A recent article about refactoring your career made me think back to when I first read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. For those who haven’t read it, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” is a personal finance book — some of the advice is a bit variable (e.g. he recommends against diversifying your investments, which I 100% disagree with), but there are some good concepts in there.
One that struck me at the time as making a lot of sense was the thought that you should always pay yourself first. In the financial world, this means contributing to your savings and investments and pensions and so on BEFORE you pay your bills or buy any “extras”. This disciplines you into saving/investing regularly.
The same is true in terms of your career. You NEED to invest in your own training and development first, in order to have a dynamic and rewarding career. Concepts like Google’s 70-20-10 rule are similar to this — you need to not only focus on what is making you money now, but also what will make you money tomorrow and next year.
In terms of your career, this means that you should be setting aside time for training and development — some of which is focused on making you better at your current job and some of which is focused on getting you towards the next step in your career … and some of which should move you towards your long term goals.
How do you include training & personal development into your life? Do you find it hard to find time to invest in yourself? Share in the comments.
I have a manager that doesn’t really invest herself in my professional development, not that she doesn’t want to, it’s just low on her radar. Out of my own frustration over this, I set about going to all the trainings that were relevant (and some that were not so relevant) to my position. I figure HR puts out all these events, might as well take advantage of it, right? The pay off has been that I definitely have grown professionally, but also developed an excellent network of colleagues that are like-minded that I probably wouldn’t have met up with otherwise. The same goes for personal dev stuff.
I don’t think it’s been hard to build this into my life; I realized that no one is going to look after my interests except for me, and that I owe it to myself to continue to learn and grow. I look at my colleagues who don’t challenge themselves and stay stagnant and shudder at the thought of ever being in that position. That’s motivation enough.