The Cornerstone Of Being Successful: Not Getting Too Used To
Anything.
by Joan Marques
Published on this site: April 12th, 2005 - See
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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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