The 5 Main Factors of Career Success
Most of the time, it is not difficult to identify why someone has career success. Talent and opportunity can only carry you so far. There are plenty of people around with talent that never succeed. Squandered opportunities litter the pathway of many people who are still trying to get traction in their career path. However, there are five factors that play a major role in converting talent and opportunity into success.Perseverance is critical until success is achieved.You have to keep pushing. This is more than just enduring. Part of persevering is keeping an eagle eye open for opportunities and then seizing them as quickly as possible. Until breaks and chances come, you have keep working to stay sharp and as busy in your chosen field as possible. This helps you to keep growing and learning.Preparation must be a priority before trying to move too far into your career.Education, building a network of contacts, learning the ropes with on-the-job experience, and even relocating to the right community or part of town can go into preparation. This is the time to build the foundations that you will build your career upon. Most of the time this part of the process is done before you leap into the career field. By having good preparation, you are ready to answer the demands of the job.Patience is needed to wait until the right chance is in front of you.It is easy to decide that opportunities are never going to come for you. Opportunities come for nearly everyone. You must be in the right place for the chance to happen for you. This requires you to be like the hunter or angler who has to wait for the prey to appear. If you leave too early, the chance will come, but you will have already moved on to other things and will miss it.Planning is really the final step of preparation.Once you have prepared for success, you have to formulate a plan to maximize your opportunity when it arrives. If does not help to have done mountains of preparation unless you have a plan to follow. Most people have said some form of the statement, "If I were running this company..." Having a plan is knowing what you will do as soon as you are given the chance. A plan keeps you from floundering and looking weak and indecisive. The plan keeps you moving onward and upward on the career path. You can always make adjustments if needed, but it is hard to succeed if you have to come up with a plan and perform the job at the same time.Performance is what success is all about.Whether you are in business, entertainment, or public service, if you fail to perform well, you will fail. Minor league baseball teams are heavily populated with players that have high potential, but have never been able to translate it into performance. What happens when you go out to do the job will make all of the difference between success and failure. Most of the time failure is not that you have not accomplished something, but that you have fallen into mediocrity instead of rising to stardom in your career.
