Learn by Doing

Explore jobs that interest you and ask yourself how do my skills and interests match up with these jobs?

• Where are the gaps?
• What options do I have to gain these skills or qualify for these jobs?
• What skills do I need?
• Where is the work?

You will now have a list of preferred jobs and/or learning options.

Ask yourself:

• What are my best work/training options?
• How do they match with my skills, interests and values?
• How do they fit with the current jobs market? How do they fit with my current situation and responsibilities?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of each option?
• What will help and what will hinder me?What can I do about it?

• Current job or role: This is what you are doing right now.
• Career Goals and Dreams: List your short-term (6-9 months) and longer-term (1-3 years) career goals and dreams.
• Your Big Why: Know why you want to do the work. 
• Core Values: What are your top 3-5 core values that you are not willing to compromise?
• Limits and Boundaries: What is it that you are not willing to do? Whom do you not want to work with?
• Top Strengths: A strength is a combination of your talents and skills.
• Desired Strengths: These are the gaps you want to fill in your skills and talents. 
• Education investment in Yourself: Are you going to conferences, joining a master-mind group, or hiring a coach?
• Execution Strategies: For instance, you may start a business, a side-hustle, a website.
• Role Models
• Ideal Client or Company: It is critical to know whom you want to serve with your work.
• Ideal Professional Self: A 25-word exercise where you describe your ideal professional self. 

Old age typically brings medical problems and increased healthcare expenses.

Living out your retirement years in comfort while also covering your medical expenses may turn out to be a burden too large to bear.

Without a well-planned retirement nest egg, you may be forced to liquidate your assets in order to cover your expenses during your retirement years.

Here are Five Steps that can create your career:

1. Analyzing yourself.

2. Identify your industry

3. Improve your basic, universal skills

4. Start from Scratch

5. Continuous Self-Development

When you analyze yourself, instead of pondering over what you are not good at, find out your strengths and sharpen them, turning a good skill into excellence.

1. Break down your big goals into daily tasks. You can't add "Get in shape" to your daily to-do list, but you can add "spend 30 minutes on my bike."
2. Consider your week as a whole. You likely have multiple goals. Some goals benefit from daily activity, while working towards others a few times a week can create momentum.
3. Add your have-to-do tasks last. We often fill our to-do lists with have-to-do tasks that crowd the whole day. Adding it last forces you to fit your have-to-do tasks around your goal tasks.

Many of us start our mornings with dozens of things we need to get done, but later realize that we haven't crossed any of them off our lists. We did get stuff done, but none of the things we planned.

A balm against hectic days that pass without progress is to choose a single activity to prioritize and protect in your calendar. If you struggle to select your top priority, ask yourself, when you look back on your day, what do you want the highlight to be? That's your priority.

Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. 

Time. A typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time.

Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all your non-career hours.

Impact. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.

Identity. We tell people about our careers by telling them what we are.

• Create a full inventory of expenses in front of you: Categorize them into fixed and variable; urgent and non-urgent; necessities and luxury; avoidable and unavoidable.
• You can create a hierarchy of needs and decide which one’s to address first. It’s all about prioritizing. 
• Accept that you have limited resources and unlimited wants. But you have to manage your resources. The sooner you accept this fact, the better you can control your impulses towards avoidable expenditures.

It’s a statement wherein you can jot down your assets and liabilities.

• Pull together your bank statements and other proofs of the liabilities
• List down your assets like the bank balance, all investments, home value, and value of other assets.
• Take a sum of all the assets to arrive at the total value of your assets.
• List down your liabilities the (car loan, home loan, credit card balances etc.)
• The sum of all the liabilities will show the value of the money you owe.
• When you subtract the value of liabilities from assets, you get your Net Worth.
  

The "Where do you see yourself in 5 years" question is about the interviewer wanting to see if you can draw a straight line from the future back to the present. A two-part answer works well.

• " I want this particular job..." reinforces your desire for the position.
• In part two, explain your future plans "... because it will help ..."

You should answer the question honestly, but your answer should also reflect the research you put into the company.

Find out what training programs are offered through the firm while holding down your full-time job. Mention your goal to grow your skills, and you'll impress your interviewer with your future-focused desires.

Doing well in your career requires there factors:

• Being capable of doing your work well. This requires knowledge: For example, if you’re a lawyer, you need to have a rich knowledge of the law.
• Meta-knowledge, or knowledge about how your career works. For example, knowing which skills matter and how to best demonstrate your talent in your particular industry.

The main route to meta-knowledge is by doing research. And it involves studying people, more than books or in a particular school.

But avoid simply asking people for advice. When you ask for advice, you’ll often get vague, unhelpful answers. Instead, you need to observe what the people that are successful in your field are doing.