Starting something new can be fun, exciting, scary, and downright hard to do. Creating this blog was all of those things and I’m completely thrilled to get my first post out the door. 
I tend to be a bit on the perfectionist side so I kept reminding myself that everything doesn’t have to be in place before starting. Steve Jobs sold the first wood encased Apple computers out of his parents’ garage, Stephen Spielberg’s first movie was a 26 minute film entitled Amblin, and before U2 became international superstars they were just a bunch of unknown teenagers from Ireland.
In the spirit of starting new things I want to encourage you to start something new that will help you get the results you want in your career. Whether that is updating your resume, taking a networking contact to lunch, or just smiling more at work go ahead and just start it. It doesn’t have to be perfect and you don’t have to know where it will take you exactly, but sometimes you just have to make a move. Three things to remember when starting something new:
1. Start small. If you’re miserable in your job and you want to do work that you enjoy, begin by taking a couple of hours a week to think and meditate about the times when you have felt fully alive. When you were really firing on all cylinders and just fully enjoying yourself. It could be work related or not. Go ahead and jot down what you come up with and look for trends and patterns. That will give you some insight as to what kind of work you might enjoy.
2. Expect success. What you expect to happen will most likely be what happens. That whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing. When you envision success its like it has already happened and your brain begins to believe that now you are just repeating something you’ve done before, which makes it easier to do. When you ride a bike you will go wherever you look, and the same principle applies in your career as well.
3. Think of it as an experiment. Remember chemistry class? If you were like me you probably never got it quite right when you mixed the green stuff with the blue stuff. But that was the whole point. It was an experiment and you just wanted to see what happened when you mixed the blue stuff with the green stuff. Sometimes your career is like that too. Sometimes you have to just see what smiling more at work does for you. Sometimes you have to see what asking your cube mate about their sick pet does for your career. Just like in chemistry class you may get a bad reaction, but sometimes (most of the time) you will get something better than you expected.
So I invite you to join me as I start something new with this blog and I know the results will be better than I expected. So here’s to starting something new…what are you going to start?