There’s a lot you’re not taught in school. Working skills, life skills, interpersonal skills — strip out all the skills that you’re not taught in school and you’re just left with academics. Now academics is good as it gives you the secondhand knowledge you need on the job, but it doesn’t give you the experience necessary to carry out that job successfully. Or really get a job for that matter.
Harvey Mackay, author of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, outlines a list of things they don’t teach you in school to help aid you in your job-hunting efforts and in establishing yourself in your career:
- Develop relationships and keep networking. Just like how a spider can catch an insect in a web, you too can easily net yourself a job if you continue to build up a good, solid network of contacts.
- Find advisors and mentors. It’s important to know that you don’t know everything there is to know, so it’s good to find people that know more than you, you know.
- Build your reputation. Typically, the larger network you have, the larger your reputation. But remember, it takes a lifetime to build a reputation, but only an instance to destroy it.
- Set goals. But not just any goals: obtainable goals. We all want to be the next great inventor or artist — whichever it may be — but that will come later. Where do you see yourself a year from not? Five years from now? Ten years? Find out what you’re capable of and set the bar a little higher each time you push past it.
- Get along with people. Possibly the most difficult and most valuable skill to learn is the ability to tolerate everyone. And in order for a company to be profitable, everyone must learn to work together, despite their differences.
- Be happy. Life sucks; it’s a fact, so get over it. The key to being happy and being successful in what you do is by finding joy in the little things. Like the challenges and opportunities that come your way.
- Smile. It’s kind of hard to smile if you’re not happy. Just sayin’
- Sense of humor. If happiness were a cake and a good smile the filing inside of it, then a sense of humor would be the icing to top it all off. Even if everything blows up in your face, laughing it off can relieve you of stress and better set others working with you at ease, allowing you all to approach the problem with a clearer mind.
- Be yourself. Because nobody likes a person who pretends to have it all together. Be content with who you are and focus more on what you’re really good at, as opposed to pushing yourself to the edge of insanity in order to fix what you’re not.
- Volunteer. Not only does this give you a healthier outlook on life, but you can also learn something from it too. Just because you’re not paid for it doesn’t make it a wasted effort.
And to see the actual article yourself (with his advice as opposed to my own commentary), then just click on link I’ve provided above.
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