How You Grow Your Career in a Slow Economy

Help! I’m trying to stay focused on my professional goals. How can I grow my career despite the economy?

Coach: Brian Tracy, Motivational speaker, author of Reinvention: How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life

Always You’ve got to maximize your potential in order to grow your career. To do that you have to get more or better results than those around you. I’ve gotten blowback from others before for saying this, but you must realize that you’re in a competition with everyone else in your company.

So what does it take to get ahead? How can you do this? Here are some simple techniques to help you get more results and be respected for your work.

First, work all the time you are at work. Immediately start in on the most important tasks. Do not surf the Internet, make personal calls, read the newspaper or make small talk.

The next thing is to contribute. Ask yourself what you can do to render the greatest contribution to your organization. Go that extra mile. Do more than you are paid to do. Put in more effort than other people. Look for ways to do more. Remember, there is no traffic jam on the extra mile.

You’ve got to think about your career like it was a marathon: Some runners get out way ahead of the pack, the pack is there in the middle and then there are those who trail the pack. Your job is to be at the front of the pack.

Sometimes I don’t think there is anything that applies here sometimes when you’re trying to grow your career. Talking about what you could do “sometimes” could be the basis for a whole separate conversation.

Never Start work each day without writing down a plan of activities organized by priority. If you don’t do that, your whole life will end up going all over the place and you’ll get little done.