How to Succeed at Any Job (3 Principles)
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I often will open with a catchy headline, and then you get in here and realize it’s either not that simple, or it’s not quite what it seems. This is true today, but I hope you’ll stick with me as I try to impart some of my learned experience for your success.
I’ve spoken at length already on how there are no shortcuts to success. This is still true. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to expedite the process nonetheless.
I’ve worked a handful of different jobs over my <30 years on this planet. Here’s my quick resume:
Age 12 - Newspaper route
Age 14 - Retirement home kitchen staff
Age 16 - KFC cook
Age 19 - College admissions staff
Age 20 - College office administrator
Age 21 - Manufacturing company marketing coordinator
Age 23 - Self-employed wedding photographer
Age 27 - Self-employed small business social media manager
Age 28 - Manufacturing company marketing manager
Not the most diverse job history you’ll ever see, but there’s a range of jobs in there no less. Here are the 3 biggest things that I’ve applied to all of those jobs to have found success:
1. A Hunger for Knowledge
This has become increasingly true at my last three jobs, but having a desire to understand the company better, my industry better, and to be on top of all the latest events is a huge thing that has set me apart.
In fact, a big reason I got the job as a marketing manager just recently is because of my desire to understand the company as well—if not better—than the average salesperson on the roster. If I can’t keep up in a conversation about the products with most of our customers, how in the heck could I ever expect to be effective at my job?
Jordan Belfort (the Wolf of Wall Street guy) has a lot of spectacular sales training videos on Youtube. Seriously—just go fall down a rabbit hole of his content. But one of the most valuable things he teaches as the foundation of sales is the absolute necessity that the salesperson has the knowledge of the customer’s needs before trying to offer them a solution for those needs. Let me rephrase that to be a little more clear:
In order to succeed at selling anything, you must understand your customer’s needs intimately.
On the surface, working a job might not seem like selling anything. But in a roundabout way, you are selling yourself! The more useful you become to your coworkers and the people around you, the more people gravitate towards you, and the more secure your job becomes as time goes on. Then the question becomes, “Well, how do I become more useful to the people around me?”
It all begins with knowledge: of your customers, of your industry, of your ability to help.
But notice this is just the first part of the equation here. I specifically titled this argument A Hunger for Knowledge. Knowledge itself is not enough.
You have to be hungry to constantly be learning.
There is no success in stagnation. You must always be growing in order to succeed. You have to want it—you have to be hungry for it—in order to find that success.
How do you impart a hunger to someone? That one I don’t have answer for. It seems like a lot of people intrinsically have it, others don’t. But if you can teach yourself to be hungry for more knowledge, I firmly believe you’re a third of the way way to huge success in your job.
2. A Hunger to be Better
Not only do you need to deepen your knowledge of your industry, your clients, and yourself, you have to be realistic about where you currently stand in your ability to execute, and recognize that you have to want to be better.
I don’t care who you are, what you do, who your clients are: there is always room for improvement. Period. End of discussion.
Your path to finding success at your job or career is to recognize this ability to improve, and to go after it.
People become lazy because they think they have achieved a status of “good enough”. People become successful because they have a mentality of “not good enough.” They are driven. They work hard. They recognize there is still more work to be done.
It’s not good enough to just know that you need to be better, you have to hunger after it, and chase it. You have to actually put in the work to get better.
Getting better involves work no one sees. It’s unglamorous. It’s un-Instagram-able.
No one will see a lot of the work that happens behind the scenes, but you still gotta do it. No guy takes off his shirt on the beach to reveal washboard abs without having busted his butt in the gym for a year beforehand. He earned it, and you have to earn it too.
You cannot settle if you want to succeed. You can always be better. Desire to be better, and go after it.
3. Discipline of Determination
Piggybacking on the last argument, you have to have discipline about achieving knowledge and greatness. It is not enough to be inspired and do it for a time.
Discipline is doing the work when you don’t feel like it. And guess what? The inspiration you might be experiencing right now? It’s going to fade. It will be over before you know it. And you’re going to be looking around at more attractive options that are exciting again.
New things are exciting. But new things do not breed success. Success is built upon discipline.
The last step of the success equation, as far as I know it, is the ability to show up day in and day out. Not every day you need to try to revolutionize your work. But you do need to show up and get the job done, regardless of how you’re feeling.
Wedding Photography, one of the handful of jobs I’ve worked, involved me to be on and alive when I was working with clients. This was their once-in-a-lifetime wedding day! There was never going to be another one like it. It didn’t matter how I might’ve felt about my day, my week, my life, the couple, their wedding: I needed to show up and be enthusiastic about what I was doing in order to deliver on what I sold them 12 months ago.
The same principle applies to any job.
Discipline doesn’t care about your feelings. Stop letting feelings run your life.
Show up and get the job done. By showing up consistently, you are already well ahead of the pack. If you can show up every day, your feelings will fall in line.
In conclusion:
Notice that literally none of this has been about technical know-how. I don’t need to teach you that because your hunger for knowledge, your hunger to be better, and your discipline of determination are going to teach you that.
Everything else falls in line if you approach them with the right mentality. It makes no difference what you’re doing.
Homework:
Ask yourself the following questions:
Do I know a lot about my industry? About my clients’ needs? How can I learn more about these things in the next 15 minutes?
Have I plateaued in my growth? When was the last time I improved myself or tried something new?
Have I been consistent in showing up every day? Have I let my emotions or “inspiration” get the best of me?
