There’s No Easy Road – But Then That Wouldn’t Be Any Fun Anyway, Would It?

I read this quote recently: "Successful men and women find out what it's going to cost to make their dream come true then they find a way to make it happen, they don't complain about the work it takes to achieve their dreams."

It really got me thinking about attitudes I hear regarding career change:

‘It's such hard work'

‘It takes so long - maybe it's just easier to stick with what I have'

‘I'm too old anyway, what's the point'

Hearing these moans makes me think of another one of my favourite quotes:

"The tragedy of life is not death, rather, it is what we allow to die within us while we live." - Norman Cousins

Why should it be a piece of cake?  I know that if you are in a job you hate, it'd be great to have a new job you love like yesterday.  But something's taken you to the job you hate, so something's going to have to take you out of it.  You have two choices: you can either continue drifting (the most likely scenario if you are in a job you aren't too keen on) or you can take a proactive navigating approach to what you do.  But navigating is harder work than drifting - but, I think, it's also a lot more fun.  You get to learn about yourself, you get to explore a variety of options, you get to meet new people and find out about what they do and how they do it, you get to imagine yourself in various roles, you get to decide what's right for you and then you get to do the work to get you there.  And yet, there's SO many people who give up before they've even started.

I recently read that when Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen compiled their first Chicken Soup for the Soul book, 140 publishers rejected their proposal!   They so much believed in what they were doing that they profiled it in every newspaper and radio show that would have them for a year, before a small publisher stepped up and said: we'll take you on.  The book series has become one of the best selling books of our time with over 100 million copies sold.  But had these gentlemen not persevered, it would be a dusty manuscript somewhere in their archives.

To have such conviction, I believe requires a solid foundation.  And all the points I brought up earlier around navigating, are steps to having that foundation.  Take your navigation work seriously and it'll get easier and trust me, it'll be enjoyable.  Try and skip steps and get too impatient and you're far more likely to go off course at some point. 

So how do you make the present enjoyable whilst you are doing your navigating work.  In last week's column I talked about taking small steps.  Most career changes don't happen overnight, they are an amalgamation of many hundreds, sometimes thousands, of small actions that from the outside look like a giant leap.  So what small steps can you already start taking in your current job/situation to get your navigation work started?