Totally self-responsible people look upon themselves as
self-employed. They see themselves as the president of their own
personal services corporation. They realize that no matter who
signs their paycheck, in the final analysis they work for
themselves. Because they have this attitude of self-employment,
they take a strategic approach to their work.
The essential element in strategic planning for a corporation or
a business entity is the concept of “return on equity.” All
business planning is aimed at organizing and reorganizing the
resources of the business in such a way as to increase the
financial returns to
the business owners. It is to increase the quantity of output
relative to the quantity of input. It is to focus on areas of
high profitability and return and, simultaneously, to withdraw
resources from areas of low profitability and return. Companies
that do this effectively in a rapidly changing environment are
the ones that survive and prosper. Companies that fail to do
this form of strategic analysis are those that fall behind and
often disappear.
To achieve everything you are capable of achieving as a person,
you also must become a skilled strategic planner with regard to
your life and work. But instead of aiming to increase your
return on equity, your goal is to increase your return on
energy.
Most people in America start off with little more than their
ability to work. More than 80 percent of the millionaires in
America started with nothing. Most people have been broke, or
nearly broke, several times during their young-adult years. But
the ones who eventually get ahead are those who do certain
things in certain ways, and those actions set them apart from
the masses. Perhaps the most important thing they do,
consciously or unconsciously, is to look at themselves
strategically, thinking about how they can better use themselves
in the marketplace, how they can best capitalize on their
strengths and abilities to increase their returns to themselves
and their families.
Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability, your
ability to earn money. Properly applied to the marketplace, it’s
like a pump. By exploiting your earning ability, you can pump
tens of thousands of dollars a year into your pocket. All your
knowledge, education, skills and experience contribute toward
your earning ability, your ability to get results for which
someone will pay good money.
And your earning ability is like farmland. If you don’t take
excellent care of it, if you don’t fertilize it and cultivate it
and water it on a regular basis, it soon loses its ability to
produce the kind of harvest that you desire. Successful men and
women are those who are extremely aware of the importance and
value of their earning ability, and they work every day to keep
it growing and current with the demands of the marketplace.
One of the greatest responsibilities in life is to identify,
develop and maintain an important marketable skill. It is to
become very good at doing something for which there is a strong
market demand.
In corporate strategy, we call this the development of a
“competitive advantage.” For a company, a competitive advantage
is defined as an area of excellence in producing a product or
service that gives the company a distinct edge over its
competition.
In capitalizing on your strengths, as the president of your own
personal services corporation, you also must have a clear
competitive advantage. You also must have an area of excellence.
You must do something that makes you different from and better
than your competitors. Your ability to identify and develop this
competitive advantage is the most important thing you do in the
world of work. It’s the key to maintaining your earning ability.
It’s the foundation of your financial success. Without it,
you’re simply a pawn in a rapidly changing environment. But with
a distinct competitive advantage, based on your strengths and
abilities, you can write your own ticket. You can take charge of
your own life. You can always get a job. And the more distinct
your competitive advantage, the more money you can earn and the
more places in which you can earn it.
There are four keys to the strategic marketing of yourself and
your services. These are applicable to huge companies such as
General Motors, to candidates running for election and to
individuals who want to accomplish the very most in the very
shortest time. The first of these four keys is specialization.
No one can be all things to all people. A “jack-of-all-trades”
also is a “master of none.” That career path usually leads to a
dead end. Specialization is the key. Men and women who are
successful have a series of general skills, but they also have
one or two areas where they have developed the ability to
perform in an outstanding manner.
Your decision about how, where, when and why you are going to
specialize in a particular area of endeavor is perhaps the most
important decision you will ever make in your career. It was
well said that if you don’t think about the future, you can’t
have one. The major reason why so many people are finding their
jobs eliminated and finding themselves unemployed for long
periods of time is because they didn’t look down the road of
life far enough and prepare themselves well enough for the time
when their current jobs would expire. They suddenly found
themselves out of gas on a lonely road, facing a long walk back
to regular and well-paying employment. Don’t let this happen to
you.
In determining your area of specialization, put your current job
aside for the moment, and take the time to look deeply into
yourself. Analyze yourself from every point of view. Rise above
yourself, and look at your lifetime of activities and
accomplishments in determining what your area of specialization
could be or should be.
And by the way, you might be doing exactly the right job for you
at this moment. You already might be capitalizing on all your
strengths, and your current work might be ideally suited to your
likes and dislikes, to your temperament and your personality.
Nevertheless, you owe it to yourself to be continually expanding
the scope of your vision and looking toward the future to see
where you might want to be going in the months and years ahead.
Remember, the best way to predict the future is to create it.
You possess special talents and abilities that make you unique,
different from anyone else who has ever lived. The odds of there
being another person just like you are more than 50 billion to
one. Your remarkable and unusual combination of education,
experience, knowledge, problems, successes, difficulties and
challenges, and your way of looking at and reacting to life,
make you extraordinary. You have within you potential
competencies and attributes that can enable you to accomplish
virtually anything you want in life. Even if you lived for
another 100 years, it would not be enough time for you to plumb
the depths of your potential. You will never be able to use more
than a small part of your inborn abilities. Your main job is to
decide which of your talents you’re going to exploit and develop
to their highest and best possible use right now.
So, what is your area of excellence? What are you especially
good at right now? If things continue as they are, what are you
likely to be good at in the future-say one or two or even five
years from now? Is this a marketable skill with a growing
demand, or is your field changing in such a way that you are
going to have to change as well if you want to keep up with it?
Looking into the future, what could be your area of excellence
if you were to go to work on yourself and your abilities? What
should be your area of excellence if you want to rise to the top
of your field, make an excellent living and take complete
control of your financial future?
When I was 22, I answered an advertisement for a copywriter for
an advertising agency. As it happened, I had failed high-school
English, and I really had no idea what a copywriter did. I
remember the executive who interviewed me and how nice he was at
pointing out that I wasn’t at all qualified for the job.
But something happened to me in the course of the interview
process. The more I thought about it, the more I thought how
much I would like to write advertising. Having been turned down
flat during my first interview, I decided to learn more about
the field.
I went to the city library and began to check out and read books
on advertising and copywriting. Over the next six months, while
I worked in a department store, I spent many hours devouring
them. At the same time, I applied for copywriting jobs to
advertising agencies in the city. I started with the small
agencies first. When they turned me down, I asked them why they
did so. What was wrong with my application? What did I need to
learn more about? What books would they recommend? And to this
day, I remember that virtually everyone I spoke with was helpful
to me.
By the end of six months, I had read every book on advertising
and copywriting in the library and applied to every agency in
the city, working up from the smallest agency to the very
largest in the country. And by the time I had reached that
level, I was ready. I was offered jobs as a junior copywriter by
both the number-one and number-two agencies in the country. I
took the job with the number-one agency and was very successful
in a short period of time.
The point of this story is that you can become almost anything
you need to become, in order to accomplish almost anything you
want to accomplish, if you simply decide what it is and then
learn what you need to learn. This is such an obvious fact that
most people miss it completely.
Some years later, I decided that I wanted to get into
real-estate development. Again, I went to the library and began
checking out and reading all the books on real-estate
development. At the time, I had no money, no contacts and no
knowledge of the industry. But I knew the great secret: I could
learn what I needed to learn so that I could do what I wanted to
do.
Within 12 months, I had tied up a piece of property with a $100
deposit and a 30-day option. I put together a proposal for a
shopping center, and I tentatively arranged for major anchor
tenants and several minor tenants that together took up 85
percent of the square footage I had proposed. Then I sold 75
percent of the entire package to a major development company in
exchange for the company’s putting up all the cash and providing
me with the resources and people I needed to manage the
construction of the shopping center and the completion of the
leasing. Virtually everything that I did I had learned from
books written by real-estate experts, books on the shelves of
the local library.
As you might have noticed, the fields of advertising and
copywriting and real-estate development are very different. But
these incidents, and every business situation I have been in
over the years, had one element in common. Success in each area
was based on the decision, first, to specialize in that area
and, second, to be extremely knowledgeable in that area so that
I could do a good job.
In looking at your current and past experiences for an area of
specialization, one of the most important questions to ask
yourself is, “What activities have been most responsible for my
success in life to date?” How did you get from where you were to
where you are today? What talents and abilities seemed to come
easily to you? What things do you do well that seem to be
difficult for most other people? What things do you most enjoy
doing? What things do you find most intrinsically motivating?
What things make you happy when you are doing them?
In capitalizing on your strengths, your level of interest,
excitement and enthusiasm about the particular job or activity
is a key factor. You’ll always do best and make the most money
in a field that you really enjoy. It will be an area that you
like to think about and talk about and read about and learn
about. Successful people love what they do, and they can hardly
wait to get to it each day. Doing their work makes them happy,
and the happier they are, the more enthusiastically they do it,
and the better they do it as well.
In capitalizing on your strengths, the second key is
differentiation. You must decide what you’re going to do to be
not only different but also better than your competitors in the
field. Remember, you have to be good in only one specific area
to move ahead of the pack. And you must decide what that area
should be.
The third strategic principle in capitalizing on your strengths
is segmentation. You have to look at the marketplace and
determine where you can best apply yourself, with your unique
talents and abilities, to give yourself the highest possible
return on energy expended. What customers, companies, markets,
can best utilize your special talents and offer you the most in
terms of financial rewards and future opportunities?
The final key to personal strategic planning is concentration.
Once you have decided the area in which you are going to
specialize, how you are going to differentiate yourself, and
where in the marketplace you can best apply your strengths, your
final job is to concentrate all of your energy on becoming
excellent there. The marketplace pays extraordinary rewards only
for extraordinary performance.
About Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy is a leading
authority on personal and business success. As Chairman and CEO
of
Brian Tracy International, he is the best-selling
author of 17 books and over 300 audio and video learning
programs. Copyright © 2001 Brian Tracy International. All Rights
Reserved.
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