4. Find What You Love – And Do It!
I’ve always loved the excitement of salesmanship. In a sense, it’s what I’ve done all my life. When I started the fund-raising drive for our arts complex in Florida, I was doing what I’d always done, and loved – selling people on an idea.
If you aren’t in love with what you do, then you haven’t found your real calling. Don’t settle for something you don’t love. Keep searching, regardless of your age. Some people say they don’t know what they want in life. Find out. Ask yourself: What is it that really makes me happy? What gets me excited? The answers will steer you to what you should be doing. As a teacher and as a business executive, I have often seen how people suddenly blossom when they find work that is ideally suited to them.
5. Learn To Take Intelligent Risks.
I received my first business lesson at age 4, when my grandmother lent me the money to start my own company. “What business do you want to go into?” she asked. I thought about it a while and then told her, “Party Favors.” I loved colors and I loved parties and figured that I could make hats and candy baskets that would be used at parties.
I was sitting at the dining room later, cutting up colored construction paper, when my father walked in and saw what I was making. “Why would anyone want to buy that?” he asked. “And who will you sell them to? You don’t even go to school yet.”
I got up from the table and left the room to think about it.
What he was telling me was that I needed a plan. So I came up with one: I would make hats and candy baskets and sell them for a penny apiece to the parents of children who were having birthday parties. I would hire a little boy in the neighborhood named Hedgewood to help me – he was already in school and had the “connections” I needed. Grandmother gave me a ledger to track my sales. On one side, I wrote “Make” in black crayon and on the other “Spend” in red crayon.
Without a plan, my business would have been a bad risk. With a plan, it became an intelligent risk – my first as a businesswoman.
When it comes to what I call “risk intelligence,” people seem to fall into one of two categories: They either maintain an aversion to risk-taking or else they take occasional risks that in retrospect seem careless, without being properly prepared, or fully understanding the consequences.
Think of risk as a stepping stone, on the path to what you really want in your life.
6. Go Back to School.
In my mid-twenties, I was running a successful ad agency and could probably have kept doing it indefinitely. But something was missing. The business was coasting. I was no longer learning new lessons.
My solution was to go back to school – both figuratively and literally. I enrolled in a doctorate program in marketing management at Indiana University – and my business benefited because of it.
One of the essential qualities of rutbusting is being able to wake yourself up when you’ve fallen asleep. Successful people never stop “going back to school.” They develop the instinct of knowing when they are becoming stale and when they need to learn fresh lessons – whether in their jobs or their personal lives.
