As mentioned in our lesson about your personal financial toolbox, your career is going to be the single biggest investment you make throughout your lifetime. Chances are, it is going to require enormous amounts of your money, time, and attention.

Because of this, you want to make sure you have a solid strategy in place for making the most of your career and for ensuring the investment you’ve made, and will continue to make, pays off over the long run.

In this three-part lesson, we will teach you how to put a strategy together that, if followed, will put you on the road to having a successful career and help you attain the financial situation you want for yourself.

Start At The End

The first step in succeeding at anything is knowing where you’re going. This couldn’t be more true for your career. Having an clear idea of what you ultimately want out of life needs to be the first thing you do when creating a plan for your career. Otherwise, you’ll be sailing without a compass.

If you don’t know what we mean by a clear idea of what you ultimately want out of life, we recommend you read our Defining Wealth and Success lesson.

Once you know what you want your life to look like, it’s time to continue to the next step in formulating your career strategy.

I Want To Be…

When we were kids, we all wanted to be something when we grew up. Some of us wanted to be police officers, some wanted to be firefighters, some wanted to be teachers, and some wanted to be astronauts. For most people, this changed several times as we grew to be older kids.

Somewhere along the way, though, reality kicked in and we stopped dreaming of what we really wanted to be. If you’re like most, chances are, you took a job that didn’t align with what you wanted to be in order to have the money to do the things you wanted or needed to do at the time. This may not have been all that long ago. You may even be in this situation now.

We want you to pretend you are a kid again, but a much wiser, experienced, and emotionally-developed kid. Think about what careers you find fascinating and exhilarating.

Notice the choice of words we used to describe your career: fascinating and exhilarating. We don’t want you to just look for careers you find interesting and you think will make you happy. Fascination is interest coupled with wonder and intellectual stimulation. Exhilaration is happiness coupled with excitement and emotional stimulation. This should be a career that makes you go to bed excited every night about what you’re going to be doing the next day.

The career should also allow you the ability to attain the level of wealth and success you defined for your life in the first step of this process. If your life goals and your career aspirations don’t align, you’ll need to go back and weigh how much of one you are willing to give up for the other.

A career that meets these criteria may not automatically come to mind, because you may not know about it yet. If you can’t think of any careers you find fascinating and exhilarating off the top of your head, we encourage you to do some research. A great place to start is researching is the Industry Career Guide from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We are 100% certain that the right career is out there for you, and that the time spent finding it will be worth the results many times over.

In Part 2 of this 3 part series, we’ll cover taking stock of your talents, identifying your weaknesses, and creating a career roadmap. In Part 3, we’ll cover how to go about executing your career strategy. Stay tuned.

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