to win every game by himself, but he noticed a big difference in his teammates when he passed the ball. They tried harder, played better and their parents cheered more. From that day forward, Magic focused on making his team better and that’s what made him one of the greatest NBA players of all time. The trademark of his leadership was his unselfish play, which always made the people around him better. I almost named this chapter Teamwork, but the more I thought about Teamwork, the more I realized that Teamwork and Leadership are different sides of the same coin. Great teams, departments and organizations aren’t possible without both. Every employee needs to be a leader and their fundamental leadership responsibility is to make the team significantly better – to add value. Great employees are leaders (at all levels) who figure out how to improve their team. Members can access the full chapter here. Get your Free Membership now. |
6. Play Your Position (Preview)
6. Play Your Position “Don’t worry about holding high position; worry about playing your role.” – Confucius I envy professional athletes because they discover their calling early in life and they’re encouraged to pursue it. Nobody approached Michael Jordan after his rookie season and said, “You had a great year so we’re promoting you to assistant coach. Keep up the good work and someday you could make head coach and a lot of money.” Jordan, who may be the greatest NBA player of all time, is a classic individual contributor. It took him 7 years to mature from an individual star into a team leader and win the first of six NBA championships. He played for 15 years and has been retired for 17 years, but he never became a coach. Most businesses build their teams on the assumption that great individual contributors make great managers. Most of the career candy (promotions, money, power) is reserved for managers. The job of a manager is the same as coach: organize, plan, control, staff, teach, and motivate. But managers don’t get to do the work of individual contributors because they are too busy managing the team. I realized early in my career that I loved doing the work and I didn’t love managing people. The best way to improve your team and become a great employee is to Play Your Position. Are you a Player or a Coach? Members can access the full chapter here. Get your Free Membership now. |
7. Get Shit Done (Preview)
7. Get Shit Done “We’ve got too many smart people. I need people who get shit done.” – Bob Stapleton My boss at T-Mobile, Robert Dotson, used quarterly goals he called Blue Chips and they were the only goals that mattered. Your job was to deliver your Blue Chips and if you didn’t, your bonus shrank. Robert had a strict rule, points were only given for results, not effort. I don’t completely agree with Robert’s rule to never reward effort, but everyone who worked for him increased their focus and delivered better results. It was a valuable lesson. Robert was hired by CEO Bob Stapleton, who shared the same results oriented philosophy. Bob had a talent for getting to the point. I’ll never forget a review meeting where one of our senior engineers was updating Bob on a continuing problem with our network. After the engineer left the room, Bob turned to the engineer’s boss and said, “Put someone new on this problem.” The boss pushed back, “Bob, he’s the smartest engineer we’ve got,” to which Bob replied, “We’ve got too many smart people, I need people who get shit done!” I could give you a long list of great employee attributes, but there’s only one your boss can’t live without - RESULTS. Great employees find a way to overcome obstacles and consistently deliver results. That’s what separates the best from the rest. Members can access the full chapter here. Get your Free Membership now. |