We all want to achieve our goals, and the difficulty of this varies greatly depending on your career path and where you start. However, I believe that anyone can accomplish anything they put their mind to, as long as they’re persistent and willing to take advice.
It’s important to take this advice from the right people, people like Joe Jedlowski. Joe Jedlowski has built and run multiple highly successful companies and has decades of experience as a CEO.
I talked with him to garner advice that anyone can use to grow their career and achieve their goals, no matter which industry they’re in. He gave me some amazing advice, and I’m incredibly excited to share this advice with you, so let’s take a look!
Define Your Goals
This may seem obvious, but the first thing Joe Jedlowski recommends is defining your career goals. This doesn’t mean thinking about them and keeping them in the back of your mind; it means writing them down.
Write down your long-term goal, as well as your short-term goals. Writing them down will help you understand what you want, why you want them, and your path to obtaining them. If you don’t write them down, it will be much harder to form a concrete plan.
Break your Plans Down
All right, so let’s get to the planning phase. Joe Jedlowski is a huge fan of making lists. He recommends creating daily, monthly, and yearly lists. Use the goals you defined previously to help you create these lists.
He finds it extremely useful to have a document with every day of the week listed out. Below each day, He’ll have a checklist of what he needs to do for that day. He creates this list at the start of the week, every single week. He also revisits this list every couple of days to make sure his needs for the week haven’t changed.
Improvement Mindset
Your mindset should not be focused on winning and losing, success or failure. It should be focused on improvement.
Whether you accomplish a goal or hit a deadline comes second to whether you’ve improved at a specific aspect of your career.
Joe Jedlowski recommends defining an area of life or work you want to get better in and doing everything in your power to improve in that specific area. Once you’ve improved, choose another area, rinse and repeat. After a few years, you’ll be well-rounded and extremely skilled.
Peers and Pros
Who you surround yourself really defines who you are and where you will go. While listening to business podcasts can help, you can create a more significant impact by surrounding yourself with people who motivate and inspire you.
Whether through inspiration or a healthy sense of competition, having peers around you to grow their career is amazing motivation. On top of this, try to find mentors.
Many people are more than willing to share their knowledge and expertise. Some even love it. Ask them for feedback, emulate them, and soak up every piece of advice they’re willing to give.
Re-Define Your Goals
Finally, it’s important to ensure that you’re not working for something you don’t want. Our goals change over time, sometimes subconsciously.
It’s important to take a look at your goals every few months to make sure they’re still exactly what you want. It’s a part of having a growth mindset.
Sometimes your long-term goals will stay the same, but you may need to change your mid-term or short-term goals because you’ve changed your mind about something. This is why writing things down is necessary.
