I’m about to do two things that many readers will dislike.
The first one is that this post is focused on creating a New Year’s resolution, which many readers don’t like. But since I’ve been a resolution setter all my life and been writing posts on resolutions since I started blogging in 2005, I can’t stop now. LOL.
Second, this post (and many to follow) is about making the most of your career. People hate the idea of making the most of their career (I’ll tell you why in a bit).
But for now let me encourage you to stick with this article all the way through because applying what it says (as well as subsequent posts in this series) can mean MILLIONS of dollars for you, earlier retirement/financial freedom than you ever imagined, and more joy and fulfillment from your job.
In other words, it’s a pretty good deal all the way around.
Don’t believe me? Stay tuned.
Resolution for 2022
I’m not sure people hate New Year’s resolutions as much as they simply don’t stick with them.
Here’s what Forbes says on the subject:
Every year more than 50% of people make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, work out, save money, get a promotion, get a raise, and more. And yet, virtually every study tells us that around 80% of New Year’s resolutions will get abandoned around this month (February).
Ok, so not a great track record.
To try and combat this decline, I’m going to challenge you to simply focus on one and only one resolution this year: making the most of your career.
You probably know why this is important, but just in case you don’t, here are some posts to shed some light on the subject:
- Two Huge Reasons Why Your Career Matters
- How to Manage Your Career to Make Millions More
- The Value of Growing Your Career is Worth Millions More than I Thought
- The Value of Growing Your Career: A Real-Life Example
After you read these, you should be convinced that your career can make a huge difference in your net worth.
But in case you aren’t, take one extra step and plug your numbers into my Impact of Career Growth Calculator. That will show you what you’re missing if you choose to ignore focusing on your career.
All I ask of you in 2022 is one simple resolution that can have a huge impact on your finances. What’s not to love, right?
Well, I’ll tell you what’s not to love. People hate being told to work on their careers.
Hate for Growing A Career
I’ve detailed how people dislike career advice in The Paradox of a Career’s Impact on Financial Independence as well as explained why people need to fight that feeling and focus on their career.
When you do, a lot of great things happen:
- You make more money. Assuming you don’t spend any more this increased savings makes a HUGE difference in growing your net worth. As a result…
- You get to FI faster. All that excess savings invested over 5, 10, and 20 years can really add up. It allows you to reach financial independence years sooner than you would have otherwise.
- You enjoy your job more. As you grow your career, it’s likely you’ll be given projects and responsibilities that most people find more fulfilling, challenging, and simply “better” than what many others work on.
All these add up to one basic fact: you need to make the most of your career.
Having a Millionaire Income
I often get comments like this (a paraphrase from the many similar comments I get) to my millionaire interviews:
“If I made that kind of money, I’d be a millionaire too.”
This ignores the spending/saving side of the equation, but let’s just focus on earning for now.
To people who ask that question (or are wondering about it), I’ll turn the tables and ask you:
- What are you doing to earn more?
- Do you have an active plan to grow your career?
- What sort of raises have you received over the past several years?
Most respond that there is no way to get ahead in their field, their company is terrible with raises, or some other excuse.
Let me say this:
- You can come up with excuses all day. Where will they get you? Nowhere. So please leave them behind.
- There is someone in every industry, company, area of the country, etc. that is making good money and more than the others. Why? Because they are willing to do what the others don’t do. If anyone does those things they can get the same results. Said another way, if you want what someone has you have to do what they’ve done.
BTW, you don’t have to earn a millionaire’s income for growing your career to work for you.
Let’s say you earn $50k a year and are able to takes some steps to now earn $55k a year. Will that extra $5k make a difference for you? You’re dang right it will!
And even more, now you’re building off of a $55k salary. let’s see if we can get it to $60k, then $70k, and then higher! All that extra money will make a very big difference for anyone regardless of their current earnings or their total earning potential.
So with all that said, I am embarking on a series about growing your career from the awesome book Own Your Career Own Your Life: Stop Drifting and Take Control of Your Future. I hope you will join me as I know what we learn from it can help people make more money.
Before we begin, let me say that I know many people have performance reviews going on now and by the time we work our way through the book, a great opportunity to grow earnings this year may have passed. For that group, I’d suggest you read 7 Steps to Millions More: Over-Perform immediately and implement those steps this year. Then read the rest of this series and use what we learn to build on it for next year.
With that said, let’s get started with this book…
Owning Your Career
In today’s post we’ll simply share the introduction to the book’s thinking to get us started.
I’ll add my comments along the way as well.
Let’s begin with this:
Most careers happen accidently. Someone recommends a major course in college or trade school, and we choose it because we don’t have any better ideas. Or we take a job for money (or desperation) and several years later find ourselves in that same field without ever really being intentional about what we are doing.
And there’s nothing wrong with starting a career that way. We all have to start somewhere. And very few people are born knowing exactly what they want to do with their life. Even if they do, they often face unexpected challenges and have to make changes. Without a clear vision or goal or a plan to achieve that goal, most people drift along, mostly reacting to life.
Several thoughts here:
- Let me begin by stating that much of this summarized my career life. All I knew early on is that I wanted to make a lot of money. So I went from wanting to be a veterinarian to a lawyer and then into business. I talk about how this all came about in Who Am I? if you want specifics. Needless to say, I did my fair share of wandering around looking for the perfect career fit.
- Even after I landed on a career, it took me a lot of trial and error to learn how to grow a career. There were many years that I floundered without solid goals and action steps to move my career forward.
- So I am not the poster boy for career success by any means. But I did figure it out along the way, applied myself, and ended up increasing my earnings at a compound annual growth rate of 8.16% for the 28 years I worked. All this is to say that if I can succeed in the haphazard way I did it, you, with the benefit of my experience and the guidance of this book, can do much better.
- “Most people drift along.” As we’ll see, much of this book is about the opposite of drifting along. If you just learn this one thing, the time spent reading my posts on this book will be worth it (and very productive for you).
Next the book shares more of my past history:
Because we will always encounter challenges in life, and unless we have a strong vision and purpose and drive to achieve a certain goal, those challenges will likely knock us down. I wasn’t intentional about what I was trying to achieve or how I was going to get there. I had a general idea of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t think too much about it. And I certainly didn’t put that purpose or goal above the fun things like going to parties with friends. Can you relate to this? Has this been you in the past?
Hahahaha. Was he along for the ride as I struggled?
I floated along for much of my early career as well. I think this is fairly typical unfortunately.
That said, we’re past that now because this book is going to help us. We are DONE floating along.
That’s because the book is about taking action:
This book is about taking control and owning your career and life. It’s about achieving your goals. And it’s about taking control of your future.
Sounds pretty good so far, right?
But you may be wondering, what exactly does it mean to own your career?
Here’s how the book defines it:
For this book, when I say, “I own your career” or “own your life,” that means taking full responsibility and being intentional with your actions. It means having an idea of where you want to go, making a plan, and then taking steps to get there. It means that you don’t wait for others to tell you what to do or where to go. It means you don’t blame others for your problems. Yes, there will be things that happen outside of your control, but owning your career means you focus most of your energy on what’s in your control and keeping moving forward.
Basically, the idea is that instead of simply going with the flow with your career and allowing it to be managed by companies, bosses, co-workers, circumstances, and chance, you’re actually going to develop a plan and manage it proactively.
As well you should because your career is a multi-million dollar asset. And you should treat it as such.
Even better, it can be worth millions more if you manage it correctly.
And finally, you probably spend at least 40 hours a week at your job, likely more. Wouldn’t you like that time to be more enjoyable? If you manage your career, it can be.
This is great stuff! Can’t you see how growing a career makes much of life and money so much better?
BTW, don’t think I’m going to have you spending hours a day managing your career. Most of the steps can be done in the normal course of your work life and require no additional time or effort.
Additional Thoughts on Owning Your Career
The book shares several thoughts about owning your career in the opening. Here are some highlights I thought were worth passing along:
You can think of it as owning a business. When you are the owner of a company, no matter what happens in the world or economy, you are responsible for everything.
Perhaps the biggest reason to take ownership of your career is simply that nobody cares more about it than you do.
So, you can sit around waiting for others to tell you what to do, or you can start taking ownership, getting intentional and blazing your own trail. I would rather own my career and life because I’ve learned that other people don’t care as much about my career as I do. They have their own lives to worry about.
My take on these:
- I like thinking of your career as a business. Why? Because it is a business and you are the product. You sell the product (your time, skills, and experience) for money. Now if you manage, market, and develop your product correctly, it becomes more valuable and hence sells for a higher price. Sounds great, right?
- I also agree that no one cares as much about your career as you do. Why would they? And why shouldn’t you care about it? I look at it this way, why wouldn’t someone care about their largest asset enough to invest time and effort into making it worth more?
- If you go with the flow, you get go with the flow results which are almost always suboptimal. If you are intentional and plan your own path, your results will be much better, even spectacular if you apply the right efforts over a long period of time.
So who’s with me? I am asking you to take this journey and spend some time focusing on your greatest asset so you can reach FI faster.
For the next post in this series, see Own Your Career, Setting a Vision for Your Career.
Sam says
Taking responsibilities are fine. But nowadays, taking responsibility without authority makes many employees crippled. And they get demotivated after that.
Any thoughts on that? Thanks.
expatAshley says
‘Authority/formal/positional power’ is typically the last thing you want to leverage to get a job done. The best leaders I know use their ‘personal power’ (their ability to influence & motivate others, knack at setting vision, their competence at the job, and their informal networks) over their formal authority.
I’m 36 years old and I’m in a role as a Sr Director at a Fortune 500 company. I can tell you even in that role, I don’t have much formal authority! Everyone has a boss, and we’re at their mercy. I’ve been able to get where I am by everything ESI captured in this article. My advice is to work on building those skills that help you grow your ‘personal power’.
Sam says
Yes. Thank you. I meant authority in regards to influencing. I know authority word gets a bad rep, but there is a servant leadership aspect that is often highlighted at senior roles.
ESI says
If you’re in a situation where you literally have no authority to impact results but responsibility for them and have tried everything (particularly what Ashley suggests) and are getting nowhere, you can always look for a different job either within the same company or a new employer.
The one thing you can always control (or at least direct) is your career — and that may or may not be with a company that puts you in a terrible, no-win position.
Sam says
That is exactly what I did. Been with a company for 6 years and getting nowhere. Put me in no-win position. Left for a better company. Here the pay was great but no growth. Now moved to another company where things are promising…
steveark says
I am going to love this series, this might be a duplicate comment, my internet is sketchy today. Our careers were kind of similar, I had a similar annual compensation increase across my career and enjoyed what I did as well. I was not a hard worker but I am crazy competitive and was able to gamify my career which allowed me to do a lot of extra things my competition did not do. And those little things like memorizing all the piping and equipment layout of our billion dollar facility gave me an edge in troubleshooting. It didn’t feel like work though, it was fun. I definitely owned my career and it was my business. I volunteered for everything from public speaking to touring first graders through the plant. And when the ox was in the ditch I was out there, all night if I needed to be. I knew success was about having the brand as the smartest and most capable guy of getting hard things done who was also versatile and good in front of the media, so I cultivated that brand. It worked!
ESI says
Haha. Yes, I think you’ll see a lot in this series that you agree with (and lived through/applied).
I know I did while writing it.
Matt says
I hope this book will dive into ways to plan and optimize your exit from an organization (think early retirement while collecting a few of the carrots that might otherwise keep you around for a while longer). I haven’t found a lot of writing on orchestrating an exit from your own job, but there must be people out there that have successfully gotten bonuses and other benefits accelerated in exchange for staying a little longer, etc. I know it’s common for C-level people to negotiate their exit, and those experiences would seem to be applicable to a wider base of highly valued employees within an organization (obviously lower $$, but the concept is the same). Anyone have any suggested reading on the topic?
ESI- this would be a very interesting topic to cover in a future post.
ESI says
We talk about this often in the MMM forums as we’ve had several people go from employed to retirement, though most (maybe all) of them are at the higher levels of an organization.
That said, I think the principles would still apply. Overall, IF you are TRULY valuable (and most think they are and are not), then you can plan an exit but you need to be very careful. Why? Because you don’t know how the company will react. You may share that you’re planning to retire in a year and want to stay on to help you out and they might see that as a lame duck employee and fire you quickly.
So the conclusion we’ve come to is work until you get the bonus, stock options, etc. in hand and THEN tell them you’re leaving. It’s the safest way to make sure you get what you want.
There’s more to it than that, but that’s the high level summary.
steveark says
That’s so true about people over estimating their value to the corporation. I saw that a lot in people that I only gave minimal raises to. I stayed one extra year because I had over $200K in stock appreciation rights and bonus coming. And I negotiated severance pay as well on my exit to retire. But I agree, you should hold your cards close, especially if you are in a top level position. Most CEO’s are not interested in you once you declare you are leaving. You are pretty much dead to them at that point.
Matt says
Thanks for the thoughts. I agree it’s tricky, as I’ve seen a CEO love an employee, right up until they say they are leaving. Then they don’t want anything to do with them.
Can you provide some details around how you “negotiated your severance”? Since severance is typically only applicable when the company decides to part ways, how did you get that on the table when you were the one looking to leave?
Steveark says
I just asked for it and they gave it to me. I think partly because they planned on using me as a consultant.
ScottH says
I am in the process of reading various books on how to improve my goal setting skills I believe that by improving how I set my goals it will lead me to down the path to executing each day.
ESI it is hard to believe you started the blog back in 2005, is seems like yesterday!
ESI says
It does seem like yesterday!
Isn’t that what old people say? LOL!!!!
M264 says
My career progression and salary growth stalled when I got comfortable and realized I did not want the responsibility of the next promotion (accompanied by a very minimal salary increase). The job I’ve been in for the past fifteen years w/ the same company is low-stress, much autonomy, and little oversight. My salary has only increased 50% over the past fifteen years, and is pretty much frozen at less than $90K. When I hit $1 million net worth at age 50, I completely took myself of the career-ladder when I reduced my work week to four 8-hour days, and torpedoed my salary by 20%. Oh well, it’s all over in about 24 months.
Phillip says
I agree there is a ROI associated with trying to push career growth at some point. IMO, the early years where the promotion pyramid is wide and you have a greater time period for compounded growth and you typically have less non-work responsibilities, it makes sense to push the career advancement. But in the later years, that equation shifts and you may decide it’s better to work less/easier hours but work a bit longer to achieve that same net worth target. It gets tougher to get the big raises since you’re competing for less promotion spots and against higher caliber people. Just be concious about that decision.
Concojones says
It seemed you knew what you wanted and chose accordingly. I think that’s a good thing.
MattPNW says
I just ran my compound earnings annual growth for the 34 years I’ve worked, comes in at 8.27% That growth and my career were a pretty haphazard trajectory, too. Just keep focused, work on valued projects and the growth follows. Wish I had started above $19K all those years ago!
M264 says
Salary 1987 = $27K.
Salary 2022 = $88K
35 years
Annualized salary growth = 3.43%
Total salary growth = 226%
Concojones says
Interesting read. FMF (do we still call you that way?) always has interesting things to say on this topic. Looking forward to the next part of the series!
ESI says
It’s like having a nickname from high school and another one from college — both work. 😉
Apexpat says
I once enjoyed a mentoring program where my mentor was the CHRO of another company, and something he told me still resonates with me: „The higher up you move, the bigger the price tags get.“
„Price tag_s_?“ asked junior manager me.
„Yes. Your salary – but also the price you pay.“
So there was that. On that day, I gave up on the big shot career that would lead me to the top. Of course I am not sure whether I could have made it, I am probably too agreeable for the highest ranks. But today, I am a director (and have been for the last seven years) and can‘t see myself moving beyond VP. But still, my salary tripled since I started working 16 years ago. Not bad for an introvert that gets bored easily by superficial conversations and people playing power games…
I wholeheartedly agree that I am so much better of than I would have been if I had stayed on working level.
Dividend Power says
A lot of people who plan their career end of doing something else. They find the career is not what they thought.