We succeed, and we fail.
We celebrate victories and struggle with heartbreak.
Along the way, life teaches us lessons, sometimes gently, sometimes the hard way. The question is whether we learn from them and share what we’ve learned with others.
What knowledge or advice would you have liked to know at the start of your career that you know now?
If you could list a dozen of the most important truths for your younger self, what would you include?
What would you do with your list?
My challenge to you is to follow my lead and share it with as many people as possible. This is my list.
Always keep your integrity.
If I could only have one character trait, integrity would be my first choice: in many ways, I believe it is the one from which all other traits flow. Keeping your integrity doesn’t mean that you don’t ever compromise. Compromise is an important part of life, and each day compromises happen, and they are an important part of building “win/win” situations. You will experience situations throughout your life and career that you will know are wrong: what you do, even if no one will ever know except yourself, defines who you are and your reputation.
Define what success looks like.
Why are you doing what you do? What is the goal your employer is seeking? What direction is the right way? Too often we become locked into traditional ways of doing things. My challenge to you is to always look critically at everything, challenge convention, not to be difficult, but to look for better and more efficient ways of growing and doing everything.
Before you spend years working toward success, make sure you’re pursuing your own definition of it. Remember that your definition may change as you learn more about yourself, the people around you, and how much of life is shaped by circumstances you never anticipated.
You will fail (usually the first time).
We are conditioned that failure is bad and often it is accompanied by shame, stigma, and trauma. Failure when learning new things should instead be expected, encouraged, and used as part of a learning process. Whether at work, in our personal lives, or anywhere else, I believe that if we changed our perspective on failure, we would try more things, stretch our expectations, and be likely to be far happier with our accomplishments.
I think I’ve made just about every mistake possible as a leader. Sometimes I still cringe when I remember my first attempts at doing things differently or trying to make something better.
But I’ve also come to appreciate that those mistakes taught me things I might never have learned otherwise. They challenged my assumptions, helped me grow, and made me more understanding of others who are struggling to find their way.
I wouldn’t choose to repeat many of those experiences, but I wouldn’t want to lose what they taught me either.
Align your short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals (As much as you can)
Maslow wasn’t wrong: having enough food, a safe place to live, and enough money to get through today and the next weeks and a few months are short-term goals. Included in those goals are things you will need or want to do today, tomorrow, and maybe the next thirty days to six months.
Your mid-term goals are what you decide you want for yourself in the next year or two. Defining those and keeping them in line can be difficult, depending on the economy and life in general. However, I believe if you can keep those mid-term goals within the same general direction, or imagine an arc of 15 to 20 degrees, where each of your goals lines up roughly with all of your other goals, it may not be a straight line, but each goal connects easily to the next; then you will make it easier to focus on your long-term plans or where you want to be in three to five years, for your long-term goals.
Your circumstances and your goals may or will change; it is totally allowed, but it is still important to have goals and objectives. Write them down and work towards them. Expect setbacks and allow some flexibility, but having a good definition of what success looks like and an evolving plan will always help you reach your destination.
Don’t measure your progress against someone else’s journey. We all start from different places, face different circumstances, and move at different speeds. Instead, ask yourself whether you are learning, growing, and doing something better today than you did yesterday.
Strive to enjoy your life.
This is not a contradiction.
Your goals and destinations are important; however, your journey, what you encounter, and how you travel and interact with people on your path may be even more important and fulfilling than what you achieve.
Take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves and don’t be afraid of changing your goals. Soon enough, life may close doors of opportunity, so as much as possible, choose to experience life both professionally and personally. Your short-, medium-, and long-term goals may not always line up with this, but that is okay: I have learned that different experiences, opportunities, and appropriate breaks may reveal new and better paths to accomplish what you have defined as success.
Often, to be successful, sacrifices may need to be made; sometimes you will have to work harder and longer than most people do. While appreciating that long hours and extra shifts will likely be necessary, balance what you do by taking time to enjoy what you can and realize that you can accomplish more in your career if you are well rested and have a life outside of work.
Few people at the end of their lives will ever wish they had spent more time at the office.
Humility and Empathy.
On your path, there will be certain people who will help you, and you may not even realize it at the time. You will owe them a debt that can only be repaid by helping other people when you have the opportunity. Never take credit that you didn’t earn, and when you do take credit, share it first with those people around you. Part of your duty in life is to leave things better than when you found them, and helping people is a great way to accomplish that.
Make a Difference
When you can, help other people. Donations of time, money, items that you no longer use, and your experiences can make a difference for more people than you realize. Notice those people around you, learn what they are proud of and congratulate them, offer assistance when someone is struggling, notice people living with barriers and ask what you can do, be aware of the systemic biases and micro-aggressions we often don’t see, apply the lessons of intersectionality in everything you do.
Set the example.
Your path to achieving your success can be helped by a multitude of small but purposeful actions. Be early for work, ideally by 10–15 minutes. Give yourself time to get settled and be ready to contribute when your workday begins. Reliability is built through small, consistent actions, and punctuality is one of the easiest ways to demonstrate it.
While you are working, work: it might seem a simplistic statement, but you will notice that many others do not. Volunteer for extra work, and when your organization needs someone to step up, make sure it is you. Ask people politely for help; even if you are in charge, always say thank you. Talk to people and learn about them. At work, eat lunch with other people, not at your desk. When you make a mistake, own it, accept responsibility, and learn from each one; as we have mentioned, few of the things you do will always work perfectly the first time.
Avoid pride, arrogance, and complacency.
Never take your success for granted at any point on your path. Remember to stay committed to doing a good job and to sharing the praise that comes from success. Being successful is seldom the result exclusively of your actions, and always acknowledging and appreciating the help you have received will help you avoid becoming arrogant or overbearing. Being successful is the cumulative effect of consistent and daily effort by you and the people around you.
Always be building relationships.
Your path to success will depend on your efforts as well as on the relationships and connections you forge with those people around you. Find mentors and learn from what they will teach you. Listen to feedback, especially criticisms, and instead of becoming defensive, always ask yourself whether they may be right and thank whoever it was for being willing enough to honestly say what they think you need to hear.
Stay in contact with people and be genuinely interested in their successes and times when they need your understanding and support. Volunteer in your community and find ways to make your community better because of you and the work that you do.
Always be learning and reinventing yourself.
Strive to find 15-30 minutes every day to learn if you can.
Listening to a podcast, reading a book or a magazine, completing e-learning: it doesn’t matter where or how, as long as you are learning new things and finding ways to be better than you were yesterday; they all count. In your career, changes, victories, and setbacks will all happen; you and your accumulated bag of tools will influence your next steps on that path and make you much more resilient.
Not everything is about you.
Every person you meet has a life. They have people and things that are important to them. They have hopes, dreams, problems, and fears. Make sure you appreciate that. My own path improved dramatically when I started trying to understand people and looking at situations from their viewpoints. There will be times that you will need to put their needs ahead of your own in order to do the right thing.
For me, this realization came when I was complaining to a mentor about some negative feedback I had received from someone who reported to me. I was quite convinced that the criticism was unfair.
Instead of agreeing with me, my mentor asked a simple question: “What if they’re right?”
Then he asked me to consider something else. How much courage must it have taken for that person to give me honest feedback, knowing that I was their boss?
I hadn’t looked at it that way.
That conversation changed how I thought about criticism, leadership, and the people around me. It also taught me something uncomfortable about myself. Sometimes the feedback we least want to hear is the feedback we most need to consider.
Not everything needs you to fix it.
I have learned the hard way that many times people will want to talk about a problem or issue. They didn’t want me to solve it; they wanted to talk about it to vent or to think and/or simply to let me know. Learn from me and start to appreciate just how important this is. If you are unsure, ask them what they would like you to do. Trust me on this one especially.
Learn from regret. Don’t live in it.
Regret is a very human emotion, and it is virtually impossible to avoid. However, if you try to make your decisions by first asking, “What are the facts?” then “What are the alternatives?” and then finally, make the best decision you can in the time that you have available. Afterwards, ask yourself, “What did I do right, what did I do wrong, and what would I do differently next time?”
If you always do your best, then regret is easier to handle.
I try to avoid dwelling on regrets because unless someone invents a time machine, all you can do is do your best. Everyone has regrets, and this is not about denying them; however, if you follow this decision-making process and you do your best, no one can ask any more than that.
You will have difficult times. Don’t face them alone.
When, not if, this happens, my advice based on many mistakes is always to seek out help and do everything you can to try and make things better.
This is perhaps the most important lesson I can share with you. Despite all of the plans and good intentions in the world, things are going to go wrong: you will have bad things happen to you, and it is impossible to stay positive 24/7/365. Know that, appreciate that, and recognize this as a truth. Prepare yourself for when that happens. Mentors can help; connections can help and never be too proud to ask for help. Realizing this truth will help make things start to get better.
Looking back, I have come to realize that many of the things I once thought defined success weren’t necessarily the things that mattered most.
Success is not simply about what you achieve. It is about who you become along the way and what difference you make to other people.
Your list of lessons will be different from mine, and that’s a good thing. We’ve travelled different paths, faced different challenges, and learned different things.
Take what you can from my experiences and share what you’ve learned from yours. Mentor someone. Encourage someone who is struggling. Share your victories, your failures, and the lessons they taught you.
You may never know how much your words or actions changed another person’s life.
Make a difference.
Paul.