Life Lessons in Fast Strategies for Career Success

Normally, I don’t discuss failure as a strategy in career success.

But I will tell you that as a professional, being able to fail fast and fail cheap is the saving grace of my own career success. And I teach my mentees how to do the same.

I have four specific strategies that I use to fail fast and fail cheap. 

First, one costly mistake that I've made in my career that has prevented me from being successful is waiting.

I think too often we kind of wait and stall in our career, and it causes us to fail. The goal is to get in early. The better strategy is to be an early adopter, to get in on the ground floor, and to make the decision early—to not wait. 

Second, I only do things that I'm an expert in, and I outsource or delegate everything else.

Your work should primarily be focused on your areas of expertise, the things that you're really good at, and that align with your strengths. If you find yourself doing a lot of work, spending a lot of time doing things that you're not actually good at, that's a waste of time. And that's a costly mistake.

You can’t keep trying to be your own pseudo career coach, trying to coach yourself through your career development. You think, ‘let me Google a resume template and let me network and let me read this book about advancing my career instead of recognizing that I am not a career coach and I need to hire somebody to help me.’ So the cheap and fast strategy that you want to apply there is investing in yourself through expert-level mentorship.

Strategy number three is to fail forward and to fail fast.

We kind of get stuck in this idea that like, I got to be a perfectionist. We're not actually perfectionists. We do a lot of imperfect things all the time. One of the things that my mentor always tells me is that you've survived every setback in your life up to this point. 
So whenever you go out to do something, whenever you go out to try something, whenever you go out to invest in yourself in the off chance that you fail—which is unlikely because you're a good decision maker, right? But in the off chance that you fail, you're going to fail forward because you've rebounded from everything you've experienced in your life up to this point.

Finally, share your failures in brave and public spaces.

The sooner you share that mistake, that failure, publicly, the sooner you can release the shame that's attached to it and the sooner you can move forward to career success. Too often we hang on to the shame, the fear, and the embarrassment that happened to us in our careers, and then we feel we can never move on from it.

I want to invite you to release that shame and not hold on to it. I'm here to commiserate. I'm here to help you develop a plan to move forward. You don't have to stay stuck where you are.

So, let’s recap my four strategies for cheap and fast ways to advance your career. Be an early adopter only. Do the things that you're good at and outsource everything else. Fail forward and fail fast, and then share your failures in brave and public spaces.

If this resonates with you, I want to invite you on a call with me this week. 📲

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