subject: Self Help For Your Career [print this page] Times changeTimes change. Demands are increasing. Knowledge is becoming obsolete more rapidly. Learning and successfully applying new knowledge is becoming more essential.
Where should you learn the new knowledge you need to apply to advance your career?
Here's my advice: Become your best source of high-payoff information from making improvements.
Let me explain. You can read a new survey every week describing where labor shortages are largest and employee incomes are expected to increase the most. However, that information takes you only so far. You still have to assess whether you like to do a certain kind of work and how effective you are at it.
Once you determine what you want to do, you may feel that you are too busy and tired to add the needed knowledge and to gain the required skill to make improvements.
If you are already highly efficient at what you are doing now, learning more will require dropping some of your current activities. However, if you aren't as efficient as you might be in accomplishing what's most important, more efficiency can help free enough time to improve your knowledge and skills.
How can you gain a lot of efficiency in current activities? Start by carving out an hour a week to learn a better way to perform essential tasks. Over 20 years you will gain over 1,000 hours to do other activities that are highly useful or desirable. Such a time saving is equal to six months of full-time work.
Surely you could spare a little time now to make such a large improvement, even if the gain seems small when viewed on a weekly basis.
I suggest you begin by developing a self-help toolkit to help you free some time now . . . so that you can gain even more free time in the future. Let me describe what should go into your self-help toolkit.
Here's your first suggested self-help tool: Keep track of how you spend all of your time by activity over two weeks. When you add up the time spent for each activity, you'll be shocked by how much time you spent on some low-priority activities that you don't care much about.
After you eliminate or greatly reduce time allocated to low-priority activities, spend the time you save gaining effectiveness and learning how to reduce future time required for important activities, including career-improvement learning and skill development.
How can you make such an advance? Here's a suggestion for your second self-help tool: Learn how to accomplish your highest-priority and career-improvement activities with 1/20th the time, effort, and expense through the 2,000 percent solution process. With knowledge of this process, you can achieve such breakthrough efficiency in almost every aspect of your work life.
Here's a final self-help tool suggestion: Produce more benefits from everything you do in ways that will greatly multiply your resources. When you combine the right 2,000 percent solutions, such multiplied resources are a cinch to create.
Here's an example of applying the 2,000 percent solution process to gain more resources: Reduce the time and cost of essential learning, and you'll learn and accomplish a lot more. In time, you'll be able to earn much more per hour. Take such extra earnings and invest them well into your next career enhancements, and even greater exponential gains in resources and effectiveness will be yours.
Let's look at a real example to help bring these points to life for you. Dr. Mark Bura is a physician whose talents extend well beyond healing people's bodies. He can also assess medical organizations to diagnose how they can help themselves to accomplish more for their patients by applying their resources more effectively.
Through dedicated research and testing, he developed a measurement method and training program that enabled hospitals and health-care practices to see how they could become more efficient and easily make the necessary changes. He anticipated that it would take most of the rest of his career to apply what he had learned to all the healthcare institutions he was dedicated to assisting in East Africa.
Rather than be satisfied with that valuable solution, Dr. Bura decided to make an investment in upgrading his skills and career through adding the three self-improvement tools (measuring how his time is spent, reallocating time to more valuable activities, and expanding resources through creating 2,000 percent solutions).
To better equip himself for career advancement, he earned a Doctor of Business Administration degree from Rushmore University through studies that focused, in part, on speeding the application of his measurement method and training program.
By learning how to assess and make better use of his time, Dr. Bura was able to earn this second doctorate while still working full time at his day job. After freeing up some time to study, he soon learned the 2,000 percent solution process and then quickly uncovered a way to roll out his efficiency innovations 20 times faster while spending no more time, money, and effort to do so.
As a result, he freed up a lot of time to develop new skills and innovations.
After several months of developing powerful new improvement methods, Dr. Bura set up a consulting business to apply his new knowledge and skills to even more difficult and significant health care issues in East Africa. He was soon fully occupied as a consultant, feeling energized by the exciting assignments he gained as well as by the increased income his family was enjoying.
I asked him to describe the key lessons from his success that you should apply to your career. Here is what he said:
"I advise anyone taking a self-improvement-oriented program like mine to focus on his or her future ambitions and plans as realistically as possible. Such a person is likely to see ripe fruits from this labor, just as I do now. However, the continuing challenge is to keep abreast of all the most important developments in the subjects on which his or her career depends. I recommend that everyone add relevant skills for self help in tracking and grasping those developments."
As I thought about Dr. Bura's advice, I was reminded of the first U.S. energy crisis, the one that occurred in the 1970s following the oil embargo. At the time, my neighbors and I lived on wooded lots and our homes had fireplaces. Wanting to save some money on rapidly rising heating costs, we each bought a small chain saw and began downing trees, cutting up limbs and tree trunks, and splitting the larger logs by pounding iron wedges with sledge hammers.
By the fourth month, I was the only one in the neighborhood who continued.
What was the difference? I learned how to quickly sharpen my chain saw so it would work rapidly and efficiently. My neighbors just gave up in disgust as their saws became duller and duller until the saws would barely cut balsa wood (something that's a lot easier to cut than our hard-fibered oak trees were).
I spent about five minutes before each cutting session at my back yard wood lot sharpening my chain saw. And that self-help made all the difference.
You, too, can outperform others in the same way after you learn how to repeatedly and easily sharpen your dullest skills where they are most needed to expand your effectiveness and to increase your career opportunities.
