Your career path is largely up to you.  Like it or not, the days of joining a company with a clearly drawn map of “steps” related to your planned evolution within the organization are long gone.  This SHOULD be perceived as a good thing – you can create a path specific to your needs and interests, and directly impacted by your growth capacity and level of exertion.  No matter what your career path is, there are some things all professionals will have to do.  Despite doing many of the same things, the effort and consistency with which we do these things in relation to one another will undoubtedly prove to be the major differentiator in our personal and professional destinations.

Here are some basic skills and activities that every individual must invest some level of time in, not just for excellence – but merely for survival:

Read
Books, magazines, and even those annoying “whitepaper” emails we receive have some nuggets of information that help shape our thinking and at least increase our awareness, if not our understanding as well.


Listen
The world around us is ever-changing and that alone requires us to pay attention to it.  Listen to local, national, and world news coverage.  Listen to conversations, by engaging or even eaves-dropping, in order to gain perspective on varying (differing) opinions.


Think
Practice using your mind.  Start with raw imagination, envision something/anything and carve out ideas.  Then create goals from those ideas and develop a plan for making them happen.  Ultimately, build a sequential list of actions that you feel will bring your imagination (potential/visual) to culmination (reality/physical).  Rinse and repeat.  Whether you execute your action list or not isn’t really important.  Why is this important?  The ability to communicate so effectively as to transform that which is potential into that which is actual can be summarized as “leadership”.

Data (communication), examined and vetted, rises to the level of Information (fact/opinion).   Information, as a part of its interaction with other data or information, is synergistically transformed into Knowledge (actionable intelligence).  Knowledge, when applied along with judgment/discernment is revealed as Wisdom.  One’s ability to harness and actuate these details determines not their level of success, which is subjective and very personal, but their level of personal development and professional capacity.