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The Cornerstone Of Being Successful: Not Getting Too Used To Anything.

by Joan Marques

Published on this site: April 12th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

This morning I presented my book "The Global Village" to my students in a management course, and made sure to specifically stress the issue of adapting a global mindset, even at the individual level. I emphasized in my presentation the truly unfortunate reality of too many members of today's workforce being afraid of losing their jobs for whatever reason. Yet, stressed I further, even more unfortunate is the fact that losing one's job is not so unthinkable anymore, since the global outsourcing trend has been fully set in motion, and even those positions that were considered safe a number of years ago are now being exported to areas where the hourly rate is lower, yet the quality of delivery similar, or even better.

I explained to my students that the driving motive for me to write "The Global Village" was exactly this atmosphere of fear that strangles today's working generation. The confrontation with abrupt obsoleteness of one's skills is too vividly present. And too many people just remain in fear without really doing anything about it. Why? Because they consider themselves helpless. I see many friends and colleagues clinging to their job as if it were their life. It is almost as if they cannot envision life beyond their current job: they define themselves by their position, and they keep forgetting that positions come and go all the time.

It is further precisely because of this error of motionless blind-staring on a position, which prevents people from grabbing the best opportunities in their lives: they dwell on where and what they are, and refrain from looking around and educating themselves in formal and informal ways on new trends in- and outside of their interest area. They refrain from considering alternatives, and keep leaning with all their weight on this one-legged chair that may give up on them anytime. They expect loyalty, while loyalty is long dead and buried in today's rapidly changing business environment.

Although the above may sound familiar and quite simply understandable, it remains a mistake that too many people continue to make. The victims outnumber the conquerors: the losers outnumber the winners. And maybe that is how it is supposed to be. But who said that YOU should be one of the masses? Who said that YOU should be a victim and not a conqueror?

In "The Global Village" a young woman, Harmonia, establishes a small, but globally operating venture with some friends, who are scattered all over the globe. And each of these friends runs a unit of the company in their own native country, while they make it a point to continuously meet in a different location of the world for their monthly meeting sessions. The philosophy behind these widespread production units and meeting locations? Familiarizing themselves with each ther's and new environments: learning in the broadest sense of the word, en continuously adapting to new trends and changing circumstances. This woman, who is only in her twenties in the year 2020, has learned from her great-grandfather from a very young age on that fear is her greatest enemy, and that hard work, creativity, adaptation and accessibility are the ways to go and grow. She learned that one of the ground rules of success is being able to make it everywhere: not being confined to one place or another, but to see the world as your home so that, when the time for changing or moving arrives, devastation remains out of sight.

And think of it: analyze the lives of the most successful people in the world throughout centuries: most of them had multiple careers; most of them had multiple failures in their name; and all of them were adaptive to change. They did not cling too much or too long to anything. They realized that everything is a passing station, even life.

The cornerstone of being successful is not getting too used to anything: not spasmodically holding on to old habits or strategies, for they become outdated, but moving on without regrets; considering the lessons learned from past ventures, and applying those to new endeavors: Time and again. Time and again.

Joan Marques emigrated from Suriname, South America, to California, U.S., in 1998. She holds a doctorate in Organizational Leadership, a Master's in Business Administration, and is currently a university instructor in Business and Management in Burbank, California. Look for her books "Empower the Leader in You" and "The Global Village" in bookstores online or on her website: http://www.joanmarques.com

 
 
     

 
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