4 Expert Tips From 4 Career Development Gurus

How do I sum up the wisdom of four talented career development gurus in one blog post? Impossible! But I will certainly try. This past week here on the blog I mentioned these four individuals, Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Tim Ferriss and David Allen, so I thought it was time for a recap on these people who made a huge impact, and still do, on my career. Below are four of the bigger concepts these guys cover:

Anthony Robbins: Consistent Focus, Repetition and Immediate Actions
Tony always says that “repetition is the mother of skill”, which means the more and more you do something, the better you get at it. Doing is the key, the more you actually put something into practice, the better and better you become. He will be the first person to tell you that all the self development in the world will do nothing until you actually start putting the methods to use. Focus is important as well, whatever you focus on consistently, starts to come to fruition. A lot of people spread their focus too wide or it’s constantly changing. He also talks about immediate actions. Once you set a plan in place, you must take a step or two immediately towards the goal. No delay. You cannot plan to work on it next week, the first steps must happen right away to create momentum.

Stephen Covey: Find Your Voice and Inspire Others To Find Theirs
He wrote the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, and the quote above is actually the 8th Habit, from the book of the same name. Find what you truly love to do, find what your career path should be. This takes lots of soul-searching and exploring, and it often takes making a move, but it must be done. The next step is to inspire others, help them find out what they want to do. Help can be in many forms. The more you help others with their dreams, the more you will see your own dreams come to fruition. He also talks about sharpening the saw, keeping your skills top notch as well as focusing on what matter most to you, not urgent items pushed on you by others.

Tim Ferriss: Get Rid of the Clutter, Get Help and Focus on the Important
Tim says in his book the 4-Hour Work Week that when you work 9 to 5 for years (or decades) and then branch off on your own, you still retain all the same methods, even if they don’t work. You still get up and work at 9am (even though nighttime may be your most productive) and you still work within the 8 hour (and more) grid. Conform your new business to you, not to dated office methods. Use virtual assistants and delegate your workflow of mundane items. Stop taking in info from the web all day, go on an info-fast, most of that info is quickly dated and not relevant to your empire. Most importantly, don’t work 8 hours just doing busy work if you don’t have work, scale back and focus on what matters.

David Allen: Get Things Done by Collecting All Your Info, Sorting, Reviewing and Doing
David Allen created GTD (Getting Things Done) and it’s a great system that actually can be explained fairly briefly. Find a system, electronic or paper, to collect all your thoughts, ideas, tasks, goals and projects. All of them must be captured/collected or else your mind will keep thinking about them. Next is to process them, stuff that can be done in 2 minutes, just do them, things that need to be scheduled for a certain time or location, track them. Work through these 5 steps: Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do. Put items into these 6 areas of focus: Current Actions, Current Projects, Areas of Responsibility, Yearly Goals, 5 Year Vision and Life Goals.

Saying the above items are the tip of the iceberg is an understatement. Google them all, read what they have to say, get their books and products. Check out their blogs. Even if you just start with one, most anything by any of these four will be highly enlightening and will definitely help you ramp up your career to where you want it to be.

Google: Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Tim Ferriss and David Allen

Websites: Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Tim Ferriss and David Allen

Of course these are my interpretations of my favorites, do you have any favorite methods? Or favorite authors?

Media Artist Secrets TV #2 – Creative Career and Being Shameless

Franklin McMahon Show #2 – Creative Career And Being Shameless..this episode is about being OK with being shameless, not being humble and ramping up your creative career by being confident.

Are you shameless? Leave a comment!

You can also watch the show in HD on YouTube or on Facebook (podcast version coming soon)

This show is all about the business of being creative, advancing your creative career and ramping up your empire.

Each episode will feature creative career development advice and inspiration, cool guests, new thoughts and ideas. Join the conversation by leaving a comment, let me know what you think.

I will also be looking for guests to interview in the coming weeks, if you are interested, please leave a comment with your links. The show will be a work in progress, but I plan on making it informative and fun.

Thanks for checking it out.

http://www.FranklinMcMahon.com
http://www.fmstudio.com

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http://www.Twitter.com/FranklinMcMahon

Are You Promoting Your Worst Skills In Your Creative Career?

I’ve been talking to people about this a lot lately, it’s worth discussing here. I always recommend that if you have a lack of talent in a particular area, you should get help, either someone to help you or hire someone to do it for you. I’ll give you an example. You have a product or service you want to sell, you have worked hard to make it really compelling, because it is your specialty. Of course you need to have a website and make sure you come up in search results. But doing SEO and web design is not exactly your talent. You are not a designer. So rather than get someone who knows what they are doing, you design the website yourself. It’s OK, design is not good, it does not function too well, but hey at least it’s something up there.

You’ve just displayed your lack of talent in an area and displayed it for the world to see. You are using this to try to promote your real passion and real talent. You then try to figure out why the results are not what you expected.

Say you have great ideas, you want to star in your own show, it could be a video show on the web, a podcast, a weekly presentation. You have the talent, drive and ideas to really light up a program. But producing costs money, so you handle the production yourself. You get an old camcorder, so-so microphone, attempt to edit, etc. You are not too good at it, but it’s good enough. Once again you are promoting and displaying what you are not good at for the world to see, in an effort to get people interested in what you are really good at or passionate about.

You do this project after project. You rinse. You repeat.

Now I am all about learning, don’t get me wrong. Getting into new areas and developing new talents is great. This is not what this is about. It is about having a genuine talent and then completely surrounding it with a subpar presentation. The problem is most of the audience will stop at the presentation. If something is not well produced, not pleasing graphically, hard to get into or seems more amateur, people will immediately judge it as less then important. And this is the kiss of death as you launch anything. It could produce a path of project after project not going anywhere. You’ll get hearty thumbs up from your friends, but the real audience that matters may quickly turn away.

You are trying unbelievably hard at something you are not good at and getting little to no results.

What also happens is when you struggle with the presentation, you’ll get a bigger sense of accomplishment when you are done, because it will be quite an achievement for you. Because it is so tough and took so long. This however will not thrill the masses. Ironically what you have spent hours and sleepless nights over will seem amateurish to a savvy audience, they will think you whipped it up in a few minutes. Why? Because it is not what you are good at.

The solution is remarkably easy though, so have faith! Get others involved who have the talents you lack. It’s no secret to surround yourself with others who are more talented then you to make anything a success. A lot of people do the opposite though, surround themselves with people less talented. Volunteers with free time. Think of your career like a boat. A ton of people without skills you direct will make the boat heavy and likely to sink. A large crew of talented boaters will make your project, I mean your boat, go faster and run efficiently.

Vanity stops us from getting people on board more talented than us because we feel threatened. We want to be the top dog. Huge mistake.

Really start to think about getting some great people to help you produce. Whatever you are doing, get a person who is an excellent delivery person. You have the talent and skills and message, but get great people to help you bring it to fruition, bring it to the masses.

And also get creative on how you collaborate with these people. It is not all about money, although I always recommend hiring people to help you grow your empire because it just helps it grow faster. It can be about someone volunteering or working out a trade or anything really, just getting that talented person on your team.

Look at your current projects. Look at the part you are least good at, the part you always struggle with and are least happy with. Or the part you have never started, because you lacked the talent. The part just sitting there for months and years. How can you get someone to work on that part while you focus on the areas you really excel at?

How can you grow your empire faster by working with others who have the skills you lack?