Brian Tracy explains how to accelerate your career: pick work you're suited for and passionate about, commit to excellence, increase your value to others, and overcome fear with courage and persistence. Personal responsibility and deliberate choice matter more than luck.
Did you know that it's not what you have, but what you do with what you have that will determine your success or failure in life? Abraham Maslow, the great psychologist, once said that the story of the human race is the story of people selling themselves short. He said that people have a tendency to settle for far less from life than they are truly capable of. Many people are spinning their wheels in careers where they should be moving rapidly upward and onward. So what can you do to put your career onto the fast track? Well, here's some ideas. Someone once said that the key to success was to choose your parents carefully. That may be partially true, but it's even more important to choose your job or career with great care. The choice of a job or occupation for which you are ideally suited comes before anything else. If you try to work at something you don't enjoy or don't believe in, you'll never be happy and you'll never be successful. Which leads us to the next point. If you want to reach the stars in your career, you have to become excellent at what you do. You have to pay any price, go any distance, spend any amount of time necessary to be the best. Extraordinary rewards only go for extraordinary performance. Average rewards for average performance. Below average rewards, insecurity and failure for below average performance. And here's a vital key. You're being paid today exactly what you're worth. No more and no less. If you want to earn more, you must increase your worth, your value to other people. The reason why choosing the right career, why doing what you love to do is so important, is because unless you really care about your work, you'll never be motivated to persist at it until you become excellent. And until you become excellent at what you're doing, you can't move ahead. You're stuck in place. So the antidote to the fears that hold you back is the development of courage and character and self esteem. The opposite of fear is actually love, self love and self respect. Acting with courage in a fearful situation is simply a technique that boosts your regard for yourself to such a degree that your fears subside and lose their ability to affect your behavior and your decisions. So whenever you feel fear, act as though you had no fear at all. As they say, act as if it were impossible to fail and it will be.
