Invincible Career - Claim your power and regain your freedom

The past two weeks have been interesting and challenging. I was selected for jury duty service here in California, and I have a few weeks left in the trial. The process has been taking up most of the time I usually spend writing, recording my podcast, and working with my clients and community.

As a result, I’m not entirely happy with my progress on the latest chapter of the book I’m writing. It’s about 80% of the way there, so I need more time to wrap it up before sharing the draft with you.

So, instead, I will try something new this week! I’m frequently asked career-related questions across various platforms. Instead of answering there, I will share the questions and my answers with you here.

By the way, if you would like to ask me a question about anything related to work, careers, interviews, etc., there are many ways you can do that:

* Reply to the weekly newsletter email and send me your question.

* Post your question in the comments section of an article.

* Send me an anonymous written question.

* Record an audio question, and you can have your voice included in an upcoming podcast episode!

Note: Please let me know if you’d like to have your name included or if you prefer to remain anonymous. For example, I can disguise your voice in the podcast.

Now, without further ado, let’s dive into the six questions below!

Question 1

“Has working remotely part-time or full-time enhanced your well-being?”

Absolutely! I have been working primarily remote for more than 12 years now and full-time remote for more than six years.

I used to commute 2–3 hours every day for my last corporate job. I was overweight, unhealthy, and unhappy. I didn't see my family much during the workweek.

Once I went remote running my own business, I started working out more often and eating healthier — after I recovered and repurposed those 2–3 hours every day. I lost 40 lbs! If you check out my Instagram, you'll see that I'm still working out every day.

I was also able to spend more time with my children and eat dinner with my family every night. I go for a walk and run with my wife almost every day. My mental and emotional health are so much better now.

Anyone who has read the advice in my newsletter knows that I'm a huge fan of remote work. I coach clients to take control of their working lives so they can work where they want and when they want. It's a life-changing experience!

Question 2

“What job or profession is a lot less fun than people imagine?”

I think many professions look more fun from the outside than they do on the inside. For example, I was a software/web/app designer for much of my career. My friends and family (who don’t work in tech) would frequently comment that my job must be “fun” because I just had to sit around and design stuff all day.

I think they confused “design” with creating art, which I actually do enjoy quite a lot. But, I can tell you that the actual profession of software design isn’t all fun and laughs. It’s a ton of long hours, arguments over requirements and design decisions, endless revisions, tedious documentation, etc. Sure, there are some fun moments, but probably no more than other professions.

Likewise, I think television shows have misled us into believing that the lives of doctors, police officers, and lawyers are a lot more exciting than they really are. My brother is a surgeon, so I know he isn’t having “fun” very often on the job. I used to be a police dispatcher, so I know that most of the job is boring and full of process and paperwork (briefly interrupted by rare moments of terror).

I’m sure that many of us look at the lives of professional athletes, music artists, and actors and think, “That must be nice! I sure do wish I could get paid to play like that.” But, there’s a reason that many of them struggle with substance abuse, depression, and failed relationships. The professions aren’t as glamorous as they look from the outside.

Question 3

“What are the considerations before making a career change?”

This is a tricky question to answer because I don’t know how significant the planned career change is. So, my first follow-up question would be, “What type of career change?” Obviously, a massive change will require more serious consideration and preparation.

Do you know what you're getting into? You should talk to people in the career/profession you’re considering. Explore what the job is like by receiving training, shadowing someone, etc.

I have some friends who have considered opening restaurants and bars. However, after spending a few days as a chef, they changed their minds.

Do you need a financial cushion? Depending on the career change, you may need funds to bridge the gap while your new career is spinning up (i.e., before it provides enough income to support you). This is often the case if you quit your job to become an entrepreneur. It takes some time for a new business to provide a reliable and sufficient income stream.

Will the career change require a lifestyle change? Are you prepared for that? For example, sometimes your commute or working hours will be pretty different when you change to a new profession. You should also be prepared for the impact it may have on your circle of friends. I lost quite a few “friends” when I left my tech career behind to become a leadership and career coach.

Finally, what’s your backup plan if the career change doesn’t work out? Failure is a possibility, and it can happen. Hey, my tech startup failed, and I had to quickly come up with my Plan B to keep going. So, be prepared with a backup plan ahead of time (just in case).

Question 4

“What (if any) new careers are open to you if you are nearing 60?”

Even though age discrimination is illegal and the law protects people age 40 or over, we all know it still happens. It’s a massive issue in tech, and I encountered it several times. Unfortunately, it’s hard to prove age discrimination.

So, it’s wise to plan ahead and be ready for the inevitable slowdown in opportunities that used to flow your way when you were younger. I started planning my future as I approached my 40s because I could already see where things were going. I intentionally guided my career in a direction where my age would be viewed as an asset, not a liability (e.g., management, leadership, consulting).

Some examples of pivoting into a second-act career:

* Successful actors become directors before they age out, and it’s too late (e.g., Ron Howard, Penny Marshall, Jodie Foster).

* Hot music artists start their own record label before they grow weary of touring (e.g., Jay Z, The Beatles, Dave Grohl).

* World-class athletes know when to hang it up and transition into coaching (e.g., Bill Russell, Martina Navratilova, Mike Ditka). 

Careers for older folks:

* Many older employees move into consulting when they feel their career slowing down within the walls of a corporation.

* People like me leave the corporate world, become coaches, and advise the next generation of leaders.

* Some people realize that they can’t be forced into “early retirement” if they start their own business and become their own boss. I know many business owners over the age of 60. My optometrist owned his practice and just retired this year when he was over 90!

* Teaching at a local school or college is a good option and lets you give back to the next generation.

* I’ve watched people retire from their first career and go into real estate. It’s a job that values your experience and connections.

* Writing is another career that is open to anyone, no matter their age. No one knows how old you are behind the keyboard!

* Finally, I know several people who indulged their artistic talent and became artists in their second-act careers. I interviewed one talented lady for my podcast.

As you may have guessed, some of these second-act careers won’t pay as well as your first-act career did when you were younger. So, plan accordingly. I think you’ll enjoy this article; A new start after 60: ‘I became a psychotherapist at 69 and found my calling.’ You might find this one interesting, too.

Question 5

“How many careers did you have before your current one?”

I guess it depends on how you define a “career.” I’ve had many different jobs in my life, but I wouldn’t classify any of the earlier ones as a career to which I dedicated a significant amount of my professional life.

Before I became a leadership and career coach, I spent most of my professional life in one career in tech. I was a designer, design manager, design leader, product executive, and startup founder and CEO. But, I would put all of those jobs under the umbrella of my “tech career.”

I will say that the idea of having one primary career for life is outdated. My professional life has changed considerably about every ten years. I would guess that many of you will change careers more than once in your lifetime, as well.

Question 6

“What do you do when your business direction is becoming more risky and you feel like your life is taking too long to get to where you want to be? Mildly bittersweet and having a lot of hindsight about my past life right now :(“

One of my most popular articles ever was on this very topic. What does “too long” mean? Are you comparing yourself to someone else?

The focus on “where you want to be” reveals what is known as the Arrival Fallacy. Many of us experience it at a few points in our lifetime.

"Arrival fallacy is this illusion that once we make it, once we attain our goal or reach our destination, we will reach lasting happiness."

— Tal Ben-Shahar

When you dream about the destination and keep thinking that reaching it will be what makes you happy, you don’t enjoy your life along the way. I know this is easier said than done, but you need to enjoy the journey too. Too many people experience a letdown when they reach their big goal. They feel like, “Is this it? Shouldn’t I feel happier now?”

Now, your comment about your business direction becoming “more risky” is a valid concern. My follow-up question is, “What do you mean by that?” You should continuously evaluate progress and how things are going. Sometimes, it is time to cut your losses and move on. But I don’t know enough to tell you if you’ve reached that point yet.

So, what do you think? Do you enjoy these Q&A articles? Let me know!

Again, feel free to comment on this article if you’d like to ask me a question.

Thank you for reading Invincible Career®. This post is public so feel free to share it.

By the way, there is a great way you can support my work without spending any money on a premium subscription:

📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 

It only takes a few seconds, and it helps grow my business so I can continue making time to write it.

I’ll even provide some copy and paste text to make it easy to share on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Thanks in advance!

I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

NOTE: I apologize for the chainsaw sounds in the background. The crew picked an amazing time to endlessly cut trees outside. 😫

I recently read Reid Hoffmann's article, Why 10 Year Plans are Wrong. In it, he states:

”You will change. The environment around you will change. And your allies and competitors will change.”

I agree with what he is saying about planning. Of course, career plans will need to change. A 10-year plan is a bit silly because the world does change so much in a decade.

* Who could have predicted the impact of the pandemic?

* Who could have foreseen the massive disruption smartphones would have on our personal and professional lives?

* Who envisioned all of the novel opportunities enabled and created by online platforms? 

Strategies and plans will always need to adapt to the changing times. But, if you created your long-term vision the right way, it shouldn’t keep changing. It should endure and stand the test of time.

So, don't get distracted by the shiny objects screaming for your attention today. Surface-level trends come and go. If you try to predict the ripples on the surface, you will fail. 

That hot new profession today may be gone tomorrow. The booming new industry everyone is talking about may go cold next year. The startup darling that all of the investors are pumping may fizzle soon (e.g., Clubhouse).

Focus on the core truths of the human condition, if you want to choose a professional path that will endure. Dive deeper and deeper still. What have people always wanted and will always need (until we evolve beyond carbon-based lifeforms)?

Let’s use the entertainment industry as an example. What evolution have we witnessed?

* Stories told around a fire at night. 

* Live plays enjoyed in the village square. 

* Theater performances on stage. 

* Films projected on screens in movie theaters. 

* VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, and DVDs watched in the comfort of your home. 

* Cable television pay-per-view. 

* Netflix delivered DVDs to your home. 

* And now, an explosion of streaming video, gaming, and other entertainment experiences is consumed on tiny computers in the palm of your hand. 

If you try to predict what's coming next, you might be correct, but you might be so very wrong. If you try to plan a 10-year career and place a bet on where it's all heading, you might win or lose. 

That's why Reid is correct about the fallacy of concrete 10-year plans. You can't predict the future with enough accuracy for planning that far into the distant years ahead. 

However, you can return to the core truth that human beings enjoy being entertained. Our brains are large enough (and our modern world is safe enough) that we can frequently focus our minds and senses on fun instead of survival. In some way, shape, or form, people will still want to be entertained — and distracted from reality — ten years from now, 100 years from now, and probably for the rest of your professional career. 

So, if you tell me that your long-term career goal is to be an executive at Netflix, I will caution you against that decision. For all we know, Netflix could implode in the next five years (e.g., a competitor might kill them just like they killed Blockbuster). 

Heck, I will say that you're making a mistake even if you tell me that your long-term goal is to be a leader in streaming video. Sure, it seems like it's not going anywhere. But, we said the same thing about many technologies that have gone to the high-tech graveyard in the past 20 years. 

However, if you want to create a long-term goal of climbing to a leadership role or founding a startup in the business of entertainment, I say go for it! People will always want to be entertained. Just be ready to adapt to the changing “how” of how entertainment will be provided.

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The future is unpredictable 

Companies often make the mistake of trying to brainstorm and engage in long-term planning to “create the future.” The reality of uncertainty and chaos makes leaders and shareholders very uncomfortable.

As Amy Webb said in an HBR article about strategic planning like a futurist:

“Nice, linear timelines offer a certain amount of assurance: that events can be preordained, chaos can be contained, and success can be plotted and guaranteed.”

Unfortunately, no amount of vision work or planning can control the future. Outside forces collide with the best-laid plans and wreak havoc on expected outcomes (e.g., natural disasters, pandemics, wars, competitive moves). That’s why so many organizations get into a pattern of cycling between strategy and tactics repeatedly and churn their teams.

Individuals fall into this trap, as well. I’m just as guilty. I enjoy long-term planning and vision work. But, we can’t predict precisely how our futures will turn out.

“Man Plans, and God Laughs.”— Yiddish proverb

As a quantitative futurist, Amy Webb suggests a different framework for strategically thinking about the future. Her timelines aren’t lines — they’re “time cones.” The image below illustrates her framework.

The tip of the cone lives in the here and now, and tactics come into play because we have the highest degree of certainty, data, and evidence. But, as the cone moves to the right with more time (5 years, 10 years, and further out), it expands more broadly, and details are fuzzier. Outcomes and destinations are less precise and could fall within a broader range of possibilities. Your longer-term vision and strategies become much more useful than tactics.

What’s also interesting about her model is that the cone moves. It is not the fixed timeline that most planning exercises use.

“Unlike a traditional timeline with rigid dates and check-ins, the cone always moves forward. As you gain data and evidence and as you make progress on your actions, the beginning of the cone and your tactical category is always reset in the present day. The result, ideally, is a flexible organization that is positioned to continually iterate and respond to external developments.”— Amy Webb, How to Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist

Control, influence, or adapt?

This topic of long-term goals and trying to plan your future reminds me of the concept of “Locus of control,” which was created by the psychologist Julian Rotter. Your life is full of actions you take, actions others take, events in the world around you, and outcomes.

If you have a greater external locus of control, you tend to place the power over outcomes in the hands of others, luck or fate, or other “powers that be.” You say things like:

* “I just got lucky.”

* “He was in the right place at the right time.”

* “I can’t do anything about it. What will be, will be.”

* “I received a bad grade because the teacher doesn’t like me.”

* “The boss only promotes her favorite employees.”

If you have a greater internal locus of control, you believe your actions determine or influence outcomes. You say things like:

* “I worked really hard to get where I am.”

* “He received that award because he’s super smart and talented.”

* “I know that I control my destiny.”

* “I received a bad grade because I didn’t study enough for the test.”

* “The boss promotes people who get results.”

Of course, this concept isn’t black and white. Most of us have a belief system somewhere along a continuum. We either tend to think we are more in control of the outcomes in our lives or those outcomes are more out of our hands. Interestingly, people with a greater external locus of control have higher levels of depression and anxiety. They feel like nothing they do matters.

A pure internal locus of control isn’t so great, either. If you do that, you blame yourself completely for every failure. The reality is that it is a balance.

Yes, you can take action and shape outcomes. But, other people and the world around you will have a significant impact on outcomes too. And, people who are more balanced in how they think about external vs. internal control report being happier (April, Dharani, & Peters, 2012). 

I've coached several people who told me that their career "just happened to them." They took the jobs that came their way, but they never intentionally pursued what they wanted. At some point, that approach failed them, they had a bad experience, or their career stalled.

However, when they shifted their locus of control more internally, they decided that they could control the path of their careers. They could intentionally decide how to prepare and position themselves. They knew they could influence the outcome. They ended up in a much better place.

I created a worksheet (available below) that is a useful way to examine a situation you might be facing that feels out of your control. It can help shift your locus of control away from external forces and reduce feelings of helplessness. The exercise challenges you to identify what you actually can control, what you might be able to influence, and what you probably have to accept.

The downloadable worksheet is free for the first 1,000 people who claim it. Grab yours today!

"Do you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?" — Charles Bukowski

Your heart is stable

People don't change. We mature, evolve, learn, and grow. But, we don't fundamentally change. 

I've observed that truism in my children as I've watched them grow up from babies to young adults. I still see the core of their personalities, likes, and dislikes despite the other changes in their lives. 

I've seen it in myself. I've watched my life come almost full circle. Sure, my career has transformed — often radically — about every ten years. 

* Blue-collar work

* Academic pursuits to receive my Ph.D.

* Software design

* Management and leadership

* Startup life

* Building my own business

* Coaching

* And who knows what will come next?

However, what has remained surprisingly stable and accurate is my ideal vision for my life. That has lasted more than 50 years. 

I got sidetracked along the way and distracted by false goals, but I'm finally returning to that vision of what I always wanted. I'm slowly but surely finding my way there (and have never been happier). 

What's always been true:

* I'm an introvert who prefers mainly working alone. 

* I'm a creator who brings what's in my head to life with words, art, and music. 

* I wither when I'm trapped in the concrete world of cities. 

* I thrive when I'm in the mountains, deep in the woods, and away from crowds. 

It took most of my life, but I've come full circle to what my heart always wanted. So, sure, a 10-year rigid career plan is ridiculous. Who knows what the world will be like and what you'll have to do to survive?

But, having a lifetime vision, mission, sense of purpose, and meaning? Yes. Yes, that is possible. I think it’s so important that I dedicated a chapter in my book to it.

Will you learn more about yourself and course correct over the years? Yes, I’m sure you will.

But, without a vision and a sense of purpose, what are you? A tiny boat on the surface of a stormy sea being thrust wherever the winds of fate blow you? 

That's surviving, not thriving. It's ok for the short term but pretty miserable as a lifelong lifestyle.

Yes, be agile with your tactics in the near term. Be flexible with your strategy for the next few years. But, don’t be afraid to create an enduring and inspirational long-term vision for your life.

”And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”— Steve Jobs

Thank you for reading Invincible Career®. This post is public so feel free to share it.

By the way, there is a great way you can support my work without spending any money on a premium subscription:

📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 

It only takes a few seconds, and it helps grow my business so I can continue making time to write it.

I’ll even provide some copy and paste text to make it easy to share on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Thanks in advance!

I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

A flawlessly executed plan will fail if the overarching strategy is flawed.

Let me use a hypothetical situation with a cafe named “Beanville” as an example. Beanville’s strategy to win in a competitive marketplace was to offer the lowest price option to customers. So, Beanville created a plan to acquire, create, and sell the lowest-priced coffee products in town. That plan included all the details required to keep costs down:

* Low-cost commercial real estate

* Sourcing the cheapest coffee beans

* Aggressively negotiating with suppliers

* Low production costs

* Minimum wage employees

* Low-cost packaging

* Pricing and sales strategies

Unfortunately, Beanville’s core strategy was flawed. They discovered that customers in town weren’t so cost-conscious that they were willing to sacrifice the quality of their coffee drinks to save a little money. So, Beanville lost to its competitors, who delivered a better product. Even though they flawlessly executed the plans to support their lowest-price strategy, they still failed. This is why choosing the right strategy matters so much and why it must happen before you go into planning mode.

So, let’s take the time to create a winning strategy that will help you achieve your goals. Developing the right strategy must come before making the appropriate plans to support it.

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Strategy vs. Plan

People often confuse creating a strategy with making a plan. As Chris Kolenda succinctly points out, here are three critical differences between strategies and plans:

* A strategy faces outward, while a plan faces inward.

* A strategy orients on factors you don’t control, while a plan focuses on what you do control.

* A strategy measures success, while a plan measures performance.

However, It’s easy to slip right past strategic thinking and into planning mode because the steps feel tangible and clear. “We’ll do x, then y, and then finish with z.” Unfortunately, intense and detailed planning does not ensure success.

A perfect plan won’t save you if the underlying strategy is the wrong choice. Looking back to your vision and mission in chapter 4, think of your vision as an inspirational flag planted on the horizon. That point — shrouded in misty clouds —is your ideal destination. That’s where you want to be.

Your mission is what you will do to make that vision become a reality. You know you need to move from where you are standing to that point on the horizon. In chapter 7, you identified the goals you need to achieve to get there. You can think of those as waypoints along the path you choose. But, you also know the journey will be complex, bumpy, and full of obstacles that will try to stop you.

That’s where your strategy comes into play. Your strategy is how you hypothesize you can navigate that mysterious landscape to follow your mission, achieve your goals, and reach that vision. Let’s play around with this metaphor for a second to make the distinctions clear.

If your vision is to reach a specific mountain peak in the far distance, you could choose one of the following strategies to get there and overcome the obstacles in your path:

* Float over the landscape in a hot air balloon and land on the mountain.

* Fly in a small plane and parachute down to the mountain.

* Take a boat down the river that leads to the mountain's base and climb to the peak.

* Ride a horse through the countryside to reach and ascend the mountain.

* Hike the entire way to the mountain on foot and climb to the peak.

Those are all valid strategies, but each one has pros and cons. Eventually, you will choose the strategy you are best able to employ, hope will take you past all obstacles, and has the greatest chance of success.

Once you have selected a strategy, only then would you start creating a plan to set that strategy in motion. For example:

* Acquire funds.

* Purchase equipment and supplies.

* Map the best route and account for travel speed, time, waypoints, resupplying, etc.

* Hire experts and guides.

* Acquire the necessary training, skills, and knowledge.

* Your strategy can’t predict the weather, but your plan certainly can prepare for the worst.

* Create a Plan B, so you’re prepared if Plan A fails.

Too silly? Ok, let me share a personal example instead.

I’ve had a long-term vision of living in a cozy cabin in the mountains surrounded by a forest for most of my life. I spent decades with this image in my mind as I made my way through childhood in Nebraska, graduate school in Texas, and a tech career in Silicon Valley. I knew where I eventually wanted to be and what I wanted my life to be like, but it seemed far, far away in the future.

However, a health scare woke me up several years ago, and I decided I shouldn’t put my dreams off forever. So, I made it my mission to make that vision come true. We had to find a way to leave Silicon Valley and move closer to the mountains where we always enjoyed spending time and wanted to make our new reality.

I’m not the kind of person willing to shoot from the hip and hope things work out. I have a family to support. So, I began exploring various strategies that could make a move possible. One strategy was to reduce our cost of living to give us more flexibility in our income. Moving out of the Bay Area and into a rural area was part of that strategy.

Yet, I still needed to make a living somehow. I had spent decades working in tech, which is why we had moved to Silicon Valley in the first place. But, how could I maintain my career in tech if we moved to a rural area far away from the heart of it all? Note: This all occurred several years ago before the pandemic and the changes it enabled for jobs like mine.

I came up with a few possible strategies for making a living:

* Stay in my current career and find a tech job in a city within commute distance from our new country home.

* Leave my career and find a non-tech 9-5 job in our tiny town.

* Find a tech job with a company that would be ok with me mainly working remotely, but traveling to be in the home office every month.

* Found another tech startup and locate partners and employees who would also be comfortable working remotely.

* Leave my tech career and design a new business that fully supported my new lifestyle and enabled me to work remotely with customers and clients.

Long story short, I evaluated all of the strategies, what they would require, the fit with my desired lifestyle, and their likelihood of success. For one reason or another, the first four strategies didn’t seem to have the full potential and flexibility that the last strategy did. So, I finally went into planning mode to execute that strategy, set it in motion, and I’m happy to say that it’s been working well for the past few years.

Strategy must come first. And you must have enough research, innovative thinking, and cleverness to select a winning strategy. Then, and only then, can you plan to execute that strategy.

We’ll go into the details of the plan to build the “Invincible You” in a later chapter. Now, we’ll focus on ensuring you are creating a strategy — or strategies — that will help you successfully navigate the competitive landscape of your professional and personal life. These are the strategies that will help you achieve your most audacious goals.

First, I’d like to share a meta-level strategy that will fundamentally shift how you think about your career and work.

The Business of You

As you may have noticed, you will be creating strategies within strategies. A high-level strategy to win and achieve your goals will often have numerous lower-level strategies to accomplish various sub-goals (identified in chapter 7) and overcome obstacles.

Treating your career like a business is one of those meta-level strategies that sits above the specific strategy you will soon create to achieve your particular vision. But, thinking like a business doesn’t come naturally for many people. If you’ve been an employee your entire career and don’t plan on changing that, why would you bother to think like an entrepreneur running a business?

However, that’s precisely how you should be thinking about your career. It is very much like a business, with income streams, expenses, and products and services (i.e., you and the work you do) that you “sell to customers” (i.e., your employers).

This fundamental shift in my thinking changed how I viewed my career forever. I understood that the strategies that helped businesses succeed in a competitive marketplace could also be applied to my professional life. Branding, positioning, pricing, marketing, sales, etc., should all be a part of a successful career.

The Product of You

Seeing yourself as a “product” that you “sell” to customers is another meta-level strategy that elevates you above the emotional turmoil of job searches, competing for promotions, and getting ahead at work. It’s also the foundation of building a solopreneurial business based on who you are and what you do.

One of the fastest ways to define the product of you is to transform your current job description into a product description. How do you help your “customer” (i.e., your employer) succeed? What problems do you solve?

Break everything down into the fundamental building blocks of what you do. Don’t forget to capture your work that goes far beyond your simple job description. You’ll discover that the product of you is more complex and valuable than you think.

One surprising and exciting discovery is that these “building blocks” can be assembled in any number of ways to create variations of the product of you. In my long professional life, I’ve learned that intelligent, talented people can learn almost anything, do almost anything, and succeed at nearly anything.

We are more flexible and malleable than we think. Once you realize this, a world of possibilities unfolds before you. You start to envision radically different strategies that leverage different facets of the product of you to achieve your goals and reach your vision.

Then you just need to determine which strategy will best support the life you want and decide how you want to build, package, promote, and sell it (e.g., employment vs. entrepreneurship). We’ll get into those details in a later chapter.

A few more strategies

I want to share a few more strategies that can help you overcome the competition before focusing on your specific strategy to win.

Coming in the side door

The masses are following the rules. The masses are a little bit lazy. Sorry, but it’s true. The masses aren’t that good at what they do. Again, I’m sorry, but that’s the law of averages (I.e., the normal distribution of the population). Only a few people stand out on the far ends of the distribution.

If you want to stand out competitively — if you want to win — you can’t do what everyone else is doing. Be creative and dare to be different. Ignore that massive line of people queued up behind the velvet rope facing a giant bouncer who won’t let them into the club (i.e., your dream job with your dream employer).

“Different is better than better.”— Sally Hogshead

Slip right past the velvet rope, walk past the bouncer, and down the dark alley to find that hidden door no one else knows about. Some rules are meant to be broken.

Leveraging your network

My first few jobs in tech happened because I knew someone who knew someone inside “the club.” I was able to leverage the power of my network. I doubt I would have landed those roles if I had followed the rules and waited at the end of the long line.

Instead, my graduate advisor called his old student at IBM. I was sitting in his office, and he said, “Hey, do you want to do an internship with a software company?” He picked up the phone, called him, and before I knew it, I was moving to San Jose to work for IBM.

A year later, a fellow graduate student introduced me to someone at Apple. That networking connection opened the door to a summer internship. That internship went so well that my manager at Apple reached out later and asked me if I wanted to stay on as an employee.

Working for Apple was my dream job, so I said, “Yes.” But, I still needed to fill out an application and formally apply. Later, I was attending a conference at the same time as a few of the hiring managers. I remember walking past a massive line of students queued up in the hall outside the Apple suite at the event. People glared at me, thinking that I was jumping the line.

I slipped past everyone, walked inside, and saw the hiring managers sitting there at the front. They smiled and said, “Hi Larry!” and took my job application and resume. The reality was it was a bit of a formality. I already knew they wanted to hire me, and they did.

Every single job I landed during my employed career came about due to connections in my network like this. I don’t share these stories to brag about how easy the process was. I’m sharing them because this strategy is available to you, too, and will make things much easier for you as well. Networking is a powerful strategy that will facilitate everything you need to do to accomplish your goals. I’ll talk about building a powerful network in a later chapter.

Ok, let’s move past these general strategies (which can help anyone succeed with whatever they want to do) and talk about more specific strategies that will help you reach the vision you have for your life.

Aligning your personal and professional visions

In chapter 4, you captured your long-term vision of an ideal future. What is it that you want most for your life? What did you write down?

Your personal vision:

➡️

You also defined your mission to make that vision come true. What did you decide your mission would be?

Your personal mission:

➡️

Now, it's time to align your personal and professional lives. We sometimes like to think we can draw a firm boundary between what we want in our personal lives and what we're trying to achieve in our professional lives.

But, it's so hard to split your energy and focus between those two worlds. It's even more challenging if those two visions are somewhat at odds. So, what happens?

Well, what most people do is prioritize their professional vision and defer their personal vision. They push their dreams into the future and hope they can return to them after retirement.

It doesn't work well. Sometimes, it doesn't work at all. As I shared earlier, a friend of mine delayed the pursuit of his personal vision, focused on his professional life, and wildly succeeded, but passed away before he could embark on the journey to achieve his personal goals.

I was doing much the same with my life. My personal vision was at odds with what was required to succeed with my professional vision. So, I ignored my personal life goals for decades.

Once I broke down the barriers between work and life, I was able to create a strategy for my professional life that supported the strategy for my personal life. Instead of working at odds with each other, they worked in harmony and let me live the life I want now instead of decades in the future.

So, let's take a moment and capture your existing professional vision and mission. What have you been striving to achieve in your professional career? What has been your mission to make that come true?

Your professional vision:

➡️

Your professional mission:

➡️

Your professional goals:

➡️

Now comes the hard part. Are there synergies between your personal and professional visions or not? Are your personal and professional missions working in harmony or not? Are your goals aligned? Write them side by side and evaluate them together.

If things are out of alignment, how could you creatively adjust your visions and missions to focus all of your energy behind shared efforts to make both come true?

In my case, my visions were at odds with each other. My goals conflicted. Many years ago, my professional goal was to become a C-level tech executive in Silicon Valley and earn enough money to comfortably support my family with an enjoyable lifestyle. But, I realized I could never be fully satisfied working for someone else and making their vision come true instead of mine.

So, I adjusted my goals to pursue building my own tech startup. That enabled me to become a founder and CEO, build a team, and create products to pursue our vision.

However, these professional pursuits were still at odds with my personal vision of living in a cozy cabin in the mountains surrounded by a forest. I was stuck in the Bay Area, fighting terrible traffic on congested freeways every day, and not enjoying very much of my limited free time. My career path had trapped me in an urban world far from the great outdoors.

As I mentioned, a health scare woke me up. Was I going to defer my personal vision until it was too late? I couldn't let that happen. So, I went through this same exercise of aligning my visions and goals to find some way to make them all come true.

You'll find that you have to challenge all assumptions for this exercise to work. I asked myself:

* Does my company have to be in Silicon Valley?

* Does it have to be a "tech" company?

* Do I still need to work in a tech career?

* What if I pivoted my career and did something very different?

* What could I create if I started my own business without the constraints I thought I had to work with? Where could I live?

* At a foundational level, what was the Product of Me? What solutions could I offer? Who needs it? Who would want it?

* What would a Business of Me look like that sold that "product"?

I deconstructed and reconstructed my visions to align them and then selected a strategy that I believed would support my mission to pursue the goal of making those visions come true. That's why I decided that if I wanted to live somewhere in the forest far away from the big city (and Silicon Valley), I would need to create my own "job" and build a flexible business that let me work anywhere in the world with anyone in the world.

My new professional goal to build this flexible, location-independent business is finally aligned with my personal goal to live wherever I choose. This lifestyle was simply not possible with the old professional vision that chained me to a specific geographic location.

So, now it's your turn. What is a bold potential professional vision that might also enable your personal vision to come true?

Your new professional vision:

➡️

What is the professional mission associated with your new vision? How can it potentially be more fully aligned with your personal mission?

Your new professional mission:

➡️

Given this new vision and mission, what professional goals do you want to pursue?

Your new professional goals:

➡️

Now, it’s time to craft a few strategies that might support your pursuit of these goals. Remember, your strategy is how you will navigate the competitive and challenging landscape to ensure the achievement of your tangible goals and your long-term vision. It will help you overcome obstacles, slip around barriers, remove blocks, and win.

Potential strategies to achieve your new goals:

*

*

*

*

*

Which one do you think might be your winning strategy? Let's put them to the test to identify the winner.

How well do your strategies help you overcome obstacles?

Let's put your strategies to the test. Evaluate the strength of your potential strategies in light of the obstacles you might face in pursuing your goals.

Have you identified all of the obstacles in your path? You captured some of them in chapter 5. But are there more barriers you might face when pursuing the strategies you just wrote down?

How does each potential strategy account for those obstacles? What will overcome blocks? What might break down the barriers?

Also, competition is always a concern. Whether your strategy involves being employed by a company or building your own business, you will be competing with someone else. How does each of your potential strategies deal with competition? Does one rise to the top?

In my case, I faced numerous issues with the original strategies I brainstormed. As I evaluated each one, the winner became increasingly apparent.

That doesn't mean the winning strategy was the "easiest" to pursue or the least risky. It certainly wasn't. The other strategies were more familiar and easier to execute. But, they failed my tests for different reasons. For example:

* Stay in my current career and find a tech job in a city within commute distance from our new country home.

* FAIL: The nearby tech jobs were with companies I wouldn’t enjoy joining. Also, the last thing I wanted to do was reintroduce a long commute and risk my health and well-being again.

* Leave my career and find a non-tech 9-5 job in our small town.

* FAIL: The available employers in my small town viewed me as overqualified, and the income wouldn't be enough to support my family.

* Find a tech job with a company that would be ok with me mainly working remotely but would require travel to work in the home office every month.

* FAIL: This was before the pandemic. No tech employer wanted an organizational leader who worked remotely. I also didn't want to travel so far and be away from my family that much again.

* Launch another tech startup and find partners and employees who would also be comfortable working remotely.

* FAIL: Founding another startup after my previous one failed would be very challenging since I would have to convince another set of investors to believe in me and the idea. Also, the market at that time wasn't great for fundraising. My current investors had already decided they were done.

So, that's why my winning strategy was building my own business that didn't require investment, could be run solo, would immediately generate revenue, and was location-independent to allow me to work from home (or anywhere).

Does one strategy stand out as you evaluate your strategies in light of your obstacles, blocks, and barriers? Which one has the greatest chance of success?

What is your best strategy?

➡️

Resources

Now that you’ve selected a winning strategy, it’s time to change gears and think about what you need to execute your strategy. Your focus will shift inward, focus on what is within your control, and plan the necessary steps to start making things happen.

What will help you achieve your goals? What do you need most? Some of the resources people often identify include:

* Training, knowledge, skill acquisition, relevant experience.

* Education, degrees, certifications.

* Money, investors, advisors, partners.

* Networking, connections, introductions.

* More free time to focus on those goals!

However, one of the most critical resources you will need is your plan for how you will execute your strategy and make steady progress to achieve your goals. That’s what we’ll dive into in the next chapter.

Key Takeaways

* Building an invincible version of you requires creating the right strategy to help you achieve your biggest goals.

* Strategy and planning are not the same. Strategy is what you will do, while planning is the detailed “how” of executing that strategy.

* If you don’t align your professional and personal goals, the conflict can pull you in two separate directions and derail your overall success.

* Your strategy is how you think you will successfully navigate the rocky landscape between you and what you want to achieve (e.g., defeating the competition, knocking down barriers).

* Don’t move into the planning phase until you select what you believe will be your winning strategy.

* It’s good to have backup strategies if your hypothesis is wrong.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my book with you this year! Become a premium subscriber today to keep reading the draft chapters as I complete them.

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📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 📣 

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I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

One of the happiest moments when I coach people is the day they accept a great job offer. They're so relieved to put the stress of the job search and endless interviews behind them. They're looking forward to starting something new.

However, that relief is soon replaced with a little bit of anxiety. They know they need to hit the ground running with their new employer. They want to make a good impression in that critical first 90 days.

One of the essential tasks in those first few weeks is meeting people and starting to build relationships. No one works alone. I don't care how great you are at what you do — if you work in a company with a team, your success depends on those relationships.

Some of your goals should be:

* Starting things off on the right foot with colleagues.

* Learning the organizational structure.

* Discovering the underlying team dynamics and power structure (which is often quite different from the formal org structure).

* Understanding how things get done at the company.

* Identifying the pitfalls and gotchas that can sabotage a new employee's career at the company.

* Finding out what has been working well and what's not working so well in the organization.

* Getting to know people, who they are, what they do, what they want to accomplish, and what makes them tick.

* Finding out how you can add value and improve things.

There really is no better way to tackle these goals than to meet with people one-on-one, whether in person or over Zoom. It’s more difficult — and it will take longer — to build good relationships in group meetings, via Slack chats, or during your everyday project work.

I’m a hardcore introvert, so I understand if some of you are reluctant to schedule many one-on-one meetings. But, it really is the best way to establish a connection and build rapport with people quickly.

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Don't worry about being an imposition

Yes, I know that accomplishing those goals does sound like a lot of meetings. Some folks get a bit stressed about this and feel like they're imposing on people. They know that everyone is busy with their work, and they're concerned they’ll annoy colleagues with meeting requests.

But, don't worry about it!

People know that a new employee is in "learning mode" and trying to absorb as much institutional knowledge as possible. They expect to hear from you. In fact, if someone doesn't hear from you, they worry they are somehow not seen as possessing useful knowledge and information (e.g., "Why doesn't the new person/leader want to meet me?").

The secret to making these meetings valuable is to ensure they aren't a one-way street. You aren't just meeting people for your personal benefit. You should also ask questions and find out what your colleagues need most.

How can you help? How can you make their lives better?

New leaders, in particular, can authentically reach out and meet with people across the organization with a genuine interest in learning and getting input on how to improve things moving forward. There are always issues and problems. Always.

Sometimes people feel like the previous leader didn't listen to them (or care). Sometimes they feel like the current leadership doesn't understand them and their needs.

You can change all of that.

Of course, being a force for good change isn't just a leader's job. No matter your role with your new employer, you can become a champion for positive transformation in the organization.

Some questions to ask

Here are some questions that can help guide your conversations:

* How do our teams currently work together?

* What is the process here for doing XYZ?

* What has been working well? 

* What are you most proud of accomplishing here?

* What does success look like here?

* What is not going so well? 

* What needs to change?

* How do you think we could improve things?

* How do you think we could improve the working relationship between our teams?

* In my role, how can I help?

* What would you most like to see from me?

* How can I help you specifically?

* Who else would you recommend that I meet?

You will feel like you’re drinking from the firehose. A ton of information is going to come your way. So, take notes and look for patterns.

People always seem to appreciate it and enjoy meetings like this when it comes from a place of authenticity and a genuine desire to work better together. If you're a leader, folks will be happy that you are taking the time to learn more about them and want to make their lives better at work.

However, there is a catch.

If you ask questions and listen but don't do anything about the issues, they will lose faith in you. You will soon be placed in the same category as other leaders who don't care.

That doesn't mean that you jump and literally do everything someone wants. But, you do need to demonstrate that you heard people, took all of the information in, processed it, and have a response to the problems, issues, and requests. Circle back and let folks know what your plans are.

A few caveats and mistakes to avoid

When you start a new job, you may be eager to please and want to demonstrate your expertise. When you hear people complaining about problems and making requests, you may be tempted to ride in like a knight in shining armor to slay beasts and save everyone. I encourage you to slow down and pace yourself.

Don't make immediate promises

Wait until you have all of the information you need and know how you want to address things. Sometimes you’ll hear about an issue and think, “Well, that’s easy to fix! I know exactly what to do.” But, later, you find out why that issue isn’t so easy to fix. If you jumped to conclusions and made a promise, now you have to go back and retract it. That’s not fun for anyone involved.

Don't overcommit

If you’re ambitious and want to make a great impression, it’s tempting to say “Yes!” to everything. You want to be helpful and show what you are capable of in those first few weeks. However, it’s too easy to take on too much before you know what you’re getting into, and now you’re setting yourself up for failure. Resist the urge to commit to everything you’re tempted to accomplish.

Never reward threats

Sadly, some people will see you as an opportunity to get what they want and threaten you (e.g., "I was promised a promotion by the previous manager, but never received it. If I don't get promoted this cycle, I'm going to quit."). Don't reward and reinforce this bad behavior.

Don't be forced into hasty decisions

One time when I joined a new employer, I was given a list of employees that were supposedly "poor performers" and told that I would need to manage them out. I said that I needed to get to know people before making such a decision. I found out they weren't poor performers at all and ended up being incredibly successful later when they worked on projects that better leveraged their talents.

Don't jump to conclusions

You need to talk with everyone, capture all of the information you can, and process things before you can really understand what's going on. It’s human nature for people only to see things from their perspective. It’s unfortunate, but some folks will point fingers and blame others for their problems. Get to the bottom of things before you decide what the truth is.

Take time to learn the company culture

Understand how people behave and communicate in the company before you leap into action. Resist the urge to talk about your past employer’s environment and processes (e.g., “The way things were done in my old company was way better”). Every company culture is different, so observe and learn as much as possible.

Be cautious with over-sharing

If you’re a friendly, extroverted person, you may tend to rush into friendships at work. But, I encourage you to take it a bit slow when establishing trusting relationships in the new office. You need to know who people really are, whom you can trust, and their reputation within the company.

Observe, process, and learn

Resist having “the answers” or talking about how you did things before. Don’t tell people that you know better ways to do something. At least not in the first few weeks. There will come a time when your fresh insights will be beneficial. But, most of your new colleagues aren’t ready to hear it yet.

Earn your stripes

You have to prove yourself before you can start pushing back hard on people, having strong opinions about how things are done (i.e., you don’t know enough yet), or sharing criticism. I remember a new hire mocking one of our coworkers in the first week on the job. Yeah, that didn’t go over well. Learn everything and earn trust first.

Good luck!

Starting a new job is exciting, but it can be a bit overwhelming. Don't be afraid to tap into the institutional knowledge of the colleagues around you.

Most people want to see you succeed and want to help. Show them that you want to help them succeed as well.

Thank you for reading Invincible Career®. This post is public so feel free to share it.

By the way, there is a great way you can support my work without spending any money on a premium subscription:

📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 📣 

It only takes a few seconds, and it helps grow my business so I can continue making time to write it.

I’ll even provide some copy and paste text to make it easy to share on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Thanks in advance!

I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

She hadn’t felt motivated at work in a very long time. The initial spark was gone. The honeymoon period was over. 

Now, work was just work. She needed the money, so she kept showing up, of course. But, every day left her feeling empty and drained. 

She struggled to get out of bed in the morning. What was the point? She asked herself, “Is this all there is to life?”

Some people are lucky enough to find meaning in their jobs. Some have intentionally created an “Invincible Career” to shape their path to only work for companies with a mission that inspires them. So, they feel like their role has purpose.

But, most people have jobs that are a means to an end. It pays the bills. But, that doesn’t mean that you have no choice but to live an uninspired life. 

You can take control and create meaning that inspires and motivates you every day, even if your 9-5 job does not. When you design an invincible life, you get to inspire yourself. 

It’s too risky to leave the inspiration and motivation to chase your wildest dreams in someone else’s hands. Sooner or later, they will let you down. No one cares about your life and career as much as you do (ok, your mother probably cares a lot too).

You will always be with you on this life journey. You can always count on yourself. So, don’t sit back and wait for someone else to inspire you with their big goals. Create your own audacious goals, motivate yourself, and keep building the Invincible You! 

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life… Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs

No matter what you want to accomplish — and before you can make a plan to go after it — you have to know where you are going. Before creating a strategy to get there, you have to know what you want and why. 

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What is your why?

“There are two ways to build a career or a business. We can go through life hunting and pecking, looking for opportunities or customers, hoping that something connects. Or we can go through life with intention, knowing what our piece looks like, knowing our WHY, and going straight to the places we fit.”― Simon Sinek, Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team (my affiliate link)

You created your vision of the future in chapter 4. You also created what your mission is that will make that vision come true. This led to a definition of your purpose in life — how you will follow your mission to make your vision of the world come true. 

Your purpose is larger and more significant than any temporary project. It’s also more meaningful and personal than the work most of us perform in our 9-5 jobs. More importantly, your purpose belongs to you and gives your life meaning that you own and control. It is your “why.”

That larger sense of purpose is what will inspire you every day. Inspiration occurs when you feel compelled to act because you’re drawn to that vision you want to make come true. Inspiration transcends the self and will make you feel more positive about life. Research has found that inspired people have greater optimism, well-being, creativity, and energy.

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle.”— Steve Jobs

Inspiration also creates feelings of enthusiasm, excitement, and hope. And, don’t we all need hope? Hope for a better tomorrow. Hope for a better world. Hope that our lives matter. 

Whatever you’ve defined as your purpose, make sure it is large and meaningful. Your “why” should be significant enough to inspire you for the rest of your life.

“Happiness comes from what we do. Fulfillment comes from why we do it.”― Simon Sinek

The psychology of inspiration

Even though something like inspiration feels too abstract to be scientifically studied, professors Todd Thrash and Andrew Elliot created a model of inspiration as a psychological construct. They conceptualized it as having three core characteristics: 

* Transcendence 

* Evocation

* Approach motivation

They also proposed that inspiration reflects the combination of two processes:

* Being inspired by something. For example, recognizing the intrinsic value of an inspiring vision of how the world could be. 

* Being inspired to do something. For example, joining a mission to make that inspiring vision come true.

But first, let’s talk about transcendence. It’s one of the essential characteristics of your vision that will help you feel inspired by it. A feeling of transcendence is about gaining an awareness of better possibilities. This is what people mean when they talk about having a “flash of insight” or when a vivid image of a better future pops into their heads.

Next, I want to explain what Thrash and Elliot mean by evocation. It’s the other essential characteristic of your purpose that ensures that you will be inspired by it. It refers to the fact that inspiration is experienced as evoked by an outside influence. It’s what happens when your vision feels larger than yourself.

Your grand vision should be larger than some immediate need (e.g., I want a new car) or shallow ambition (e.g., I want to be rich). What change do you want to see in the world? How do you want to improve the lives of others?

To be inspired, you must evoke a vision of a meaningful goal that is significant and may even require a lifetime to pursue. That may sound intimidating, but having a purpose that you follow for the rest of your life will give your life meaning. It’s what keeps people going.

A lack of purpose is what makes many people give up. It’s also why those who take early retirement don’t live as long as folks who have a reason to get out of bed every day.

Finally, approach motivation compels you to actually do something vs. simply being inspired by your vision. You hope to persuade yourself to take action. Otherwise, what’s the point? You don’t want your vision and mission to remain nothing more than a warm and fuzzy dream.

You want to create a vision of the desired end state and evoke a feeling of significance, then activate and direct your behavior toward the possibilities you’ve described. When you succeed, you’ll feel compelled to make your new idea or vision come true.

Take a moment to review your vision, mission, and purpose from chapter 4 within the context of this psychological framework. Ask yourself these questions:

* Does my vision paint a vivid picture of a desirable future?

* Is the mission significant enough to feel meaningful?

* Have I described a compelling purpose that drives me to make it come true?

Inspiration helps you “plant a flag” on the horizon. It represents the big picture of who you want to help, what problem you want to solve, and who you want to become. It gives you a target, which lets you start defining goals that describe successful progress and achievements on your journey to that flag. 

Now, it’s time to translate your vision, mission, and purpose into tangible and realistic goals. You can think of your goals as a sliding target window with the far end in the distant future of what you ultimately want to achieve and the near end focused crisply on the here and now. 

Your near-term goals help you define your daily habits, tasks, and activities (I’ll talk about this in a later chapter). What do you need to be doing to achieve them? Your longer-term goals are the ones that will inspire and motivate you to pursue bigger and better things in your life. 

Long-term goals

I’m going to make a wild guess that you have a life goal that you would love to achieve, but you’ve been putting off the work to make it happen. I think we all have experienced that.

Why do we put our most important goals on the back burner? I think it happens for a few reasons:

* We’re busy with the demands of our daily lives.

* There are people who need something from us every day.

* We can’t let our work tasks slide.

* Significant personal goals feel overwhelming.

* We know we want to achieve them but don’t know where to begin.

Personal goals that are important for us don’t have the same urgency as the goals for our job. We want to work on them, but we feel like we don’t have to work on them right now. We’ll get around to it someday.

I get it. It’s easy to get caught up in your 9-5 job. I did too. We often set goals and engage in planning exercises for our employer’s benefit. Even though I run my own business now, I still spend a lot of time working in my business but not on my business.

But, this exercise is about setting goals for you. This effort isn’t for your employer. I want to help you dream, grow, and set yourself up for success. Your goals are an intentional investment in your future!

Why am I asking you to think about your goals for the next few years? Why bother with documenting them now?

Well, because we often keep these long-term life goals bottled up inside and do nothing about them. But, research has found that writing down your goals and committing to them increases your likelihood of success. Accountability is also an incredibly powerful psychological tool, but even more so when we are accountable to others.

The Association for Talent Development performed a study on accountability and found the following probabilities of accomplishing a goal:

* 10% if you have a goal in mind.

* 25% if you consciously decide that you will achieve it.

* 40% if you set a date by which you will achieve it (the point of this chapter).

* 50% if you create a plan for how you will do it (coming up in a later chapter).

* 65% if you make a promise to someone else that you will do it (that’s one benefit of my private career community).

* 95% when you make specific accountability appointments with that person (which is probably why 1-on-1 coaching works so well).

So, what is your most audacious goal? You can whisper it in my ear if you prefer (feel free to send me a message). Have you ever talked about it out loud?

Here’s an exercise that can help you envision that future. Play around with filling in the blank in this statement:

“I wish I could get paid to __________ every day.”

For example:

* “I wish I could get paid to write every day.”

* “I wish I could get paid to create art every day.”

* “I wish I could get paid to network with people every day.”

* “I wish I could get paid to think about business strategy every day.”

* “I wish I could get paid to bake every day.”

* “I wish I could get paid to coach every day.”

Then, expand upon that sentence and create the long-term goal that would make it possible. What needs to happen for that statement to come true? Some examples from a few of my friends:

* One wants to become a New York Times bestselling author who makes a living as a writer. She knows this process will take several years, especially since she currently has a different full-time job. But, when she achieves that goal, she will get paid to write every day.

* Another friend wants to be the CEO of a successful biotech company. He knows this won’t happen overnight and estimates it will take about 10-15 years to get there. But, when he succeeds, he will get paid to think about business strategy every day.

* Another friend wants to leave the corporate world eventually, become a professional chef, and open an award-winning restaurant. When she achieves her most ambitious goal, she will get paid to cook and bake every day.

Now it’s your turn. What do you want to achieve within the next ten years?

Sometimes, your long-term goals will be so audacious that you know you may never reach them (e.g., ending world hunger). But, they serve to inspire you while you do achieve the near-term goals along the way. 

However, if you do find yourself performing beyond your wildest dreams and hitting those long-term targets, it will be time to adjust that sliding target window and set your sights on something even more audacious. 

As you may have already discovered, achieving goals can sometimes feel like a letdown afterward. You get a sense of, “Ok, now what?”

However, life is about the journey and the striving. We love the “thrill of the chase.” So, set a new long-term goal, if necessary, and refuel your inspiration engine. 

A word of caution: some people go a little too crazy with their long-term goals. They have a list of dozens of wild things they want to accomplish. For example, “I want to become a billionaire, walk on the moon, cure cancer, write five bestsellers, play guitar in a rock band and tour the world, and then star in a Hollywood movie about my life.”

Ok, Richard Branson. Good luck!

Instead, I encourage you to select a single goal to place at the top of your list. If you must, list a few related secondary goals.

However, I’ve found that the people who achieve the most are those with a singular vision, mission, and goal. They put all of their energy behind that purpose. So, resist the urge to spread yourself too thin.

What is your highest-priority long-term goal?

*

Do you feel ready to pursue it? Are you committed to making it happen (why or why not)?

List any secondary long-term goals:

*

*

*

Note: a fuzzy goal will make it harder to create a strategy and plan later (we’ll work on those in later chapters). For example, if your goal is to become one of the greatest authors of all time, what does “greatest” mean? Greatest in terms of what?

* The total number of books you publish?

* The number of bestsellers you’ve written?

* The awards you win?

* How much influence your work has on other writers?

* How much you’ve earned from your books?

As you might imagine, your strategy and plan would be different for making the most money from your books vs. winning the most awards. So, be as clear and specific as possible with your goals.

Quantitative goals are the easiest to measure, of course. But, in some cases, it will be hard to pin down a qualitative assessment (e.g., I want to feel fulfilled). Even with qualitative success measures, do your best to describe how you will know when you’ve achieved that goal.

What does success specifically look like for your primary goal?

How will you measure success?

How will you know when you’ve achieved your goal?

Mid-term goals

Working backward from your long-term goal, what do you need to accomplish over the next three to five years to make steady progress? Think of these mid-term goals as the stepping stones on the path to your long-term vision. What will set you up for success later?

In chapter 5, you identified the gap between where you are today and where you want to be. So, some of your goals may be focused on what it will take to close that gap. This could include acquiring new skills, knowledge, experience, and connections.

For example, if my friend wants to become a CEO in 10 years, he will first need to establish a track record as a successful executive. No one is promoted straight from individual contributor to CEO. So, his mid-term goals might look like this:

* In 2 years, get promoted to Director.

* In 3-4 years, get promoted to Senior Director.

* In 5 years, land a role as Vice President.

* In 7 years, become a Senior Vice President. 

* In 8-9 years, reach EVP.

* By year 10, work with an executive headhunter to connect with companies looking for a CEO. 

However, even though I used this as an example, I hope the goals you have in mind aren’t tied to a job title. I’ve talked about this problem before. Reaching a specific level in your career isn’t that meaningful or inspirational. It also leaves you a bit vulnerable since the decision to promote you lies in someone else’s hands. 

Now, founding and becoming the CEO of a company solving a meaningful problem in the world is quite different (e.g., researching a cure for cancer). Writing and publishing a book that could change people’s lives can give you a real sense of purpose. Pursuing a goal that will make a difference in the world is inspirational.

What are the biggest goals you want to achieve over the next two to five years? Consider how these goals will pave the way for success for your primary long-term goal.

* Year 2:

* Year 3:

* Year 4:

* Year 5:

What does success look like for each of these goals?

How will you measure success?

Goals for this year

Now, let’s pull in your goal-setting window and focus on the next 12 months. This is an exercise I do every January with my premium newsletter subscribers. We identify their goals for the year and then work on strategies and map out plans to achieve them.

I enjoy this exercise because it feels more pragmatic, realistic, and achievable than the longer-term goals. Those larger goals are too big and complex to jump right in and tackle. So, break them down into a series of subgoals and steps you need to build up to achieve them.

Then, map those subgoals into the months of the year. Some of your subgoals and tasks can move forward in parallel, but some must be sequenced.

Here are some examples of annual goals that I’ve heard in the past from clients and community members:

* Get promoted into management to start down the path to eventually becoming an executive.

* Land a better job that helps them advance their professional development.

* Move to a new city that will set them up for a more significant career move later.

* Write a book, which will eventually get published and set them on the path to making a living as a writer.

* Pursue a new degree that will help them with a significant career change later.

* Learn a new language and travel to the country where they want to relocate and retire eventually.

* Learn how to cook professionally to prepare for a career pivot into becoming a restaurateur.

* Create and teach a workshop that paves the way to launching a new business and eventually quitting their 9-5 job.

Diving deeper into that last one, if your goal for this year is to teach a workshop, you might want to break that down into a series of goals for each month to prepare for that event. For example:

* January - Identify the purpose of the workshop.

* February - Interview representative ideal customers.

* March - Reserve a physical venue to host it.

* April - Create the schedule and outline.

* May - Develop your workshop content.

* Etc.

In chapter 5, you also identified blockers and barriers standing between you and your long-term goals. They might be holding you back from pursuing your vision. So, some of your goals this year may need to be focused on eliminating those barriers before you can make progress. Take a moment and map all of your subgoals into the months ahead.

January

*

*

*

February

*

*

March

*

*

April

*

*

May

*

*

June

*

*

July

*

*

August

*

*

September

*

*

October

*

*

November

*

*

*

December

*

*

As I recommended earlier, try to find an accountability partner or a supportive community to improve your odds of success. My resources page for this book provides some links to explore and learn more.

Goals for next quarter

The monthly goals for the year can seem a little high-level, so now it’s time to go into more detail for the next three months. What do you want to focus on during the upcoming quarter? What are the subgoals you want to achieve?

I know. This starts to feel a bit like a planning exercise, which we will cover in a later chapter. But, the distinction is that we’re still talking about the “what” of what you want to achieve and not the “how” of what you will actually do to accomplish those goals.

For now, simply document these subgoals, so you have them ready for the later planning effort. What do you want to prioritize for the next three months?

Month 1

*

*

*

Month 2

*

Month 3

*

Goals for the next 30 days

Finally, focus on the upcoming month. Break your subgoals for that month into weekly goals. What do you want to accomplish every week to stay on track for the quarter (and eventually the year)?

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

*

Week 4

This goal-setting may feel overwhelming, but it gets easier and feels more natural the more you work on it. You might also wonder why I’m asking you to keep breaking your big audacious goal down into smaller goals and even smaller subgoals.

I recommend this approach because most people never achieve their dreams. They never accomplish the most important goals they want for their lives.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”— Henry David Thoreau

Some people give up before they even get started. They let their goals float around in their heads as wishful dreams and never commit to them at all.

Other people leap into tasks they think will take them straight to that audacious end state. But that’s like trying to scale the peak of Mount Everest with no strategy, planning, training, guides, or basecamps along the way. They set themselves up for failure by trying to do it all at once.

Instead, I want you to succeed. I want you to achieve your biggest dreams. So, that’s why this goal-setting chapter went into so much detail.

Now, a goal without a plan is simply a dream. If you don’t develop a strategy for achieving your goals, they’ll never be more than wishful thinking. We’ll dive into that phase in the next chapter.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my book with you this year! Become a premium subscriber today to keep reading the draft chapters as I complete them.

By the way, there is a great way you can support my work without spending any money on a premium subscription:

📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 📣 

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I’ll even provide some copy and paste text to make it easy to share on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Thanks in advance!

I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

“I can’t stop my mind from racing. A million thoughts run through my head when I try to go to bed. I think of all the tasks I need to complete and all the problems I want to solve. I worry about the people I love and, before I know it, it’s 2 AM and I’m still wide awake.”— Anonymous friend

If that sounds like you, you know you can’t keep burning the candle at both ends for too long. Lack of sleep is so crushing. You can’t think straight at work, you drowse off during your commute, and your health suffers. 

Now that many of us are working from home, you may have heard of people who need a specific ritual that signals it’s time to “go to work.” They may only have to walk a few steps to their home office or workspace, but they need that psychological boundary and mental shift to switch modes from life to work. 

Here are a few rituals that I’ve read about: 

* One person wraps up their morning rituals and fills their special “work mug” with coffee. That’s the cue that it’s time to “go to work.”

* Another person showers, gets dressed for work, finishes breakfast, walks out the front door of their home, and re-enters through a different entrance to step into their home office. 

* A friend of mine built a home office shed in the backyard so they can literally separate work from their personal life in their home. 

* Believe it or not, another person gets in their car, drives around the block, and returns home to start the workday. 

Yes, morning rituals are essential, and many of us rely on them to start our day and go to work. But, we kind of drop the ball on the other end of the work-life equation. We don’t create or follow a consistent evening ritual. Instead, we let our work bleed into our nights, and then we wonder why we can’t sleep and our mornings become so unpleasant.

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Problem

Since the release of the first iPhone almost 15 years ago, too many of us have gotten into a bad habit of endlessly scrolling our email, messages, socials, etc., in bed. How many of us? 90% of Americans have reported using a technological device in the hour before bed.

My friends, this does not make for an evening of restful slumber. It also sets us up for a rough start the next day. 

Why is it so bad? For one thing, our devices emit “blue light,” which suppresses our body’s release of melatonin (a hormone that makes us feel drowsy). Blue light may be helpful during the day, but it becomes a problem at night when we’re trying to fall asleep.

Also, when we keep reading work emails and messages, we stress about things that we can’t deal with right now. I’ve learned this, and I think you know it, too: You could literally work 24x7 and never be “caught up.”

When we keep scrolling on Twitter, Facebook, and the news, it gives us incredible anxiety about world events that are out of our control. For example, I was up late the other evening and read the breaking news about a mass shooting in Sacramento, California. It was a tragedy, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about it that night.

Finally, when we try to work right up to the last minute before falling asleep, it doesn’t provide closure to our day. We don’t give ourselves enough time to wrap things up, decompress a little, and shift our minds into relaxation mode. And, you do need time for rest and relaxation to be your most creative, productive, and balanced.

Cal Newport talks about the need for a “shutdown ritual” at the end of the day, so you don’t leave your mind spinning with that feeling of unfinished work.

“…this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.”

I know that I need this, too. I get stressed when I feel like I’m going to forget to add a new task to my calendar, lose an important idea overnight while I sleep, or not be prepared for a meeting in the morning. So, a few years ago, I created the evening ritual that I described below as a way to close out my day, calm my mind, and sleep better.

Create a new evening ritual

Basically, these evening habits of working too late and staring at your phone aren’t doing you any favors. So, I want to share an evening routine that may help you make the most of every day and start your next morning with clarity. It also will help you sleep better every evening. 

* Reflect 

* Plan

* Anticipate

* Communicate

* Read

1. Reflect

You probably already know I’m a fan of morning journaling. I harness my creativity before the tasks of the workday strip it away. I sometimes sketch to let my artistic side run wild for a few minutes before I start working.

I like to capture random thoughts and feelings. But, I also write down ideas for my business, new articles, and ways to help my clients. It helps me focus my day as I jot down my goals and what I want to accomplish.

However, my evening reflections are a bit different. I find that I’m less creative at the end of the day. I’m a little tired, I’ve been focused on work all day, and my mind feels a bit drained.

So, instead of trying to come up with wild new ideas, I reflect on my day. You can think of this as a mini version of a post-mortem exercise that you might use for one of your work projects.

Thinking back on your day helps you evaluate things and make small improvements going forward. If you wait days, weeks, or months to reflect on how things are going at work — or in your life — the details become fuzzy, and it’s not as effective.

Here are some sample questions to ask yourself. Use a paper notebook to write your answers to avoid that blue light problem. This exercise doesn’t have to take a lot of time. I know you have a busy life, so try doing it for about 15 minutes.

* What went well today? Why do you think it went well?

* What did you enjoy doing and why?

* What didn’t go well? What went wrong and why?

* How could you be more effective and successful next time?

* What did you learn today?

* Did you accomplish everything you wanted? If not, why?

* What do you want to do differently tomorrow?

As you do this for a few weeks, you will probably discover that the act of writing is also cathartic. Research has found that writing can help you process traumatic, stressful, or emotional events, which improves your physical and psychological well-being.

2. Plan

I’m sure you’ve experienced that feeling of a million ideas, issues, and problems swirling around in your brain. I know many people who have trouble falling asleep at night because their mind is racing. 

The simple act of capturing those thoughts in a paper notebook helps me fall asleep more quickly in the evening. I keep a small one on my nightstand for this purpose. When I have a creative idea or a thought about how to solve a problem, I scribble it in that notebook before my head hits the pillow.

I know that I can’t make more progress or solve problems at bedtime. I know that I need to sleep. But, I can’t relax until I write down those issues to remember to deal with them in the morning. 

So, before you crawl into bed, plan your next day. What is the most important thing you want to accomplish? Put it at the top of the list.

Sure, you can have other tasks and appointments. But, if you complete that one critical task tomorrow, you’ll feel accomplished. If you finish even more items on your list, you’ll feel like a productivity machine.

3. Anticipate

Anticipate the activities of the next day. I always want to ensure that I haven’t overlooked an early morning meeting. I also want a sense of what tomorrow will be like and how I’ll weave my other tasks and activities around the scheduled discussions (e.g., time for exercise).

Scan your calendar to ensure you feel ready for the day. You can even engage in a quick visualization exercise and picture yourself accomplishing various tasks (e.g., presenting to your boss). Block off time (i.e., private appointments with yourself) if you know you’ll need some time to prepare before some of your meetings.

When you have a sense of who you’ll be meeting and what you’ll be doing, your unconscious mind can prepare. It’s kind of surprising, but I’ve found that priming myself for tomorrow’s events must somehow allow my brain to process things while I’m sleeping.

I often wake up and immediately have a creative solution to a problem I thought about the night before. That’s why I love to grab my journal first thing in the morning to capture those ideas before getting distracted.

4. Communicate

Communicate with your future self. Think of this as a low-budget “time machine” that lets you send a message to the “you” of tomorrow morning. What do you want to share with yourself?

Capture where your thoughts are at the end of the day to enable a successful handoff to yourself tomorrow. It will help you pick up where you stopped instead of saying, “What in the heck was I thinking here?”

I do this when I’m writing articles, stories, and my book. I’ll quickly scribble a few bullet points that capture the essence of what I’m thinking and how I’ll take those ideas and jump back into writing the next day.

I can’t think of the author’s name right now, but they had an interesting strategy for avoiding writer’s block. Even when they knew exactly how they wanted to end the chapter they were currently writing, they wouldn’t finish it if the day was almost over. Instead, they’d write a few notes about what they had in mind and go to bed.

The next morning, they didn’t have to waste any time thinking about what to write or how to get started. They knew exactly what they had envisioned and how they would end the chapter they were in the middle of writing the previous day. They could dive right into things.

So, you can do the same thing with your work. Leave things in a good state the night before, with you knowing exactly what you want to do next. Make a few notes to communicate that vision to your future self, go to sleep, and attack it again when you’re fresh in the morning.

5. Read

Finally, instead of staring at your phone in bed or looking at a TV screen, open a good book. We all know that we should probably be reading more, but we struggle to find time to do it.

I was a voracious reader when I was younger. I would finish numerous books every week. Sometimes, I would read a book a day.

But, as I grew older, life got in the way of my reading hobby. I was so busy with textbooks during college and graduate school that I didn’t have time to read for pleasure. Later, when I was in the middle of my career, I felt like I should only be reading books on professional development, leadership, and business.

Only in the last few years have I started reading for pleasure again. For example, I no longer feel guilty about reading fiction for fun.

Whatever it is that you prefer and works for you (e.g., fiction, nonfiction, humor, biographies, mysteries), try reading to calm your mind as a bedtime ritual. As much as we love Netflix and scrolling social media on our phones, those activities aren’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. 

My wife and I got into a bad habit of watching a show on Netflix every evening in bed. It felt like a comforting ritual, but we noticed that we weren’t sleeping very well. We’d wake up several times during the night. Sometimes we’d wake up early (e.g., 4-5 AM) and couldn’t fall back asleep. 

For the past few weeks, we’ve set Netflix aside in favor of reading in bed for 30-60 minutes. I’ve noticed that I get much sleepier and have no problem dropping off quickly into slumberland. 

Test this ritual with yourself

I know. It can feel rigid to create bedtime rituals, morning rituals, work rituals, etc. It’s fun to be spontaneous, wild, and free!

Some of us are creatures of habit and find it centering and calming to create and follow rituals (Hi there!). I’ve always enjoyed personal optimization and experimenting with ways to be more effective, productive, and healthier. But, some folks find it challenging to create new habits and stifling to follow them. 

However, if you’re discovering that being wild and free is messing with your productivity, sleep, and health, it might be time to test a better routine. 

For the next few weeks, try these five activities of reflecting, planning, anticipating, communicating, and reading. You won’t see the benefits right away in a day or two, so give it some time and give it a chance. Let me know if this evening ritual helps you! Feel free to share other strategies you’ve used to wrap up your day in a positive way.

Thank you for reading Invincible Career®. This post is public so feel free to share it with a friend struggling to get a good night’s sleep.

Would you be willing to tell your friends about me?

By the way, there is a great way you can support my work without spending any money on a premium subscription:

📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 📣 

It only takes a few seconds, and it helps grow my business so I can continue making time to write it.

I’ll even provide some copy and paste text to make it easy to share on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Thanks in advance!

I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

Why are you so amazing? 

If you don’t yet believe that you are, you will by the time you finish the exercises in this chapter. You have come so far — and accomplished so much — that you’ve probably forgotten most of it. So, I want to help you refresh your memory.

The previous chapter focused on your weaknesses, what’s blocking success in your life, and what stands between you and your dreams. I know — heavy stuff.

Now, let’s have some fun in this chapter and talk about what makes you so great! This is just between you and the pages of this book. No need to feel shy. No need to be humble. 

After decades of observing who gets promoted, careers that tend to skyrocket, and who will succeed in business, I think those who do not move up have often erred on the humble side of caution. People often misinterpret humility and believe they must never be proud of their work, speak of their accomplishments, or be confident about their talent.

But, my interpretation of humility means that:

* You realize that you don’t know everything, but you are proud of your accomplishments.

* You know that you aren’t immune to making mistakes and sometimes being wrong, but you also have valuable talents and skills.

* You listen to others at all levels, and you’re open to learning experiences, but you have also accumulated an incredible depth of knowledge from your life, work, and education.

* You remember where you came from, and you’re thankful for others who were a part of your success.

So, be a bit humble yet confident, and shine a light on your work to be highly visible and let people see how amazing you are. But, before you can do that, you have to fully understand who you are, where you’ve been, and what you are capable of becoming. 

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Story of You

Regardless of where you are in your life and career, you may feel frustrated by your perceived progress relative to where you wish the bookmark were currently placed in the book of your life. It’s easy to look ahead at the blank pages remaining and be disappointed that you haven’t achieved more.

I’ve felt that way at times. If you never have, you’re an amazingly self-aware, proud, and confident person. Buy me a coffee sometime so that I can meet you.

That wasn’t me being sarcastic, by the way. I love meeting people who have always known what they wanted to be when they grew up, made a plan, and are happy with their progress. I’ve met a few people like that, and it is truly a joy to behold.

Now, I have found the following to be a helpful exercise for the rest of us who sometimes have doubts. Sit down in a quiet place with your favorite mug of coffee or tea, and start capturing the “Story of You” from the beginning.

We’ve all been on a more amazing journey than we realize. We’ve had life experiences that we have mostly forgotten or taken for granted. We’ve accomplished things that we no longer feel are worth mentioning. It's time to revisit all of it, capture your life story, and reflect on things.

When I recommend that people write about their career and life experiences, they are humble to a fault. They say:

* “Oh, my life isn’t that interesting.”

* “I haven’t really accomplished that much.”

* “No one would want to hear what I have to say.”

That’s absolutely false. We’re not the best judge of ourselves. We’re too close and take too much for granted.

We have forgotten so many experiences and accomplishments that only come up when someone asks deeper and more detailed questions. Then, you start to hear things like:

* “Oh yes, I guess I did publish a book once.”

* “I forgot about that summer when I backpacked around Europe.”

* “Well, I do remember doubling revenue at that company when I was leading the team.”

I’m amazed by how easily people brush off their accomplishments. They don’t realize how valuable their stories would be to so many people just starting their own career paths. They aren’t aware of the people who would benefit from their words of wisdom.

There is always someone in need of the knowledge you’ve acquired.

That is reason enough to start capturing and sharing your story. However, I have another motive in mind. When you take the time to write down everything you’ve done in your life, you realize how far you’ve come.

You see patterns in your talent, skills, knowledge, and experience. Once that is all laid out in front of you, your confidence grows. You may still have a long way to go, but you now understand how far you’ve come.

"Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story."— John Barth

Confidence is fuel. But only when it’s genuine confidence. I don’t like tricks or hacks to appear more confident. I’m talking about true self-confidence that you have earned and recognize based on rereading your story.

Real confidence is a fuel that powers achievement in your life. It improves your relationships, career, and wellbeing. It will enable you to take more significant risks and accomplish more audacious goals.

It will help carry you through the inevitable failures and setbacks. You’ll shrug them off more quickly, get back up, and carry on.

Yes, there are things you can do now to develop your confidence further (e.g., improving your health and fitness, acquiring new skills, improving your public speaking, educating yourself). However, writing the Story of You will immediately elevate your confidence because it’s the culmination of decades of accomplishments and work you’ve already put in.

As you look back over the years of your life and write your story, pay attention to the patterns in your talent, skills, knowledge, and experience. Capture everything that stands out and assemble this information to build the “Toolbox of You.”

The Toolbox of You

You own a metaphorical toolbox full of the tools you’ve accumulated over your lifetime. These are the tools you apply to accomplish things in your work and life. 

Some of these items were given to you at birth. You’ve always had these talents. Others were developed when you received your education. Many were acquired during your years of work. But most of your tools have been built and tuned from thousands of days of making your way in this crazy world. 

You have decades of knowledge, skills, and experience. You may think that can only be applied very narrowly to what you are and always have been. But that’s not true. What’s in the “Toolbox of You” is invaluable and can be leveraged with great success in so many different ways.

When you rise above the specific tasks you perform in a particular job, you see how everything in your toolbox can easily apply to almost any job. For example:

* A talent for persuasion comes in handy for nearly anything you want to do.

* Deep knowledge of human psychology can help you collaborate more successfully with more people.

* Research skills can help you be successful in almost any job.

* Experience with handling customers will make you invaluable.

So, let’s take a moment and capture all of your talents, knowledge, skills, and experience that make up your toolbox.

Natural talent

Your natural talents are the tools you were born with. They include innate personality traits, unique behavioral tendencies, and natural abilities. There’s no need to get into an entire nature vs. nurture debate here, but what’s wonderful about your natural talents is that you can invest in developing them and transforming them into a real competitive advantage.

Your best strengths probably evolved from some basis in talents you’ve had since childhood. You probably noticed that you improved at some activities much more quickly than others. For example, I discovered that I had a natural talent for music at a fairly young age and played numerous instruments for many years. On the other hand, my natural talent for basketball seemed to be sadly lacking.

“Talent—when I use the word, I mean it as the rate at which you get better with effort. The rate at which you get better at soccer is your soccer talent. The rate at which you get better at math is your math talent. You know, given that you are putting forth a certain amount of effort. And I absolutely believe—and not everyone does, but I think most people do—that there are differences in talent among us: that we are not all equally talented.”

— Angela Duckworth, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

Some of your talents might be dusty. You never did much with them. But, you might be surprised by how quickly you could reactivate those talents if you decided that you wanted to do something with them.

I also would imagine that you have honed other talents into impressive tools because you leaned into them and built them into your greatest strengths. Perhaps you displayed a natural talent for leadership as a child, and now you’ve become a leader in your industry. Or, maybe you have always been naturally persuasive, and now you’re a world-class salesperson.

What talents were placed in your toolbox and have been there since the day you were born? You might be very aware of what some of these “talent tools” are. But, it is also a helpful exercise to talk with people who have known you for your entire life.

If you want to create a more complete list of your talents, talk with your parents, siblings, and close friends who have known you for a long time. If you have a significant other in your life, ask them what they’ve noticed comes naturally to you.

My wife is particularly insightful and has known me for over 30 years. When I was planning a new business venture, she was the one who helped me see some of my talents that I had not been fully leveraging in my previous jobs. Her insights helped me identify a new opportunity to pursue.

Knowledge

Your knowledge tools come from living life, your formal education in schools, and what you’ve learned from your work experiences. Hopefully, you have also made a habit of being a lifelong learner and accumulating more knowledge on topics that interest you or could be useful for your profession.

Thousands of people will claim that they have the same knowledge and experience that you do. If you want to stand out, set yourself apart with proof of your expertise (e.g., writing, public speaking, a portfolio of your work), validated experience (Linkedin helps here), and testimonials and recommendations(which are invaluable when they are from other reputable people).

"Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality."— Dalai Lama XIV

What knowledge have you accumulated in your lifetime and tucked away in your toolbox? Take a moment to capture some notes about the valuable knowledge you know you have. What do you know that most people do not?

Skills 

Your skills are the tools you’ve developed that help you do your work. You’ve developed some skills on your own. Many were developed on the job. 

When people use the word “skills,” they often refer to hard skills, and you should undoubtedly document the ones you have. But don’t forget to capture your soft skills too. What’s funny is that — beyond a certain point — it’s the soft skills that will take you to the highest levels of your profession.

For example, the CTO of a company is not the most talented engineer with the best technical skills in the company. Instead, they have soft skills (e.g., leadership, communication, adaptability, persuasion, negotiation) that helped them rise to the top.

Most professions do require some unique skills — often hard skills — that set them apart from other professions. Software engineers and surgeons have very different skills. Designers have special skills compared to product managers. Real estate agents need very different skills than a chef at a restaurant.

However, some skills are valuable and transferable across multiple professions and jobs. I often tell the leaders I coach that great leaders are great leaders. As people climb the career ladder, the lower-level hard skills become less important. That’s why I was able to pivot my career from a VP of Design to a VP of Product Management.

What are all of the skills you have in your toolbox? One helpful exercise is transforming your current detailed job description into the services you would include in a business plan. How would a business describe its services if it offered clients what you do every day?

Experience

Finally, your experiences are the history of all of the times you combined your talent, skills, and knowledge to get things done. What have you accomplished for your past employers? If you’re an entrepreneur, what have you achieved in your business? 

I would guess that almost all of you have created a resume for a job search and provided one to a potential employer during a job interview. Many of you have probably been through this process dozens or even hundreds of times.

However, the basic resume you use for job interviews doesn’t tell the complete picture of your life and work experiences, does it? I know that my old resume didn’t include all of my work experience, so that I could keep it to two pages.

One helpful exercise is creating a comprehensive “mega resume” that includes every work experience you’ve ever had. Go back to the beginning of your young working life. You never know when something you did in the past could trigger a valuable memory (e.g., “I totally forgot how much I loved doing that kind of work!”).

I’ve had kind of a crazy path to where I am today. For example, if I go back to my youth, my work experiences include:

* Delivering newspapers

* Mowing lawns

* Working on farms

* Stocking shelves in a grocery store

* Working at fast-food restaurants

* Assembling trophies and engraving plaques

* Working the stockroom at Kmart

* Various construction jobs

* Security guard

* Police dispatcher

* Expert witness researcher

* Software designer

* Design manager

* Director of Design

* VP of Design

* VP of Product Management

* CEO of a startup

* Business consultant

* Leadership and Career coach

What work and life experiences do you have stored in your toolbox? Capture everything you can remember.

The authentic you

What is your “secret sauce”? What makes you stand out from the crowd?

Whatever it is, that’s a key to your individuality. Embrace it, don’t hide it. Lean into it to create an advantage in how you pursue your career at work and the interactions in your life.

There is no level playing field in life, despite the popularity of schools, companies, and various online services exclaiming, “Hey, we create a level playing field!”

Please. Who are they kidding?

You can’t go through life as if you are playing a board game by the rules, making sure that everyone is playing fair and no one has an unfair advantage. 

Life doesn’t work that way.

There are so many variables that influence your success in life. Variables in who you are. Variables in your culture and environment. Variables in the workplace. Variables in your boss. Variables in the work you do. And an infinite combination of variables in the people around you and how you interact with each other.

It is impossible to create an absolutely level playing field for everyone. On top of it all, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t leverage every single advantage you have. The world is challenging enough without you restraining your talents and capabilities out of some naive sense of fair play.

Play as hard as you can

I remember a conversation with my children about natural talent, strengths, weaknesses, and being able to compete with others. During soccer season, this would sometimes come up, usually starting with, “It’s not fair. He’s bigger than I am.”

I would have to remind them that life isn’t fair. No one can promise that life will ever be fair. Yes, there will be kids on the field who are stronger than you, and they can’t hold back that strength or somehow have it limited in the interest of a level playing field.

So, I said, “He may be bigger than you, but you are faster.”

He replied, “What if someone is bigger and faster than you are?”

“Well, in life, there will always be people who are bigger or stronger than you, but you are faster. Someone might be faster than you, but you are stronger than they are. And, someone might be bigger, faster, and stronger, so you have to be smarter.”

Of course, my son said, “What if someone is bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter than you are?”

So I said, “Well, then I hope that you are better-looking.”

I was teasing him a little bit. But I’m not joking when I say that you need to stop holding back. You need to use your “unique sizzle” to create your unfair advantage. You don’t get to reset the game board at the end of your life and play harder next time.

This is your one shot.

You get one game.

One ride.

Obviously, be a decent person. Don’t be cruel, ruthless, or do terrible things to get ahead. But, play as hard as you can with what you’ve been given and what you’ve earned. Leverage every ounce of your natural talent, strengths, hard-earned skills, knowledge, and experience to succeed.

What is your unfair advantage?

There is nothing wrong with using your supposedly unfair advantages to succeed in your career and life. Believe me; no one else will dedicate their lives to helping make you successful every step of the way. You’ll be on your own and have to earn it.

Use every tool in your Toolbox of You to succeed. Attract with sizzle, but retain with substance. I will call BS if you huff and puff and say that you don’t notice sizzle. We vote for tall presidential candidates. Pretty people make more money than others (12% more). We even find attractive people to be more persuasive.

Do people find you attractive? If so, don’t be shy about it and feel like this is something you need to suppress to level the playing field. Embrace it, be thankful, and recognize that people may treat you as more capable, whether you are or not.

Do you have a deep, warm voice? Would you believe that a decrease of 25% in voice pitch (i.e., a deeper voice) is associated with an increase of $187K in annual salary for CEOs? For men, there is often a positive correlation between having a deeper voice and greater success in business and politics.

Do you have a great smile? If so, know that people will find you more attractive when you smile vs. not. They can’t help but react to your smile, and often they will smile back, thus changing their own brain chemistry.

Are you funny? Are you a good storyteller? Do you make friends easily? Do you naturally put people at ease? Do you learn new things quickly? I could go on and on. But I think you get the point. You have something that probably comes naturally to you that gives you a competitive advantage.

Sizzle? What sizzle?

So, you may be saying, “This is all great, but I don’t have any special sizzle.”

If you truly weren’t born with any sizzle - which I highly doubt - then create it. The easiest sizzle that anyone can tap into is being genuinely friendly and using a natural smile to engage and pull people in.

Case in point: me. I spent most of my life with a neutral to negative resting face. People have told me to smile. Friends have asked why I look so grumpy. My regular resting face isn’t warm, friendly, and smiling.

But, over the past few years, I have been making a deliberate effort to genuinely smile more when I meet new people or need to engage with someone. For example, when I talk with someone in customer service in a retail establishment, I start with a genuine smile. Ok, that may sound funny to you, but it’s new for me.

I have my own techniques for feeling true warmth and friendliness so that my smile is genuine. One strategy is that I tell myself that I am meeting someone who is an old friend, and I haven’t seen them in years. I know. Sounds kind of stupid, huh?

But it works. For a couple of minutes, in the beginning, I light up like I’m greeting an old friend. Then, the other person tends to light up as well, and the friendly engagement will naturally continue from that point on without feeling forced. Call it a “warm and fuzzy” jumpstart.

So, you may not think you have natural sizzle, but every single one of us is capable of smiling and being friendly. If someone like me can start smiling more at this late stage of life, then anyone can. It is one of the easiest and most natural ways to connect more deeply with another human being. And that deeper connection is one of the secrets to tapping into an unfair advantage in your career and life.

It feels funny to call it an “unfair advantage” or a secret tip, yet it is because most people are in such a rush and are too focused on “me, Me, ME!” Slow down, take the time to really engage with other people, and don’t be shy about being warm and human. It’s surprisingly effective, and it’s also ridiculous how long it took me to learn that.

Be the best you that you can be

Don’t feel like you can’t be the “real you” and leverage some of the best advantages that you naturally have. Opportunity may not knock again, so make the most of who you are and what you have right now.

"Too often, the opportunity knocks, but by the time you push back the chain, push back the bolt, unhook the two locks and shut off the burglar alarm, it's too late."— Rita Coolidge

Do you see it now? Do you see how amazing you are?

I hope that taking the time to write the Story of You helped you appreciate how far you’ve come in your life. I hope that capturing your talents, knowledge, skills, and experience made you realize how great you are and what you are capable of doing.

This chapter is one of the essential steps in building an “Invincible You.” The confidence you should be feeling right now will help you step up and claim the work and life you deserve.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my book with you this year! Subscribe now to read the draft chapters as I complete them.

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Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to start my day with journaling and sketching. Recently, the concept of career ladders kept popping into my head, prompting me to think about how much careers have changed in my lifetime.

A few days ago, I sketched some rough stuff in a paper notebook so that I wouldn’t forget about it. But today, I committed the ideas to a few illustrations. As you will see below, these are a bit rough.

Yes, I was a “designer” for many years, but not that kind of designer. I was an interaction designer, focusing on business models, product requirements, user needs, engineering capabilities, information architecture, task flows, layouts, and prototyping. I can do a little visual design, but nothing like my more talented friends who create works of art.

But sketching and simple illustrations help me think through ideas and get them out of my head. The process allows me to turn them into something I can share with you. So, here we go!

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The old model

My parents and grandparents had careers that followed the ladder illustrated below.

* Go to school.

* Graduate and get a job.

* Stay with that employer for life.

* Hopefully, you climb the ladder, move into management, and make more money.

* Then, that magical day finally arrives: Retirement.

* Retire and never work again.

* Golf, fish, and play bingo for the rest of your life.

I’m Gen X, and I thought my career would follow the same path. I’d climb the corporate ladder, just as our parents did, and strive for that golden retirement age. Well, the world changed (and I didn’t end up working for NASA). Very few people commit to an employer for the entire duration of their careers now.

What we actually need

I was taught to “chase money” and pursue a career that would lead to financial success. That’s what mattered most.

Buy “happiness” through material possessions that signal your success (e.g., big house, fancy car, a boat), raise a family, and pump money into your retirement account. That’s how you achieved safety and security.

Unfortunately, that model actually leaves you pretty vulnerable. Chasing money and spending more and more money to be happy becomes a trap. Leaving your fate in the hands of an employer isn’t very safe.

And safety is essential! The foundation of your career ladder depends on it.

It’s almost impossible to focus on the mastery of your craft and profession when you don’t feel safe at work. And, without safety, finding purpose and meaning is a distant dream.

However, safety goes beyond a steady paycheck. We want to feel safe at work without the looming threat of being fired and corporate layoffs hanging over our heads. We want to work in a safe environment without bad bosses berating us, toxic coworkers undercutting us, and corrosive cultures damaging our confidence.

In other words, we need psychological safety, too. As Google discovered in their research to discover the secrets of effective teams:

"Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk-taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea."

How do you build the rungs in your ladder to climb to higher levels of career safety? I’ve talked about this before when I identified how we become vulnerable and what we can do about it.

A few activities that build your security and safety:

* Hone your craft and become incredibly good at what you do. Oh, and don’t forget to learn how to use AI well (it’s here to stay).

* Identify your unique talents, strengths, and experiences and double down on making yourself valuable and indispensable (e.g., no one can be you, and no one can do precisely what you do).

* Mitigate your weaknesses and vulnerabilities (e.g., some “weaknesses” are really just undiscovered and undeveloped strengths).

* Always be networking, connecting, and discovering opportunities.

* Always be open to conversations and interviews (keep your interviewing skills sharp).

* Create additional sources of income (e.g., entrepreneurial explorations, side hustles, passive income).

* Manage your budget, reduce expenses, and build a financial cushion.

For example, I was lucky to have developed a robust professional network early in my career. My Apple colleagues have stayed in touch and supported one another for over 20 years. Later, this network opened doors for me with multiple startups, employers, and clients.

I felt a sense of safety, which gave me the courage to take risks that advanced my career and business. I always knew that I could contact a few people and have a new job within a week or two.

That feeling of security is invaluable. Take the time to build it for your career, and it will enable you to focus on the higher rungs of mastery and meaning.

The harsh reality of employment

Looking back now, I’m amused by my naivete as a young employee in the tech industry. I thought my career would take care of itself if I worked hard, put in long hours, and went above and beyond.

My younger self also thought that my job would always be secure, I’d never be fired, and I would never experience a corporate layoff. That all changed at IBM when it executed the first layoff in its corporate history. I was there that day, and it was a surreal experience.

I also experienced multiple rounds of layoffs during my time at Apple. I still think back to that time and how my answer to one question probably saved my job (e.g., “You’re familiar with UNIX, right?”).

I can’t really blame young me, however. Multiple people and educators assured me that great workers don’t lose their jobs. Hard workers are always in demand.

Sure, there is some truth to that. But, as I discovered at IBM, Apple, Yahoo, and my first startup experience, there are no guarantees.

You could be amazingly talented and valuable yet still lose your job due to poor corporate planning and decisions requiring massive strategic changes, project cancellations, budget cuts, the sunsetting of products, and layoffs.

When the rung you are standing on starts burning, you have no choice but to find a way to rebuild it, often on your own.

Own your ladder

The sooner you accept full responsibility for your professional growth and career ladder, the better off you will be. No one cares about your career as much as you do. No boss will take ownership of your path and future.

You must build your own ladder to get the safety, growth, security, and fulfillment you need. The old days are behind us of joining a company and climbing an internal career ladder for the rest of your professional life.

Building your ladder may feel overwhelming, but it is ultimately empowering. Your career exists far beyond the walls of any one company. You get to plan the path that is best for you.

In this modern, connected, remote, global working world, you have an almost infinite number of “rungs” to choose from. Intentionally choose employers who will give you the skills, knowledge, and experience you need to keep climbing your unique ladder.

You can even select rungs from the wonderful world of entrepreneurship, as I have. It is easier than ever before to transition from employee to solopreneur.

Own your growth plan

If you’re lucky, you may find yourself working for great managers and leaders who want to help you grow within the company. They will challenge you, mentor you, and pull you up the ladder into roles that elevate you and tap into your potential.

However, not everyone is so lucky. Most managers are pretty average. A few are downright terrible and destructive.

You may be on your own or need to work with a career coach. But, no matter what you do, advancing your career and investing in your professional development requires some discomfort and conquering fears.

Comfort leads to stagnation. Growth requires stepping into more challenging roles, often moving to new employers, and assuming greater risks. Build your career ladder with the employers and positions that will help you climb to reach the vision you have for your professional life.

Create a plan that puts you on the path to professional mastery. You want to become so good at what you do — and so well-known in your industry — that you are always in demand. When you climb the ladder to that level of extreme competence and excellence, you become an opportunity magnet.

Hiring managers and recruiters will be contacting you regularly and attempting to poach you from your current employer. You don’t have to hunt for new jobs. They find you.

An entrepreneurial view

I often talk about treating your career like a business. And, the product that the business sells is you. So, in that sense, we all need to be more “entrepreneurial.” We all should do a better job of marketing and promoting ourselves.

However, I also believe that true entrepreneurship (i.e., building your own business) provides security, freedom, and growth in ways that no 9-5 job ever can.

* You will never fire yourself (and please don’t mistreat yourself 😉).

* You will never be forced into early retirement by age discrimination.

* You can build your business 100% around your talents, strengths, experience, and interests.

* You get to decide where, when, and how you work every day.

* You get to decide with whom you work every day.

* You get to plan a future that maximizes your safety and security, professional mastery, and purpose and meaning.

Is it easy? No, building a business is hard work. But at least you control your destiny. The harder you work, the more you get out of it, and the better your decisions, the better your outcomes.

It is certainly possible to find purpose and meaning in the work you do for an employer. Some of my friends are working on solutions that will change the world.

But if you aren’t finding meaning in your day job, it’s crucial to create it for yourself. I often say that entrepreneurship is one of your best opportunities to build your life around something that matters to you. You literally get to define what you do, so you can decide how you might change people’s lives and make a difference in the world.

Don’t we all want security, happiness, and fulfillment?

Hey, if you’ve somehow found a way to get all the factors below with a trusted employer who will never, ever let you down, more power to you!

* Fulfillment

* Security

* Meaning and Purpose

* Freedom

* Financial independence

* Mental, emotional, and physical health

* Happiness

However, if you desire all of this and that magical employer still hasn’t shown up in your life, it’s time to take ownership and make it happen. You deserve it, and life is too short to keep waiting.

Here are some final thoughts about retirement. Maybe you are on a good path in your career as an employee and are set up pretty well for your retirement. But, I’m already seeing that most of us (e.g., Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and beyond) don’t want to fully retire the way our grandparents and parents did.

We have things we want to accomplish that have nothing to do with our employers and professions. We have personal goals and dreams that we want to see come true. That’s what gives our lives meaning and purpose.

Once we’ve locked in our financial security and independence, an exciting phase of life can begin. We have time to pursue fulfillment in a way that many people from previous generations could not.

It’s a gift. Take advantage of the opportunity!

I’m Larry Cornett, an executive coach who works with ambitious professionals to help them reclaim their power, become more invincible, and create better opportunities for their work and lives. Do more of what you love and less of what you hate!

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Who hasn’t wanted to walk into a room with total confidence? Or give a presentation where everyone trusts your recommendations? Or be given more responsibility because the leadership team knows you can handle it?

In other words, who hasn’t wanted a little executive presence?

But, what is executive presence? Even experienced leaders struggle to define it. They say, “you’ll know it when you see it.” It’s that automatic response you have to someone who exudes calm confidence and power and seems to be in control of the room.

I’ve witnessed the lack of it holding many people back in their careers. Frequently, when leaders hire me to coach high-potential employees on their teams, they tell me that someone is on their list for a potential management role. But, they don’t feel the person is ready yet for a few important reasons.

Guess what one of those reasons is?

Yep. They lack executive presence.

It really comes down to:

* Projecting self-confidence and professionalism

* Making tough decisions, often on the spot

* Taking control and ownership when necessary

* Holding your own around other strong personalities.

While you may have been told to just “fake it til you make it,” the reality is that executive presence takes emotional intelligence, strong interpersonal skills, and a willingness to step up and fully leverage your talents. When I was a vice president with Yahoo! Search, I was lucky enough to work with a few professional coaches who helped me cultivate that elusive executive presence so many people talk about in the corporate world.

In this article, I’ll share five steps you can take to start building your executive presence. All you need is a base of some self-confidence and an ability to deal with whatever comes your way calmly.

Whether you’re aiming for CEO someday or just want to feel a little more confident in your next presentation, this advice will help! Let’s dive into these strategies.

* Convey calm confidence

* Look and behave like a professional

* Improve your public speaking

* Get better at handling conflict

* Learn how to think on your feet

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

1. Convey calm confidence

I always knew something really bad was going on at work when my manager’s confidence seemed shaken. He wasn’t good at controlling his emotion in the office.

Unfortunately, his nervousness and anxious behavior were contagious. Before you knew it, the whole team was whispering in the hallways, trying to figure out what was going on, and feeling panicked.

Great leaders know the last thing their teams want to see is them acting worried, stressed, or out of control. The ability to remain calm is an essential skill that helps you and others.

Practice conveying confidence and calm, even when you’re not feeling that way. It’s one of the first steps you can take to display a stronger executive presence.

* First, smile warmly when joining meetings. But, it has to be a genuine smile. People can tell when someone is faking a smile. So, convince yourself that you are greeting old friends. This is a technique I used in the corporate world, no matter how contentious I thought the meeting might become.

* Next, use deeper, slower breaths to relax. When we get nervous, we tend to retreat into shallow breathing. Our chest feels tight, and then we feel more stressed. Focus on breathing in slowly through your nose and into your belly, not your chest. Pause and hold your breath for a second. Then, slowly breathe out, taking a little longer than you spent breathing in.

* Finally, take the time you need to respond to questions. We often get anxious in meetings when we feel put on the spot and don’t have all of the answers. It’s ok to sit silently for a second while you gather your thoughts. It’s also ok to say, “I’ll look into that and get back to you by the end of the day.”

Here’s the big secret: No one has all of the answers. The key is to portray confidence in your ability to get the answers and report back. Control your response, take ownership, and resolve issues on your timeline.

When I first became a manager, I definitely didn’t have all the answers. During stressful meetings, I felt very anxious on the inside, and my heart was racing. However, I did focus on externally displaying calm confidence at all times. Apparently, it worked.

One of my employees once said to me, “You’re always so calm in every meeting, even when people are arguing. Nothing seems to bother you.”

I thought to myself, “Well, good! I’m glad it’s working, and you think I’m calm. I’m super stressed, but my team doesn’t need to see that.”

Try these tips next time you start feeling anxious in a meeting. Remember to smile and be friendly. Slow down your breathing and focus on centering yourself. Take time to listen and reflect, answer when you’re ready, and be heard.

Conveying a sense of confidence and calm begins with owning how you respond. Start with controlling yourself, and you’ll be on the path to genuine executive presence. 

2. Look and behave like a professional

Are you familiar with the saying, “Dress for the job you want, not the one you have?”

When it comes to cultivating your executive presence, it goes one step further. Behave as if you are in the job you want, too.

I know the advice of “look and behave like a professional” may sound rather obvious. What kind of professional? Where do you even begin?

The good news is the answer is probably right in front of you. Someone in your professional circle — whether that’s in the academic or corporate world — is operating at a level you admire. They also have the executive presence you desire.

This person could be your model for how you want to look and behave to cultivate your executive presence.

First, identify someone you view as your career hero. Perhaps they have the job you’d like to pursue. Or, they’re operating in a more senior role on your current career path.

The key is to choose someone who is not only in a role you admire but also behaves like the professional you want to be. They have that desirable executive presence.

Next, pay attention to your hero in meetings. What is it she does that conveys professionalism? How does she behave?

I had a career hero at one of my past companies. I thought he was on the path to executive greatness, and I was right. He went straight to the top.

I paid attention to everything he did.

* How he walked into meetings.

* Where he sat.

* How he ran meetings.

* The expressions on his face when others were talking and presenting.

* And how he responded to questions.

Finally, pay attention to your hero’s style. Remember, dress for the job you want? Like it or not, your appearance does impact your executive presence.

A great deal of how you are perceived will indeed be how you speak and behave. But, people can’t help but notice your appearance, too, especially as you join a meeting and before you even begin speaking.

You don’t have to become a carbon copy of someone else, nor should you. But, your career hero gives you a sense of how a successful professional with executive presence looks and behaves.

3. Improve your public speaking

Did you know that approximately 20 million people in the U.S. are struggling with a fear of public speaking? I used to be one of those people.

However, can you picture a single person with a strong executive presence who is uncomfortable speaking in front of others? I would guess not.

Overcoming my fear of public speaking has been the number one thing that helped me advance my career. It made me comfortable with my leadership duties, taking the stage, and pitching investors for my startup.

If you want to strengthen your executive presence, invest in your public speaking skills.

First, make time for deep preparation to boost your confidence when you speak. Nancy Duarte — an excellent presenter and TED speaker — estimates that you should expect to rehearse at least one hour per minute of your presentation.

I’m sure that sounds extreme! But, I did that to prepare for a talk at a conference in Australia (pre-COVID) since I wanted to make sure that I nailed my presence on stage.

Guess how much time I spent rehearsing my talk?

Over 52 hours! Yes, 52 hours of practice and rehearsal over several months for a one-hour presentation.

Next, if you’re an introvert like me, create your speaking persona. I learned to think of my public speaking as a performance and visualized that my talking on stage was acting.

It is rather liberating. This helped me overcome being inwardly focused on my anxiety while speaking to the audience. Instead, I was someone else.

Finally, find your friendly fans. When you first start speaking, you face an imposing sea of faces, whether that’s on stage or using Zoom.

The key is to find the faces of your friendly fans. Rather than feeling like you’re speaking to a crowd, you have a series of one-on-one conversations throughout your talk.

There are always a few people smiling and nodding as you speak. Present to them! That will boost your confidence.

Becoming a talented public speaker requires a lot of preparation and practice. But, that investment is well worth it for your career and developing your executive presence.

4. Get better at handling conflict

Who wouldn’t want a workplace that is 100% free of anger, conflict, and misunderstandings? While we’re making wishes, I would also like a unicorn pony.

I’ve always been impressed by the people in meetings who can resolve conflict with ease. They can defuse a volatile situation and help everyone reach a resolution.

Conflict is a part of life, and it will occur in your workplace sooner or later. Sometimes the issues will be with your coworkers, sometimes with your boss.

But, have you noticed that the people with executive presence never let the conflict shake them? Perhaps some people are born with nerves of steel, but I know that you can develop your conflict resolution skills.

First, challenge your starting assumptions. Thinking the worst of someone else and playing through disaster scenarios in your mind won’t guide you to a positive outcome.

Pierre Omidyar founded eBay in 1995 on the premise that: “People are basically good.” That also influenced our approach to workplace conflict in the company.

When dealing with an issue with your coworker, start with the assumption that the other person is a good person. Assume they are a rational human being.

Next, use radical candor (my affiliate link). Have you heard of that before? As Kim Scott puts it, “Radical Candor really just means saying what you think while also giving a damn about the person you’re saying it to.”

Operate with essential integrity, authentic communication, and constructive negotiation. Be open and honest, and seek mutual success.

Finally, seek shared goals. Discussing common goals with someone is one of the most effective techniques I’ve used for handling conflict.

I often find we get too focused on the lower-level goals of our team and ourselves (e.g., “I want X, but you want Y.”). It helps to move the conversation up to higher-level shared goals that are good for the entire organization and company.

You want to metaphorically sit on the same side of the table and face the issue together. Reach mutual agreement on the shared goals, and focus on working together on a solution that lets you achieve them.

So, the next time you’re facing conflict at work, ask yourself how someone with an executive presence would handle the situation.

Assume the best of the other person, use radical candor to discuss the issues, and seek shared goals that will enable both parties to succeed.

5. Learn how to think on your feet

Real life is messy and chaotic, but you don’t have to let that chaos rub off on how you behave. People with executive presence rarely seem flustered.

First, always prepare ahead of time. Never come into a meeting cold. If you take control of your calendar, you’ll know what’s coming up and can be ready for the day.

Do your research on the topic and issues. Research the players in the meeting too. If you’re smart, you’ve already met with key players ahead of time to build the alliances you need.

Next, expect the unexpected. Practice answering expected and unexpected questions. Nothing in a live meeting will be identical to your rehearsal, but practicing your answers makes it easier to improv later.

That’s what meetings feel like sometimes — an improv act. People with executive presence know what they want to say and control the flow of the conversation.

Finally, it’s ok not to have all of the answers on the spot. The people I’ve observed with good executive presence didn’t always have every answer to every question.

However, they took ownership and were accountable. They always said, “I don’t know. But, I will find out and get back to you.”

Behave like a leader before you’re a leader

Some people think you acquire “executive presence” once you become a senior leader or an executive. But, I bet you know a few leaders who don’t have it — and you’re probably wondering how they got promoted to that level. I’m pretty sure you also know a few individual contributors who exude executive presence even though they don’t have much official authority or a team to back it up.

Authentic leadership is expressed through your actions and words, not your title. Don’t wait for some magical promotion to grant you self-confidence and presence. Start building it for yourself right now. No matter what path your career takes, having a strong executive presence will serve you well.

After participating in countless performance review sessions, calibration activities, and promotion decision-making sessions, I know that a lack of executive presence can hold someone back. It might not hurt you for lower-level promotions, but it will be noticed and discussed during promotion decisions for senior leadership positions.

More than once, I recall a manager putting someone up for a promotion and having it shot down by a peer. They’d say something like, “Them? No, they aren’t ready for a Director-level role. They’re not confident enough. They don’t even act like a leader!”

Fair or not, impressions have an impact. If people don’t see you as a leader, they may not treat you like a leader. If you want it, step up and be it!

More to explore

Allison Kluger is a lecturer in Leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in the areas of strategic communication, reputation management, and personal branding. Stanford published an excellent interview with her on their website, Improve Your Executive Presence, which I think you’ll find helpful.

You may be familiar with Dr. Amy Cuddy and her infamous “power pose” described in her TED talk on body language. Yes, that research was challenged, but she successfully refuted that criticism. She’s also published a new book, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges (my affiliate link).

Thank you for reading Invincible Career®. This post is public so feel free to share it.

By the way, there is a great way you can support my work without spending any money on a premium subscription:

📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 📣 

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I’ll even provide some copy and paste text to make it easy to share on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Thanks in advance!

I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.

Why aren’t you already living the vision you defined using the questions in the previous chapter?

* Why aren’t you working for your ideal employer?

* Why haven’t you created your dream business?

* Why aren’t you living the life you really want?

Whatever the answer is you just quietly whispered; that's one of the barriers standing between you and your ideal future. It could be:

* Lack of opportunities

* Financial concerns

* Lack of time

* Family responsibilities

* Fear of failure

Now, you could let those issues hold you back forever or you can do something about it. You can identify all the barriers and knock them down one by one. Climb over them if you have to, or find a way around them.

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” — Calvin Coolidge

Sadly, most people give up before they even try. You won’t be one of those people, will you?

Grit and determination are often the only things that separate successful people from those who give up. I’ve watched ambitious people push through and succeed where more talented people have thrown in the towel and given up.

This chapter will help you identify what’s stopping you from living the life you want. We all deal with external factors that can hold us back and keep us down. But, you can create a plan and commit to eliminating those issues.

However, there is another uncomfortable question to consider: Are you in your own way? One of the most significant barriers you might be facing is a lack of faith in yourself and your abilities. But, that problem can be conquered too.

At times, it may not feel like it, but the easiest thing to change is yourself. We can’t force other people to change. We may have limited control over our environment. But, we do have power over our own thoughts and actions. Start there, and then move on to explore any remaining barriers.

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”― Leonardo da Vinci

Invincible Career® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Identify the gap

First, what’s the gap between where you want to be and where you are today? Consider your career goals and lifestyle aspirations. This could be a gap between:

* Your current profession and an ideal profession.

* Your current job title and your ideal role.

* Where you currently live and where you dream of living one day.

* Your current financial situation and achieving financial security.

However, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I don’t know what matters most to you, but you probably do after reading the previous chapter. So, take a moment to capture your specific goals and how far away you feel you are from reaching them.

Now, what do you need to reach your goals? What do you need to succeed? This could be any number of things. But, building on the examples I shared above, you might say:

* “I need to go back to school to get a degree that will help me to pursue my dream profession.”

* “I need to find an inside champion at my dream company who can help me get a job there.”

* “I would need to sell my current house, move to my dream location, and find a new job and home there.”

* “I need to increase my income, reduce my living expenses, make some smart investments, and create a financial cushion that helps me sleep better at night.”

The next step is to identify what’s stopping you from taking action right now. There’s a reason these gaps still exist.

What’s in your way?

You may have a clear idea of what’s standing between you and your goals. You may already know why you’re not taking action.

However, many of us know exactly what we should be doing yet find ourselves putting it off again and again for months or even years. So, I’d like to explore and discuss some of the more common blocks and ways to overcome them.

Fear

Fear is a significant blocker. It keeps many people from even trying things that might dramatically improve their lives.

* Fear of the unknown traps people in jobs they hate and professions they no longer enjoy.

* Fear of failure prevents many people from starting that business they dream about building.

* Fear of judgment makes people hesitate to share something they created (e.g., poetry, art, music).

Some people have such an unrelenting fear of success that they unintentionally self-sabotage. They’re worried about the consequences of becoming increasingly successful (e.g., losing friends). They fear the unwanted side effects of success that they’ve witnessed in others (e.g., unwanted attention). Or, they have already encountered negative experiences related to their past success (e.g., being attacked by jealous peers).

Take ownership of your path to success by facing and addressing each blocking fear head-on. Create a plan for how you will handle every single one. I had to do this to remove the barriers between me and my goals, so I know this task isn’t easy.

However, it is possible. Others have accomplished it, and so can you.

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’” — Eleanor Roosevelt

Weaknesses

In Now, Discover Your Strengths (my affiliate link), Marcus Buckingham recommends doubling down on your strengths. It’s good advice in a world obsessed with managing flaws.

Focusing on developing and leveraging your natural talents and strengths is a better strategy for your career than worrying about your weaknesses. Also, there is a difference between a weakness and an undiscovered talent. Something that might be labeled a weakness may simply be a talent you’ve never bothered to explore before.

However, when you find yourself blocked from achieving your goals, it could be that a weakness is holding you back. When you want something valuable, but it lies on the other side of fear, it’s worth investing in removing that obstacle. When a weakness is a barrier between you and your dream career — and you can actually do something about it — it’s worth working on it.

Addressing that weakness can change everything.

For example, I feared public speaking. I could tell it was holding me back in my professional career. It was almost impossible to be visible in my industry if I was too afraid to step on stage. It was challenging to be an effective manager and leader when I was nervous about standing in front of everyone in a conference room.

So, I stopped hiding from it, avoiding it, and working around it. I received training and forced myself to get a little better at it every day. A funny thing happened along the way. I fell in love with public speaking. Over a few years, I transformed a weakness driven by fear into one of my most valuable strengths.

Missing skills

Often, skill acquisition can close the gap between where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow. For example, reaching the peak of your career might require becoming really, really damn good at what you do. That requires consistently putting in the time and effort every single day.

“Be so good they can't ignore you.”― Steve Martin

However, if the skills you need aren’t part of what you do every day, you need to find other ways to acquire those skills. For example, I interviewed someone who wanted to reinvent his career and become a developer. He didn’t have time to write code every day in his blue-color job.

So, he had to acquire the knowledge and skills on his own time after work. That meant many late nights and weekends dedicated to learning web development. It was challenging and tiring, but he did it and has a fantastic career now, earning way more than he did in his previous job.

Going back to school isn’t the only way to learn new skills. It probably isn’t even the best way. As I just described, sometimes you can’t even acquire the skills you want with your current employer.

Therefore, the best approach to eliminating a barrier of missing skills might be to teach and train yourself. From one of my favorite recent articles:

”Jonny Greenwood may be a prolific guitar player and Oscar-nominated film composer, but during a recent interview with NPR he admitted that he faked playing keyboard when he first joined Radiohead in the '80s.”

Talk about faking it until you make it! Thom Yorke didn’t know Greenwood was faking it, and he actually complimented his playing.

“They made quite a racket, quite a noise,” the guitarist continued. “It was all guitars and distortion — and so I would pretend to play for weeks on end and Thom would say, ‘I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture, because I can tell when you’re not playing.’”

“And I’m thinking, ‘No, you can’t, because I’m really not playing,’”

Greenwood added. “And I’d go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords and cautiously over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up. And that’s how I started in with Radiohead.”

I don’t know about you, but I find that story rather inspirational! He didn’t let his lack of skill keep him from pursuing his dream of joining the band, and then he aggressively worked on closing that skills gap every day.

Missing knowledge

Similar to missing skills, missing knowledge can be a barrier that creates a gap between you and your vision of the future. Of course, you can acquire knowledge through education and work experience. If you have the opportunity to learn what you need to know via your current employment, by all means, seize it!

However, you can also take the time and make an effort to educate yourself. Everyone should be a lifelong learner. Learning how to learn was one of the best skills I developed when I was younger.

It sounds obvious, doesn’t it? If you’re missing the knowledge you need to chase your goals, get it! But, you’d be surprised by the number of people who let a knowledge barrier stop them from moving forward.

“I can’t do that because I don’t know how to do that.”

About 23 years ago, I interviewed as a design consultant for a startup creating an innovative tablet device. They wanted someone with experience with PDAs (personal digital assistants), which I did not have since they were relatively new — and quite expensive — at the time.

So, I made an investment in my first Palm Pilot, bought a couple of design and development books for the Palm OS, and spent the weekend learning as quickly as I could. I interviewed with added confidence in my new PDA knowledge and won the contract.

The modern world of instant access to Kindle books and online courses makes it so much easier to close a knowledge gap than ever before. Don’t let missing knowledge block you from pursuing your dreams.

Lack of experience

In some cases, lack of experience seems to be a more significant barrier than it actually is. For example, numerous times, I’ve had clients tell me they didn’t apply for a job because they didn’t have the necessary years of experience required in the job listing.

However, when people find an inside champion and work their way into the company for an interview, they often discover that “years of experience” is a fuzzy requirement. Employers make exceptions for extraordinary candidates they want to hire.

Lack of specific experience (e.g., within an industry or profession) is also less of a barrier than you might think. As I often say, smart people can learn anything, and ambitious people can accomplish anything.

I’m not the most intelligent person you’ll ever meet, but I am ambitious. I was able to secure a role as a Vice President of Product Management even though I don’t have an MBA and I’d never “officially” worked as a product manager before. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

There are more opportunities than ever before to gain the experience you need to land a great job, launch a new business, or pursue something important to you. If you want it badly enough, you can find a way.

Lack of credibility

In some cases, people are missing the credibility markers that will help them achieve their goals (e.g., launching a new consulting practice). They haven’t developed a reputation yet that would give others the confidence to hire them, partner with them, or purchase their services.

I’ll go into more detail about your professional reputation and branding in a later chapter. But, building credibility does take time. Having a powerful network with people willing to vouch for you helps a lot, though.

However, much like experience, I think some people use a perceived lack of credibility as an excuse to delay pursuing their goals. They say things like, “I don’t have the experience and reputation yet that would convince people to work with me. Why would anyone listen to me?”

Yes, you should continue growing your experience, developing yourself, and building a positive reputation. But, if you keep waiting until you feel ready, you may never take action to achieve that audacious vision you have in mind.

You’d be surprised how far confidence will take you. Just get started! You will stumble a few times on the path, but that’s ok. Get up, dust yourself off, and keep going. With every step, your credibility grows, and the gap narrows.

Financial issues

I probably couldn’t have built my coaching practice if I had stayed in Silicon Valley. The California Bay Area is an exceedingly expensive place to live. My “burn rate” was so high that I would have used up my financial cushion before my new business generated enough revenue to support us.

Unfortunately, many people focus too much on trying to make more money while ignoring the power of reducing expenses. You should work on both sides of the financial equation.

I’m thankful that I married someone who also believes in managing expenses and avoiding wasteful, extravagant spending. She’s always been supportive of my entrepreneurial adventures and helped us manage our budget to stay on track.

I do know that money is a significant blocker for some people and their dreams. But, in some cases, that happens because people are trying to leap all the way to their grand vision instead of taking baby steps to get there.

For example, I’ve witnessed this happen with a few local people in the restaurant industry. Most took out significant loans to invest in expensive real estate, extensively remodel a restaurant, and go all in without doing the upfront research and testing to ensure they were on the right path. In less than a year, most failed and closed their doors.

Be smart about investing in your future. Make sure you’re making money before you spend more money. Don’t overextend yourself. Keep adding funds to your financial cushion to make it easier for you to feel secure while you’re pursuing your big vision.

That’s obviously true for entrepreneurs, but it’s also good advice for employees climbing the career ladder of success. Too many people get a taste of the “good life” when they land an excellent promotion, so they start living beyond their means.

Other people

Up until this point, I’ve been sharing barriers that are all about you and issues that are mostly under your control. But, sometimes, you are blocked by other people. They stand between you and your goals.

I could write an entire book about bad bosses, the damage they do, and how to deal with them. We’ve all worked for at least one incompetent manager. Many of us have experienced terrible leaders.

So, if your boss is a barrier between you and your career vision, what are you going to do about it? If you’ve been spending years trying to make it work, but you’re stuck, it’s time to move on. Life is short! Don’t wait too long to make a change that will accelerate your progress.

Of course, bosses aren’t the only people who might be standing between you and your dreams. I’ve talked with clients who’ve suffered from unsupportive friends and loved ones. They’ve put off living the life they want because they didn’t want to disappoint a parent or partner.

However, your life is your life. If someone is blocking you from pursuing the life you want, it’s time for a deep conversation, counseling, or a significant change.

Environment

Finally, sometimes your environment is the barrier holding you back. You could be living somewhere that lacks the opportunities you need to achieve your goals. Your grand vision may not be possible where you live, so you might need to move.

For example, I had to leave the Midwest and move to Silicon Valley to pursue my career as a software designer. In the 90s, we didn’t have the amazing world of remote opportunities available today. I had to change my environment to keep moving ahead.

Years ago, I moved again. My vision of an ideal future was to be surrounded by forests and mountains. So, I made significant changes in my life and career to make that possible.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” ― Jim Rohn

Your environment also includes the people around you. Are they supporting you, encouraging you, and inspiring you to become the best version of yourself? Or, are they holding you back and trying to keep you down?

I know people who had to change their circle of friends and leave bad habits behind to become the person they wanted to be. For example, it’s hard to achieve your dreams when everyone around you wants to party and get drunk every evening.

As James Clear often says, you can design your environment to maximize your odds of success. Don’t let poor environmental conditions be a barrier between you and your dreams.

Take action

At some point, you risk being in eternal planning and preparation mode. Yes, sometimes you do need to eliminate some barriers, close gaps in skills and knowledge, and make necessary changes in your life. But, you also need to take action.

What I’ve noticed in successful people is that they take action. They create success habits. They build accountability systems and develop a network of people to advise and support them.

They don’t wait until they have all the answers. They don’t wait for perfect timing.

So, identify your blocks and barriers and do something about them. Taking action can be as simple as creating a plan and defining a timeline for eliminating them.

* How can you find a more supportive boss?

* How can you increase your income?

* Can you add passive income sources?

* Can you create a budget to reduce your expenses and give yourself more financial breathing room?

* What would it take to improve your environment and professional circle of peers?

Deal with your list of barriers as well as you can. Make progress in some way every day. But, always keep moving forward.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my book with you this year! Subscribe now to read the draft chapters as I complete them.

Thank you for reading Invincible Career®. This post is public so feel free to share it.

By the way, there is a great way you can support my work without spending any money on a premium subscription:

📣 Recommending my newsletter on social media! 📣 

It only takes a few seconds, and it helps grow my business so I can continue making time to write it.

I’ll even provide some copy and paste text to make it easy to share on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Thanks in advance!

I've really been enjoying the Invincible Career newsletter by Larry Cornett (@cornett). If you want to get ahead at work and be happier in your job, but you aren’t subscribed yet, you’re missing out.

https://newsletter.invinciblecareer.com

Larry Cornett is a leadership coach and business advisor who hosts a private mastermind community for ambitious professionals with weekly challenges, office hours, and confidential support. If you’re interested in starting your own business or side hustle someday (or accelerating an existing one), check out his “Employee to Solopreneur” course (launching later this year).

Larry lives in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with his wife and children, and a gigantic Great Dane. He does his best to share advice to help others take complete control of their work and life. He’s also on Twitter @cornett.